Sleepless: A Novel [Hardcover]

Charlie Huston (Author)

Book Description

Release date: January 12, 2010

From bestselling author Charlie Huston comes a novel about the fears that find us all during dark times and the courage and sacrifice that can save us in the face of unimaginable odds. Gripping, unnerving, exhilarating, and haunting, Sleepless is well worth staying up for.

What former philosophy student Parker Hass wanted was a better world. A world both just and safe for his wife and infant daughter. So he joined the LAPD and tried to make it that way. But the world changed. Struck by waves of chaos carried in on a tide of insomnia. A plague of sleeplessness.

Park can sleep, but he is wide awake. And as much as he wishes he was dreaming, his eyes are open. He has no choice but to see it all. That's his job. Working undercover as a drug dealer in a Los Angeles ruled in equal parts by martial law and insurgency, he's tasked with cutting off illegal trade in Dreamer, the only drug that can give the infected what they most crave: sleep.

After a year of lost leads and false trails, Park stumbles into the perilous shadows cast by the pharmaceuticals giant behind Dreamer. Somewhere in those shadows, at the nexus of disease and drugs and money, a secret is hiding. Drawn into the inner circle of a tech guru with a warped agenda and a special use for the sleepless themselves, Park thinks he knows what that secret might be.
 
To know for certain, he will have to go deeper into the restless world. His wife has become sleepless, and their daughter may soon share the same fate. For them, he will risk what they need most from him: his belief that justice
must be served. Unknown to him, his choice ties all of their futures to the singularly deadly nature of an aging mercenary who stalks Park.

The deeper Park stumbles through the dark, the more he is convinced that it is obscuring the real world. Bring enough light and the shadows will retreat. Bring enough light and everyone will see themselves again. Bring enough light and he will find his way to the safe corner, the harbor he's promised his family. Whatever the cost to himself.

It is July 2010.

The future is coming.

Open your eyes.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Amazon Exclusive: Barry Eisler Reviews Sleepless

Barry Eisler spent three years in a covert position with the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, then worked as a technology lawyer and startup executive in Silicon Valley and Japan. Eisler’s bestselling thrillers have won the Barry Award and the Gumshoe Award for Best Thriller of the Year, have been included in numerous "Best of" lists, and have been translated into nearly 20 languages. The first book in Eisler’s John Rain series, Rain Fall, has been made into a movie starring Gary Oldman. Read his exclusive Amazon guest review of Sleepless:

One of the great things about Charlie Huston is the way he sneaks up on you. You think The Shotgun Rule is about teen gangs and the consequences of crime--and gradually realize that on a deeper level it's about fathers and sons and reconciliation with the past. You think The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death is about the quirky crews who clean blood and brain matter from the furniture and rugs when someone prematurely shuffles off this mortal coil--and you start to see it's really about healing the wounds within. And you think Sleepless is about zombies, and a dystopian Los Angeles that's as real as tomorrow, and horribly believable government/corporate conspiracies, and a stylish and awesomely capable assassin--and you realize when you finish (tears in your eyes, in my case), that it's really about the unlikely human bonds that transcend shock and horror and trauma.

There are so many things I loved about this book. That sly Huston humor, lurking just beneath the tilted and terrifying zombified world he depicts, is one:

"Movies themselves had not stopped shooting. Certainly production had been scaled back, and more than one studio had gone under or, more accurately, been consumed whole by somewhat heartier competitors, but even as energy costs spiked, even as all cities, most suburbs, and many rural areas, experienced outbreaks of organized violence, even as the standing army was deployed with obvious permanence to the oil fields in Alaska, Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, and Brazil, even as the draft was reinstated and the gears of the economy audibly snapped their teeth and ground to a squealing halt, even as the drought extended and crops withered, even as the ice caps melted and coastal waters rose, people still liked a good picture."

And Charlie isn't only skilled with the broad brush. His grace notes, the little asides that animate the larger images and characters and themes, are legion. It felt so right that sufferers from the sleepless disease call the non-afflicted "snorers"... and there's Vinnie the Fish, the ex-criminal and current open-air seafood restauranteur who believes the height of dining elegance is a meal served with a real fork, not a spork... and the lethally poised Lady Chizu's carefully arranged collection of typewriters "upon which suicide notes were written. And not another word, after."

