The Little Sleep: A Novel [Paperback]

Paul Tremblay (Author)

Book Description

Release date: March 3, 2009

Raymond Chandler meets Jonathan Lethem in this wickedly entertaining debut featuring Mark Genevich, Narcoleptic Detective

Mark Genevich is a South Boston P.I. with a little problem: he’s narcoleptic, and he suffers from the most severe symptoms, including hypnogogic hallucinations. These waking dreams wreak havoc for a guy who depends on real-life clues to make his living.

Clients haven’t exactly been beating down the door when Mark meets Jennifer Times—daughter of the powerful local D.A. and a contestant on American Star—who walks into his office with an outlandish story about a man who stole her fingers. He awakes from his latest hallucination alone, but on his desk is a manila envelope containing risqué photos of Jennifer. Are the pictures real, and if so, is Mark hunting a blackmailer, or worse?

Wildly imaginative and with a pitch-perfect voice, The Little Sleep is the first in a new series that casts a fresh eye on the rigors of detective work, and introduces a character who has a lot to prove—if only he can stay awake long enough to do it.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

South Boston PI Mark Genevich struggles to lead a seminormal life despite his narcolepsy, whose symptoms include falling asleep mid-conversation and hallucinations, in this uninspired noir from Stoker-finalist Tremblay (City Pier). When Jennifer Times, the daughter of prominent DA William "Billy" Times, comes to Mark's office with racy photographs of herself she received anonymously, Mark agrees to take her case. But after trying to contact both Jennifer—who's a contestant on an American Idol–like TV show—and her father, Mark realizes that Jennifer's visit was a hallucination. The photographs are his only tether to reality, one that becomes even more tenuous when he discovers not only that the subject isn't Jennifer, but that her father and his goons will do anything to get the mysterious photos back. Despite a promisingly quirky hero, Tremblay's plot is so full of holes that readers may wonder if they've suffered from one of Mark's frequent blackouts. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

As if the severe narcolepsy he developed after an auto accident hasn’t been enough of a stumbling block for Mark Genevich, the wisecracking South Boston PI now seems to have drawn the ire of the district attorney and his dour goons. He can’t be sure because his condition also triggers harrowing hallucinations, such as the woman who seems to show up at his office begging him to help find her stolen fingers. Hallucination or not, she looked a lot like the DA’s daughter, a finalist in an American Idol–style singing contest, and didn’t the DA grow up with Genevich’s late father in Southie? With the help of his acerbic-but-doting mom, Genevich stirs himself from his usual computer-based investigations and sets out into the hostile real world to solve the case—or at least figure out if a case even exists. Although the plot of this Chandler homage grows ragged around its increasingly surreal edges, it’s hard not to root for the loopy Genevich. (“I’m not peachy,” he explains at one point. “I’m not feeling any fruit in particular.”) This is a promising debut. --Frank Sennett

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 271 pages
• Publisher: Holt Paperbacks; First Edition edition (March 3, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805088490
• ISBN-13: 978-0805088496
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.9 x 8.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (49 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,598,190 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Paul Tremblay is the author of the novels The Little Sleep, No Sleep till Wonderland, Swallowing a Donkey's Eye, and coming in 2014, Floating Boy and the Girl Who Couldn't Fly (co-written with Stephen Graham Jones).

He is a three-time nominee of the Bram Stoker award has sold over fifty short stories to markets such as Razor Magazine, Weird Tales, Last Pentacle of the Sun: Writings in Support of the West Memphis Three, and Best American Fantasy 3. He is the author of the short speculative fiction collection Compositions for the Young and Old and the forthcoming In the Mean Time, and the novellas City Pier: Above and Below and The Harlequin and the Train. He served as fiction editor of CHIZINE and as co-editor of Fantasy Magazine, and was also the co-editor (with Sean Wallace) of the Fantasy, Bandersnatch, and Phantom anthologies, and co-editor (with John Langan) of Creatures: Thirty Years of Monster Stories. Paul is currently on the board of directors for the Shirley Jackson Awards as well.

Paul is very truthful and declarative in his bios. He once gained three inches of height in a single twelve hour period, and he does not have a uvula. His second toe is longer than his big toe, and yes, on both feet. He has a master's degree in mathematics, teaches AP Calculus, and once made twenty-seven three pointers in a row. He enjoys reading The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher aloud in a faux-British accent to his two children. He is also reading this bio aloud, now, with the same accent. He lives outside of Boston, Massachusetts and he is represented by Stephen Barbara, Foundry Literary + Media.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Wake Up To This Nightmare February 27, 2009

By Kevin L. Nenstiel TOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

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

When a reality TV diva falls into Mark Genevich's office with a hot case and a hefty check, he knows things will be weird. But everything's weird for Genevich. South Boston's most rinky-dink private dick lives in a constant Krazy Kat fantasyland because of chronic narcolepsy.

Despite the title, this book bears only a shirt-tail bond to Raymond Chandler's noir classic The Big Sleep. Author Paul Tremblay is less interested in Chandler's story than his world-weary tone and rigidly moral character. But Tremblay makes his PI a man out of time, a self-conscious anachronism. Genevich is less Chandler's Philip Marlowe than Robert Altman's screen version in The Long Goodbye.

