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Sleepless

3.66 of 5 stars 3.66 · rating details · 1,195 ratings · 225 reviews

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 h...more 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.(less)

Hardcover, 368 pages

Published January 12th 2010 by Ballantine Books (first published 2010)

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Dec 25, 2010 Robert Beveridge rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: amazon-vine, finished, owned-and-still-own, best-i-read-2009-edition

Charlie Huston, Sleepless (Ballantine, 2010)

I started three books on the same day, two Vine books and a third I'd bought with birthday money. I figured Sleepless would probably be the one that would get relegated to the back of the line, as I knew nothing about Charlie Huston save that The Mystical Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death has gotten a lot of good press this year and that it had an interesting-sounding premise. But Friday night I had a large block of reading time available, so I ended...more Charlie Huston, Sleepless (Ballantine, 2010)

I started three books on the same day, two Vine books and a third I'd bought with birthday money. I figured Sleepless would probably be the one that would get relegated to the back of the line, as I knew nothing about Charlie Huston save that The Mystical Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death has gotten a lot of good press this year and that it had an interesting-sounding premise. But Friday night I had a large block of reading time available, so I ended up alternating chapters in the three (after finishing two books I was almost done with). By the time I was finished with that, Sleepless had won out over an Elder Scrolls novel and the first book Robin Hobb has set in the Liveship Traders world in six years. That takes some doing, on both counts; this Huston guy has definitely got something going for him.

Sleepless is an alternate-universe noir in which the (absolutely real) disease Fatal Familial Insomnia has somehow mutated into a new disease: sleepless, commonly abbreviated SLP. While FFI is genetic (and limited to fifty families, as far as anyone knows), SLP is horrendously communicable; one in ten people worldwide, in Huston's world, have been diagnosed with the disease. There is only one medication that is capable of helping, Dreamer (or Dr33m3r if you're into that sort of thing). With 10% of the world's population entirely unable to sleep, the rule of law has almost vanished, and worldwide distractions have taken hold (including Chasm Tide, an MMORPG that bears some resemblance to World of Warcraft). We see this world from two different perspectives. One is Park, a small-time drug dealer who's suddenly gotten big-time and may have an in to the black market in Dreamer that everyone is sure exists, but no one has actually been able to gain any evidence of. The other is Jasper, an obsessive-compulsive hit man. Their paths cross when the owners of a Chasm Tide gold farm are murdered. Jasper is hired by Lady Chizu, the head of the Thousand Storks mercenary company, to retrieve a travel drive located in the gold farm; Park was the dealer for a number of members of the gold farm. When Park discovers the massacre while making a delivery, he pockets the travel drive to see if it contains any evidence that may lead him to the killer. This, of course, puts Jasper on his tail.

The travel drive, however, is a secondary player in this novel, as is the main plot; Sleepless is all about worldbuilding a society that's close to our own, with a single quirk that doesn't exist in reality. What happens to the world if you flip one switch? Huston has obviously spent a lot of time thinking about this question, and because of that, the alternate Los Angeles he builds here is almost as real as our own (the only literary analogue I can think of recently that impressed me as much was the London depicted in China Mieville's King Rat). From there, Huston seems to have adopted the storytelling mode Faulkner used when writing As I Lay Dying: take a bunch of normal people and heap as much misery on them as possible, and then see what they do. And he does it very, very well.

I've already dropped some very big names here in comparison, and I'm going to do it one more time: this novel somehow put me in mind both of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash in the way he actually integrates the sci-fi elements into things without them seeming like he's just showing off some new toys (think about, say, the very cool but useless map scene in Babylon A. D. as a good example of “showing off toys”) and of Cormac McCarthy's The Road (to which this could very well be a prequel; McCarthy never does tell us what killed the world) in the rhythm and flow of Huston's language, though Huston is far more accessible than McCarthy could ever be. All the comparisons, from the standpoint of the quality of Huston's writing, are eminently justified. This guy is very good at what he does.

