Customer Reviews

Sleepless: A Novel (Library Edition)

5 star:		(25)
4 star:		(20)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I have been a fan of Charlie Huston since reading all the Joe Pitt books. However, I must admit to being disappointed in both this book and The Mystic Art of Erasing All Signs of Death. Between those two, I actually preferred Mystic Art. Here's what I didn't like about Sleepless: the writing is confusing and sort of like a roller coaster, in a bad way. Moments of interest interspersed with long passages of boredom. A far cry from Joe Pitt, whose stories roll on like gangbusters. In Sleepless, the story is difficult to follow (for me, at least), part of which is explained by the shift from the third person to first-person narration (in the form of a very detailed notebook kept by the main character), and then in the end, first-person narration by a second person. As this second narrator says, "I could follow the rationale in his choices and actions [speaking of the main character], but it was very much like a novice speaker of a foreign language translating everything he heard into his native tongue. The sense was there, but it was arrived at only after great labor, and with little nuance." I too felt that understanding this book took a bit more labor than I really wanted to do. And it's hard to feel a lot of suspense when you're trying to figure out exactly what is happening.

Now, what is good, if not great, about this book? There's actually a lot. Especially the very conception of a prion-caused plague and its origin. Very inventive, very original. Or the notion of a whole culture being overtaken by a video game and the avatar characters created by the desperate people in this dying world. Some of the descriptive language is also outstanding, with the kind of detail that puts you right there. For example, "Park ran his finger across the Gateway's touchpad and watched the cursor flicker from arrow to pointing hand and back." And the descriptions of the apocalyptic mayhem of a city broken apart are harrowing and vivid.

I wonder if I was just not in the right mood when I read this book, but I honestly didn't care for it, and I had to push myself to finish. There are enough five-star reviews, with glowing recommendations, that it makes me feel that I must have missed something somewhere. But there you are. I can only be honest.

I'll be brief. Charlie Huston does some of the best writing around in the areas of hard boiled crime fiction and speculative/dark fiction. Period. You doubt? Read "Sleepless" and discover an America disturbingly familiar, where helicopter gunships patrol Santa Monica and video games have become real to the ever growing population of sleepless-sufferers of what used to be a rare genetic disorder- fatal familial insomnia. Somwhow, a diseased brain prion (a protein thingamajig that gets into your brain and f***s it up) has developed in ten percent of the human population. Think of it- suddenly, you are awake 24 hours a day, having no sleep, walking like a zombie, desperate to Sleep. To Dream.

But you can't. Instead, you lapse into waking nightmares. Nightmares so awful you smoke Chinese speed (Do they make everything in China now or what?) or have yourself shot full of cat tranquilizer and shoved into a sensory deprivation tank just to escape them. Throw in a rigidly moralistic cop turned undercover drug dealer, his sleepless wife, their infant daughter, and a relentless aging mercenary with a nascent conscience, and watch the sparks fly.

Charlie Huston has already provided a life time worth of great writing: The Joe Pitt Series, The Henry Thompson Trilogy, a variety of Marvel comics, The Shotgun Rule, and The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death. In Sleepless, he fuses the best of the pulp tradition in three different aspects: crime, horror, and science fiction. At the end of the day, Charlie Huston is a quiet revolution in contemporary American fiction. You doubt? Read one of his books and see. I dare you.

As an author myself, I admire so many things about this book. Foremost of these is how right this book is for the times.

I read this just after political leaders in Washington nearly allowed the U.S. to default on its debt. Heading into the fourth straight year of a dismal, high-unemployment economy. Amid collective anxiety over a growing chasm between rich elites and everyone else, global warming, overpopulation, environmental toxins and other existential horrors -- all of which society seems unable to unify to solve in an intelligent way, giving one the sense that it will soon be far too late.

Huston takes those themes and moves them forward a few increments, endorses the idea that we won't get around to cooperating to address them, and adds a horrible pandemic on top of it all. Then he squires us through this hellscape on the parallel shoulders of a hyper-moral police detective and a supremely pragmatic and adaptable assassin/fixer. I liked neither of them at the beginning of the book but ended the story greatly respecting and deeply understanding them both.

Huston immerses us in this world (as well as an online gaming world crucial to the plot and to the lives of many of the characters) and makes us believe it all without question. The not-too-tidy ending satisfyingly pays off this great setup, a trick that many thriller novels I've read this year have failed to pull off.

At the beginning of the novel, the author throws you into the deep end of the pool and forces you to swim out, but stick with it. It's more work to read, but you feel as if you're having an experience, not being told bits of information. With close attention, you'll find your way in this new world without too much trouble. You'll be relieved to close the cover on the world Huston sketches, but sorry that the trance is over.

Huston's latest book is smart, carefully crafted (except for a couple of subtle misspellings that escaped copy editors) and almost too close to reality for comfort, but so relentlessly dystopian and unflinchingly tragic that it is an emotionally draining read. It is on a par with the post-nuclear war epics of the 1980s like "On The Beach," or tales of utter despair like "Slumdog Millionaire" or "Schindler's List" or "A Scanner Darkly" or "Requiem for a Dream."

The efforts of our hero, Officer Haas, to do the right thing to save society so that his child Omaha can grow up in a better world, are muddied by the musings that his background as a PhD ih philosophy son of a wealthy Ambassador taints him with. This makes for fine character development, but Huston fails to appreciate that idealistic protagonists exist in literature in order to share with us enough hope to make the ending worth persevering towards. With optimism as dim as his providing the positive feelings in this novel, there isn't much to emotionally balance out the rather more dismal outlooks of the drug addicts, dying wife, twisted misunderstood pharma scion, emotionally fragile hit man, uber-cynical police force boss, and post-modernist artists with whom he shares the story. Dark wit is present, but there is no light in the story to illuminate it with higher meaning.