Genevich is a gripping mix of modern and dated. He knows people dislike him. He cultivates his archaic mein to cover his physical wounds. Like the best detectives, his bodily scars are shadows of his internal mutilation. But Tremblay pushes it a step farther. The wounds that slash Genevich's soul are a small fraction of those that maim everyone around him. He's a damaged man in a damaged world.

Yet Genevich remains an endlessly fascinating character. His dogged persistence, growing from gimlet-eyed belief in justice, is matched by his grim humor and screw-you indifference to others' scorn. He's funny and repellent by turns. You stick with him because you need to know how awful his next decision will be.

There's no let-up in his entropic world. Every choice digs his grave a little deeper. He knows he's harming his few remaining confidantes, yet honesty and anger forbid him to stop. The problem is, he can't tell what's real and what's phony in his own mind because his illness transforms his eyes into liars.

Part of a trend in offbeat thrillers, this novel creates a character whose only predictability is that he can't be predicted. And he fights a crime that only tells the truth about its lies. This is a captivating character in a sophisticated story, for fans or beginners in the noir thriller world.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Debut Has Decent Patter but Shaky Plot April 19, 2009

By A. Ross HALL OF FAMETOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

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

I'm a sucker for crime novels with a gimmick, so when I saw this one about a narcoleptic detective, I couldn't resist. Mark Genevich is a grouchy low-end private investigator, the kind who doesn't do much more than poke around online doing background checks and the like. A few years ago he was a regular, fun-lovin' dude, but a car accident left him facially disfigured and with narcolepsy, and his best friend dead. So now he spends most of his time holed up in the South Boston building his mom owns, where he splits his time between his "office" and his apartment, managing his condition. You see, it's not that he simply conks out at the drop of a hat, he also suffers from cataplexy (whereby one is awake and totally conscious, but completely paralyzed) and has hypnogogic hallucinations (a form of super-lucid dreams that are nearly impossible to distinguish from reality). The combination of these three conditions means that even the most routine case can be exceedingly complicated for him.

The plot of this first adventure of his (the book has all the hallmarks of being a series debut) revolves two snapshots of a young woman in a compromising position. She may or may not be a local contestant on an American Idol style show, who just also happens to be the daughter of Boston's district attorney (who also happens to be a childhood buddy of Genevich's father). Genevich snaps awake one day to find these photos on his desk, but can't remember who gave them to him or why. So, he has to try and reconstruct how they got there, which means a lot of stumbling about in the dark until he stirs up a hornet's nest of trouble. He's never quite sure which of his meetings are real and which were hallucinations and soon enough, he has a pair of goons from central casting following him around and shooting at him -- or maybe not. Depending on your temperament, all this uncertainty as what's real and what isn't will either be charming or rapidly annoying. Either way, it makes it a little hard to connect with Genevich and get too invested in his story, since he's constantly screwing up.

Other than its damaged hero, the book's other distinctive element is its style, which aims for a modern ultra hard-boiled patter (in case you couldn't tell from the Chandler-inspired title). This mostly works, although you really have to be in the mood for it, and if you're not, it would probably be really annoying. What's more of a problem is that the entire plot hinges on a rather improbable coincidental resemblance (without the resemblance, there is no story). Furthermore, without giving anything away, the main villain could have easily averted the entire mess the first time he meets Genevich by simply playing along with what Genevich believes is happening. In the end, I found myself intermittently enjoying some of the patter, but not particularly engrossed by the plot. And I'm definitely not eager to spend a second book watching Genevich's condition complicate an otherwise basic case.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars I Dreamed I Dreamed January 26, 2010

By Michael P. McCullough

Format:Paperback

*The Little Sleep* is an interesting thriller (mystery?) with a gimmick - the narrator is a private investigator who is a narcoleptic (as a result of a head injury) and he frequently falls asleep, or partially asleep, and is prone to hypnagogic dreams and hallucinations. In other words - people can't always tell he is asleep, and he is unable to differentiate between dreams and reality.

Brilliant, eh?

This is a clever and intriguing concept for a novel, and to a certain extent it works. The flawed narrator's humorous, descriptive wisecracks add humor to the story.

Regrettably, like a lot of bestseller type fiction (mysteries, thrillers), the book becomes overly concerned with plot elements that become the essence of the story. What could have been an amazing examination of reality and dreams becomes another stepwise, plot driven whodunit.

For example: The main character is searching for a certain clue (some film), and we have a lengthy description of his searching the entire house, the basement, the backyard, the shed, yada yada yada - and surprise! He finds it! Then he needs to find a projector, then a stepwise description of threading the film through the projector . . . C'mon! Finally, half an eternity later, we find out what is on the film, and there is little suspense or joy because we knew we would discover what was on the film the first time we learned there *was* a film.

So in some respects this book failed to meet its potential; however, I have read there is a sequel in the works. Hopefully there will be more exploration of the nature of narcolepsy, dreams, etc., and less plot driven filler.