If the book has problems, they are all in the area of pacing, as Huston slows things down on a fairly regular basis (this usually happens when Jasper is describing how he sees the world, in his obsessively detail-oriented way). The reason for this becomes clear at the end of the book, and it's a pleasant surprise, but that doesn't entirely erase the feeling of having to slog through a passage here and there. Still, as far as crime fiction goes, Charlie Huston has given the world a good piece of it. Sleepless earned itself a place on my 25 Best Reads of the Year list without any trouble at all. ****
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Feb 13, 2010 Kemper rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: apocalypse-now, sci-fi, crime-mystery, dystopia

I have good news, and I have better news.

The good news is that Charlie Huston has finally started using quotation marks instead of the annoying and confusing dashes before dialogue. Granted, he still isn’t using ‘he said’ or ‘she asked’, but progress is progress.

The better news is that Huston has written a masterpiece.

It’s been fascinating to read along as pure talent has evolved to extreme skill from the Hank Thompson and Joe Pitt stories to the point where Huston started delivering these stan...more I have good news, and I have better news.

The good news is that Charlie Huston has finally started using quotation marks instead of the annoying and confusing dashes before dialogue. Granted, he still isn’t using ‘he said’ or ‘she asked’, but progress is progress.

The better news is that Huston has written a masterpiece.

It’s been fascinating to read along as pure talent has evolved to extreme skill from the Hank Thompson and Joe Pitt stories to the point where Huston started delivering these stand-alone novels that have shown him growing as a writer with every book. What he started in The Shotgun Rule and followed up with in The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death, he has perfected for Sleepless. Reading a Charlie Huston book used to be like a grenade going off in your face. Sleepless is like getting carved up by a scalpel.

Set in an alternate version of 2010, an epidemic of insomnia leads victims to prolonged and ugly deaths. The SLP disease has pushed an already unsteady world to the very brink of collapse. Governments and services are in the midst of a slow motion disintegration, and the only thing that still works reliably is the Internet as people still demand on-line gaming and other distractions. In Los Angeles, open gang warfare is common and religious cults are beginning to clash with what’s left of the military and the police in what is almost sure to be the opening rounds of a global meltdown.

An idealistic LAPD officer named Parker Haas naively thinks that the tide can be turned if people will just start doing the right thing. Unfortunately, his wife Rose is already suffering from the sleepless disease, and things aren’t looking good for his infant daughter either. Park hides from his personal issues by dedicating all his time to his undercover assignment, tracking down any black market dealing of a drug called DR33M3R which is the only thing that offers some relief against the insomnia. But Park crosses paths with a deadly mercenary hired to recover a stolen object, and things get ugly in a hurry.

This book reminded me of the better cyber-punk books like Snow Crash, but Huston has built something unique here. The version of a world collapsing was brutally cynical but filled with moments of grace from desperate people. Huston flips from a third person narrative covering Park’s story to Park’s heartbreaking first person journal entries to another first person narrative from the mercenary’s point of view. This creates an eerie disconcerting vibe that makes you feel like it’s all a confusing dream for the first few chapters, but it’s a nightmare that feels all too possible.(less)

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Nov 04, 2010 Maddy rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2010-reads

PROTAGONIST: Parker Hass, LAPD
SETTING: Post-apocolyptic LA, 2010
RATING: 3.0

Charlie Huston has done it again. With the release of his latest book, he shows once again that there is no formula that he is going to follow. SLEEPLESS is a work of speculative fiction set in post-apocalyptic Los Angles. It’s like nothing I’ve ever read before.

It’s mid-2010, and the world is in a chaotic state. Los Angeles is living under martial law, and violence rules. Societal mores have broken down, and the citizenr...more PROTAGONIST: Parker Hass, LAPD
SETTING: Post-apocolyptic LA, 2010
RATING: 3.0

Charlie Huston has done it again. With the release of his latest book, he shows once again that there is no formula that he is going to follow. SLEEPLESS is a work of speculative fiction set in post-apocalyptic Los Angles. It’s like nothing I’ve ever read before.

