Per wiki policy, Spoilers Off applies here and all spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned.
The Edge of Sleep provides some terrifying imagery. The characters can't fall asleep lest they fall victim to what is killing everyone in the story. But after listening to it, you won't want to sleep either.
Examples:
- The situation in general. Something happens to everyone that kills them in their sleep with no prior warning. The way that the once extremely busy city turns into a Ghost Town disturbs the protagonists and provides a harrowing backdrop to the story. As Linda and Dave search through the city, they slowly realize that they don't have much time to figure out what to do.
- Dave's condition is terrifying. His own mind turns anything against him to give him vivid nightmares, and images of violence will amplify it. His parents mention that much of it involved them being mutilated, hurting each other, or transforming into eldritch monsters.
- Even something as simple as an elephant book was able to give him nightmares. His mother transforms into an elephant monster as she tries to kill him.
- The Moobles. On their own, it was a stupid B-Movie with a cheesy premise. In the hands of his condition, the first night turns into horrifying imagery where they dismembered his parents. His mom's head is left on the counter with her eyes replaced with olives, and the rest of her and his dad are in the fridge. They egg him on as they take him over, giving him only one way out: cutting them out of his body.
- The Trespasser provides a heck of a lot of terror and he's not even the main threat. He's a Serial Rapist who abducts his victims and makes them OD on heroin to get away with his crimes. Mateo and Linda find dozens of driver's licenses from his victims. As Dave looks through all of them, their names are read out and become more erratic and overwhelming as the realization of what this man is sets in.
- Dave and Mateo first meet him when he's in his van. They hear his victim (who was later found out to be chained up in the back) and try to stop him. Later, when everything goes down, he looks out to the barren city with awe as he thinks about all the havoc he'll commit.
- Dave gets a scare when he calls Katie, hearing the Trespasser preparing to abduct her.
- The Trespasser shoots at everyone and abducts Dave to torture him. Dave, while being shot in the stomach, is panicking while trying to find a way to survive while he's Alone with the Psycho. While he gets chummy with Dave after the latter tells him about his past, he starts saying that they can go across the country to hunt girls together, but he says that Dave can't have fun with Katie, so he's going to cut his balls off to make sure only he can.
- What happens to the victims is only slight Body Horror, but Body Horror nonetheless. When Linda, Dave, and Mateo start looking at what happened to the others during an autopsy, what they find when they cut into a body's skull (after brain matter explodes onto them) is smoke. When they could finally see past it, all they could find was a burn in the shape of a black triangle.
- As Dave, Mateo, Linda, and Katy attempt to get to the airport, the dead bodies eventually wake up and start to attack them, like a Zombie Apocalypse. The implication is that whatever killed all the people was able to take over their bodies after they died.
- Dave's dreams as he tries to fight the Entity. It uses his parents and Katie to trick him into succumbing to their grip, then their voices distort into inhuman and eldritch versions of them as it attacks him.
