The second, The Sleepwalker Tonic, deals with addiction, as a neighboring town falls victim to a stupefying magical beverage. The first book is, at heart, about a child wrestling with grief for his lost parent. The subject matter tackled via this allegorical method is not for softies. As Segel told the author Lev Grossman in a 2015 interview about the second book-and as his character Jimmy Laird is now discovering over the course of Shrinking’s first season-“to walk through things you’re afraid of is how you end up achieving stuff.”
The journey of the main characters in Nightmares!, suspenseful as it is on the sheer plot level, is ultimately more psychological than physical. For other characters, it will entail dealing with their anxiety about being bullied or flunking out of school. For his friend Paige, it involves accepting the scary reality of her own mother’s chronic clinical depression.
For Charlie, that means confronting the finality of his mother’s death.
As the kids become more adept at traversing the portal and understanding the connections between the Netherworld and the waking world, they also learn how to face up to what frightens each of them most-not really, as it turns out, witches, the dark, or hungry lions in a gladiator ring, but rather the real-world counterparts of these symbolic boogeymen. The first three Nightmares! books (the fourth is a reference-style guide to the previous books’ taxonomy of monsters) trace the changing relationship of Charlie, Jack, and their pack of middle school pals to this forbidding oneiric realm. He may not be getting high with sex workers in his backyard while his high school–age daughter tries to get to sleep, but Charlie himself is sleep-deprived and cranky, rude to his father and stepmother, and borderline cruel to his unflinchingly devoted little brother.
Also like Jimmy Laird (a character whom I have trouble not thinking of as a part of the extended Nightmares! universe), Charlie begins his narrative arc as a person who’s far from pleasant to be around. As it happens, this is also the surname of the 12-year-old hero of Nightmares!: Charlie Laird, a seventh-grader who, as the first book begins, is, like his older television namesake, trapped in a bad cycle of grief and familial dysfunction. Send me updates about Slate special offers.įor me, a fan who has followed Segel’s career with interest since his run on the too-good-to-live one-season comedy Freaks and Geeks, the first striking fact about his character in Shrinking was his last name: Laird.
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