Some of what's in the book felt so real I had to Google it to know more. A role-playing game called Chasm Tide. The etiology of Fatal Familial Insomnia and the sleepless prion. I won't tell you what I found, but I was all the more impressed.

I could go on, but I'm running out of room. So let me just note again the aforementioned assassin, Jasper. If you've read my Rain books, you know I like assassins possessed of style, exceptional lethality, and unusual self-awareness. Jasper has all that, and more. He's the best fictional assassin I've come across in a long time: believable, fascinating, ruthless. A joy to spend time with, as is the book itself.

The characters, the vision, the atmosphere... long after the final page surrenders the last of the story's surprising and utterly satisfying secrets, Sleepless will stay with you. It's Charlie's best yet--his most ambitious, his most engrossing, his most affecting. A strong statement, you'll agree, if you've read his other terrific stories. But see for yourself--and prepare to be wowed. --Barry Eisler

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From Publishers Weekly

In Huston's impressive, challenging thriller set in a postapocalyptic Los Angeles, a devastating illness renders the afflicted unable to sleep. In about a year, those with SLP (as the sleepless illness is known) deteriorate and die. Amid the city's rampant violence and lawlessness, LAPD cop Parker Park Haas tries to persuade himself that a future exists for his newborn daughter. As the outside world becomes increasingly dangerous, Park pursues an undercover investigation that takes him deep into the milieu of an online game called Chasm Tide, into which many people have retreated. As in the author's Joe Pitt vampire series (My Dead Body, etc.), this book has at its heart a love story: Park's wife is dying from SLP, and Park begins to fear he may be getting it, too. Can the mysterious mercenary known only as Jasper help? Some fans of Huston's crime fiction may not be comfortable with a novel that itself resembles a role-playing game, but it will gain him a whole new readership. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Ballantine Books; 1 edition (January 12, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0345501136
• ISBN-13: 978-0345501134
• Product Dimensions: 6.4 x 1.2 x 9.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (74 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #722,580 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Charlie Huston is the author of the bestsellers The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death and The Shotgun Rule, as well as the Henry Thompson trilogy, the Joe Pitt casebooks, and several titles for Marvel Comics. He lives with his family in Los Angeles.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

36 of 38 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Secular Vision of the Soul November 29, 2009

By Gary Griffiths TOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

The iconoclastic Charlie Huston is using quotations marks? Yep, that must have been a pig that just flew past the window. But if Huston has yielded to convention, it's done nothing to blunt the raw power of "Sleepless", a savage novel told with grace, style and sophistication, making it clear that Hank Thompson and Joe Pitt and "Shotgun Rules" and "The Mystic Art of Erasing All Signs of Death" were merely artist's sketches, simply practice in refining the brushstrokes and darkening the pallet for this, Huston's Stygian masterpiece.

It is the summer of 2010, and the world is in a pandemic of terminal sleeplessness, "SLR", a devastating disease that robs the ability to sleep, creating a zombie-like existence short on dreams but long on nightmares - a hell on earth of martial law in the days leading up to full anarchy and certain apocalypse. Parker "Park" Haas is a Stanford PhD and an LAPD cop, a serious and seriously committed young man assigned deep undercover to crack the illicit trade of "DR33M3R", the drug that won't cure SLR, but will ease the suffering of those condemned to an agonizing death of wakefulness. Park's wife has contracted the disease, while the health of their infant daughter is unknown. Meanwhile, Jasper, an aging but more-than-capable assassin, embarks on a mission to recover a stolen disk drive from the diabolically mysterious head of a ruthless paramilitary contractor. As LA sinks further into chaos, reality shifts from concrete and steel to avatars and binary bits, virtual web artifacts take on value greater than their material world counterparts, and team of the sleepless flock to computer screens in the online game "Chasm Tide". As day and night blend and lose meaning, these strung out souls create in-game persona's that will live and continue to play long after their corporeal identities have died and been forgotten. Across this tormented landscape that is both war torn and addictively electronic, Park's Quixote-like quest is aimed as much at repairing the broken world as it is busting the bad guys and rescuing his wife and child.

