Alive~Asleep is Laura Robertson’s horror memoir, a sequence of fragments sent to a father with cancer who may already be gone, moving from bedroom to hospital to hospice. Sleep-starved and pursued by visitations that linger well into daylight, its narrator turns to paintings, horror films, and ghost stories, finding in them fresh terrors and, alongside them, a way of keeping company with loss. Fear and tenderness keep the same hours here, and out of the long nights comes a strange, hard-won solace.