It’s mid-2010, and the world is in a chaotic state. Los Angeles is living under martial law, and violence rules. Societal mores have broken down, and the citizenry exist in a world where all of the boundaries have fallen. Traffic jams are so bad that they can take hours to resolve; people abandon their cars rather than dealing with the mess. But worst of all is a curse that has been visited upon them—a plague of sleeplessness has taken hold. Although that may sound benign, it is anything but. Months of sleeplessness can lead to insanity and ultimately death. The only possible cure is a hard-to-find drug called Dreamer, which is supposed to be dispensed fairly and not merely to those who can afford to pay its steep price.

Although policeman Parker Hass does not suffer from sleeplessness, his beloved wife Rose does. There is nothing that he can do for her; he can only watch helplessly from the sidelines and be there when she is lucid. He is worried because their infant daughter is exhibiting signs of becoming sleepless as well. But then Hass becomes involved in a big way with dealing with the plague. Working undercover as a drug dealer, he is assigned to track down the illegal trading of Dreamer. The drug has the highest profit margin in history, and warfare could ensue if its distribution is not tightly controlled. The truth behind the black market appearance of the drug is beyond anything that he could have imagined; he finds himself dealing with a warped genius who runs the pharmaceutical company that manufactures the drug.

The main problem that I had with SLEEPLESS is that Hass dedicates himself almost entirely to the effort to thwart the illegal distribution of Dreamer. Certainly, that is an important and noble goal; but he does so while neglecting his own wife and child. It is dangerous for his daughter to be cared for by his wife, who tends to focus manically on things like video games and be completely unaware that her child needs attention. Although they have a caretaker to help, she isn’t always there; several times, Parker has come home and found his child in real danger. He’s like the white knight who rides off on to the crusade while forgetting to leave behind any means of support for his family.

Although the plot was cleverly conceived, I found myself struggling to read the book. It moved very slowly for me. Part of that was due to some very long pieces of dialogue as the resolution played out, and the book was quite slow to get started. And part of the problem was my own inability to figure out exactly what was happening; I didn’t even realize it was being narrated from two points of view for quite some time.

Charlie Huston is one of the most innovative authors writing today. Although he’s only been published since 2004, his output is nothing short of amazing. He’s responsible for the acclaimed noir trilogy featuring Hank Thompson, 5 books in the Joe Pitt vampire PI series, 2 standalones and SLEEPLESS. Even though I haven’t loved every single one of these books, I always find Huston taking chances and I enjoy the reading journey. And despite the fact that SLEEPLESS wasn’t a great read for me, I will still happily read anything that he writes in the future. Huston is a talent that one cannot afford to miss.

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Jun 03, 2013 Stefana rated it 5 of 5 stars