Comparisons will likely be drawn to William Gibson's "Neuromancer" or "Idoru", and to Ridley Scott's sci-fi classic "Blade Runner". But "Sleepless" is mostly what McCarthy's highly acclaimed "The Road" should have been. Both revel in stylistic prose that leaves deep canyons between them and the common and overdone post-apocalype novel, both are dark, both hopelessly bleak, both tip the balance between pride in and disdain for the human spirit closer to the latter. Yet Huston's "Sleepless" is more complex, more insightful, a journey into American culture that sees the wafer-thin barrier separating that $5-buck Starbuck's Double Latte from mass starvation. If Van Gough were a writer, instead of a tortured canvass the result would look a lot like this.

"Sleepless" is a staggering example of American fiction that redefines "noir", succeeding in combining science fiction, crime, and suspense with a thoughtful and intelligent dissection of 21st Century America. With each new effort, Charlie Huston moves further ahead of a growing pack of talented and exciting new writers contemporary crime fiction. Read it before it becomes a classic.

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars A novel worth staying up to finish December 8, 2009

By Justin G. TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

It's 2010 and a new plague is ravaging the world. It's a plague that affects people's ability to sleep. So far, 10 percent of the population is "sleepless" - doomed to live the remainder of their short lives in a fugue state before the inevitable painful end. Society is already starting to break down as a result of this contagious disease, and a full-on collapse seems imminent. In Los Angeles, undercover narcotics officer Parker Haas (Park), is on the trail of the elusive drug Dreamer, which can alleviate the suffering of the sleepless. Park, whose wife is one of the sleepless, is trying to find out how this drug is reaching the black market, and his search puts him in the crosshairs of a powerful drug company magnate as well as the aging assassin known only as Jasper.

Charlie Huston's latest novel is a fascinating look at what it would take to nudge our whole way of life completely off the rails. I'm not sure what you call a story like Sleepless. Pre-post-apocalyptic crime noir perhaps? There's also a cyberpunk aspect to the book, with nearly every character connected somehow to a massively popular online fantasy role playing game called Chasm Tide. I was reminded of Blade Runner (BFI Modern Classics), The Road (Movie Tie-in Edition 2009) (Vintage International) and L.A. Confidential throughout the book, which was quite the interesting mix of influences.

This was my first Huston novel, and I was immediately taken in by his dazzling prose and compelling characters. The dialogue, sharp as it was, is also a bit jarring, and the style takes some getting used to. I also had a hard time believing that a video game could become such a major influence in mainstream life (and I say that as someone who grew up in the video game era). Still, witnessing the straight-laced Park slowly unraveling and the amoral Jasper's decisions towards the finale made for an unforgettable ride, and Huston's impeccable sense of timing kept the story compelling from start to finish.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars It Could Happen, that's Scary February 16, 2010

By Ken Douglas

Format:Hardcover

It's hard for me to say how much I enjoyed this book. I am just itchin' to give away the ending, it is just so darned good I want to talk about it, but I won't. I read a lot and this is the best book I've read in a long while. Charlie Huston sets this book in the present, well only a few months in the future, but it'll be the present by the time most of it's readers get their hands on this story. So though this isn't an alternate history story, it offers an alternate present. It's a present that hasn't happened, but could've happened, might still happen, though the disease that plagues the planet may be different.

Parker Hass is a good cop, the son of a good cop, the husband of a dying wife and a child who may be dying as well. The disease they're suffering from is called SLP. Those afflicted can't sleep and eventually die. The dying takes a year and it's not pretty.

Jasper is a hitman. He is ruthless and good at what he does.

This story alternates between the first person points of view of Parker and Jasper and a third person narrative. We see Park's fears, we see his goodness, we see his conflicts. We see Jasper's too. This man has no fear. He's a great character.

SLP affects ten percent, one out of ten are going to get it and die. There is no cure, however there is a drug called Dreamer which offers some relief against the pain. The suffering will do anything to get it. Parker has gone undercover as a drug dealer to find black market Dreamer, but he finds more than he's supposed to.

Jasper has been hired to retrieve what Parker has found.

Parker is on the trail of some very bad people. Jasper is on Parker's trail.

If you've read Charlie Huston before, you know he has an imagination second to none. He lets it run wild here, but as wild as it gets, the book is a stunner, because what goes on in this book smacks so much of reality that it's frightening. That it could actually happen is terrifying. That one can actually read a book this good is exhilarating.