How many tales of worldwide disease outbreaks don't have even a single character who is remotely interested in finding a cure? This is the story of a world where disaster strikes and mostly humanity just gives up and decides to play "World of Warcraft" instead. Read this book when you are deeply depressed and you want to wallow in the experiences of someone whose story is even more dismal than yours.

I've been a fan of Charlie Huston, although I got a bit tired of the `Joe Pitt' series. However some of the negative reviews of this book seem to be based on the idea that a writer should not go beyond his genre. I'll admit it took me a bit to catch on to what he was doing here but once I saw it I was hooked and couldn't put the book down. The book is a police procedural and a mystery novel, but a love story as well.

Houston takes, in this SciFi novel, a very disturbing view of the future of humanity. He uses as his basis Fatal familial insomnia (FFI) an inherited autosomal prion disease similar to `Mad Cow' in domestic animal, `Wasting Disease' in deer and elk and, `Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease' in humans. It is 100% fatal and marked by an inability to sleep. In this novel FFI has somehow become an infective disease which will ultimately kill the majority of humans; only a few will have natural immunity.

I think what puts some folks off this book is the fact that Huston has two characters following parallel tracks and he switches 1st person point of view and time without giving you a lot of hints. This is difficult to follow, but in the end makes complete sense.

Initially I was tempted to give this four stars, but the ending so hooked me that I will probably go back and read it again in a year or so; it's just that good. Don't approach this book if you want things simple or think that Huston somehow `owes' you what he did in previous novels; this one is different and makes me believe that he is growing in his craft.

Charlie Huston's latest offering is pure suspense rock and roll with a whole lot of reseach thrown in. If you're not freaked out by the immediate plot (a post-apocalyptic world where people don't sleep any more) in the beginning, you will be by the end of the book.

In the past, Huston has borrowed definite crime elements for his series. The Joe Pitt and Hank Thompson series are firmly rooted in noir, and crime is at the heart of his other standalones. But for this book, Huston has bankrolled the action and suspense with a classic video-game driven engine that tears through the scenery. And smack in the middle of everything is a wonderful love story that will have you pulling for the hero against insurmountable odds.

A pet peeve of mine about Huston's writing has always been his lack of quotation marks. He's just never used them. I know it's not that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things, but it's always bothered me. I'd preferred the audio books because I could "hear" (note the use of quotation marks?) the dialogue better than while reading it. But he's using them now, and it makes a big difference.

Huston keeps the noir beat in this one and offers a wonderful character in Park Haas as he goes stumbling down through the darkness that is SLEEPLESS. This one will keep most readers turning the pages, intrigued and awed by this seriously disturbed world.

Charlie Huston has taken a rare genetic disorder known as Fatal Familial Insomnia, and used it as a basis for this compelling, human novel. The premise sounds so strange that I was surprised to find that FFI is an actual fact. Caused by a mutated protein, the disorder renders the sufferer incapable of sleep and, usually within a year, leaves them dead. The premise of Sleepless is that this disorder has begun to spread, and the infection shows no signs of abating. There is no cure for the suffers, and the only known treatment is a drug known as DR33M3R, whose distribution is tightly controlled.

The book is told through two shifting perspectives. The first--and to me, by far the most interesting--is that of Parker Haas. Park is an LAPD officer who goes undercover as a drug dealer with the aim of trying to track down trade in DR33M3R. Park is the father of a baby who may or may not be Sleepless, but his wife, Rose, has been tested and is definitely suffering from the disease. I found Park to be a very vivid and very sympathetic character. He cannot process the world as it is, cannot imagine how his child can possibly survive in such a world. Park has an almost physical need to find answers: what causes sleeplessness? Can it be cured? Why does it seem like no one is doing anything to try to stop it? Huston provides a lot of insight into Park, giving the reader glimpses into his past: his complicated relationship with his father, his enduring love for Rose, and the personal ethical code that make Park the man he is. I was rooting for this character from beginning to end and was very emotionally invested in him. I think Huston did a masterful job with him.

What kept me from giving this book a 5-star rating, however, was the second character from whose perspective the story is told. This character is shrouded in mystery to the extent that he's not even named until well into the book. I found him problematic because, for the bulk of the book, we never get a real sense of who this character is. That he's some sort of mercenary for hire is obvious. However, little information is given about his past or about anything that might help the reader form a picture of the guy. Most of his passages in the book are devoted to long, detailed trivia about what types of weapons he uses and minute descriptions of his technique in taking on assailants. I like thrillers and mysteries, but I'm not personally interested in details about firearms, etc., so I frankly found these sections boring, and my mind would often wander while reading them. I was always anxious to get through them so that I could get back to Park's story.

The world that Huston imagines is quite vivid as well. There are descriptions of Sleepless that are very disturbing. Integral to the overall feel of the book is an MMORPG called Chasm Tide with which many of the characters, particularly those who are Sleepless, are obsessed. I found this a very believable aspect to the novel. When your world seems on the verge of collapse, what better way to escape your grim reality than into a fantastical world that offers something more hopeful than what is truly outside your door? When you don't know what enemies you should be fighting in the real world, it might just be very soothing to log on and go fight some tangible enemies in an imaginary world.

Still, for a good part of the novel, I was unsure of whether I actually liked it. While there were many elements that I felt were very poignant and interesting, I was so turned off by the sections with the unnamed character that it tempered my overall enjoyment of the book. However, I felt that the story ultimately came together in the end in what was, for me, a very satisfying way. I thought Huston did a really nice job of providing small clues and details that were eventually woven together to form a larger picture. This is what saved the book for me, and I was glad for that. Huston's writing was too real and too intensely felt for an ending that would have let me down.