Porneste de la ideea unui viitor apropiat, în care omenirea e lovită de o epidemie mai puţin obişnuită. Una de insomnie. Simplu şi tragic. Fiindcă toţi ştim, cred, cât e de rău să pierzi doar câteva nopţi. Luni întregi fără somn? Da, poate că o astfel de maladie nu e la fel de spectaculoasă şi rapidă ca altele, dar efectul asupra organismului e la fel de devastator. Mai ales atunci când nu există medicament care s-o vindece, ci doar unul care atenuează simptomele -- Dreamer, produs de o supercor...more Porneste de la ideea unui viitor apropiat, în care omenirea e lovită de o epidemie mai puţin obişnuită. Una de insomnie. Simplu şi tragic. Fiindcă toţi ştim, cred, cât e de rău să pierzi doar câteva nopţi. Luni întregi fără somn? Da, poate că o astfel de maladie nu e la fel de spectaculoasă şi rapidă ca altele, dar efectul asupra organismului e la fel de devastator. Mai ales atunci când nu există medicament care s-o vindece, ci doar unul care atenuează simptomele -- Dreamer, produs de o supercorporaţie, distribuit, teoretic cel puţin, sub control guvernamental. Potenţialul de haos al unei asemenea epidemii e uriaş.
Iar America lui Huston chiar asta e: o ţară fracturată, în care atentatele sinucigaşe au devenit un lucru banal, comunităţile se izolează, noţiunile de bine şi rău se amestecă, ofiţerii legii acţionează adesea precum gangsterii, elementele criminale, dar şi forţele de securitate privată capătă mijloacele şi organizarea unor armate puse pe distrugere. Pe o astfel de scenă se joacă o intrigă poliţistă alertă, cu personaje ieşite din canon şi o miză dusă dincolo de obişnuitul „cine a făcut şi de ce?”
Naraţiunea se face când la persoana întâi, când la a treia, dar de fapt urmăreşte doi inşi, confruntaţi cu provocări existenţiale majore. Poliţistul sub acoperire Parker Hass, absolventul de filosofie care nu acceptă compromisul, e încă legat de valorile unei lumi muribunde, dispus să-şi rişte cariera şi viaţa pentru ele. Dar încearcă în acelaşi timp să-şi salveze soţia insomniacă şi fetiţa despre care nu ştie dacă a contractat boala. Nu se poate însă îngriji cum trebuie de ele fiindcă viaţa cealaltă, de traficant de droguri, îi consumă timpul, împiedicându-l chiar să doarmă. Viaţa în care trebuie să afle cine şi cum vinde pe piaţa neagră cantităţi mari de Dreamer.
Nemesisul său e, ai spune, Jasper, misteriosul ucigaş plătit ajuns la o vârstă neobişnuită în profesie -- 60 de ani. Capabil să se elibereze şi să-şi anihileze torţionarii, după ce a fost ars cu fierul înroşit pe pulpe, în şedinţe succesive, presărate cu urletele sale. Personajul meu preferat, pentru că e construit din oţel şi muzică. Un om aparent lipsit de moralitate, dar care recunoaşte ce este şi, mai ales, care pare perfect adaptat pentru cruda lume nouă. Un ins care descoperă umorul unei situaţii fie şi în timpul unei reprize de tortură, care şi-a construit viaţa în jurul unei armonii a elementelor. Fie că e vorba despre mobilă, despre lucrări de artă modernă, excentrică, sau despre trupurile pe care le lasă în urma sa.
Cei doi vor ajunge, printr-o misterioasă potrivire a elementelor aparent întâmplătoare, pe o traiectorie de coliziune. Şi viaţa lor se va schimba radical. Poate, efectele întâlnirii lor vor merge chiar mai departe. Dar cum se termină povestea, nu vreau să vă spun. Ar însemna să anihilez suspansul. De care „Insomnia” chiar nu duce lipsă. Şi aş vrea ca, dacă o luaţi în mână, s-o citiţi pe nerăsuflate, ca mine. Iar apoi să meditaţi la ce suntem şi unde putem ajunge. Fiindcă ficţiunea Americii imaginate de Huston nu e atât de departe de realitatea zilelor noastre.(less)

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Nov 24, 2011 Raelyn rated it 3 of 5 stars

In an alternate time line, LAPD cop Parker Haas has gone undercover in order to make “a bust of scale” on the black market of DR33M3R: a drug that grants sleep to those infected with fatal insomnia. This new plague eats away at its victim’s thalamus, causing them to become sleepless, and therefore hysterical. Parker’s wife has the disease, and it could soon pass to their infant daughter. He’ll do whatever it takes to protect them, which involves assuming the roll of a drug dealer, going to under...more

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May 30, 2011 Jake rated it 3 of 5 stars

I started reading this the day before my son was born, so I pretty much experienced the story the same way as most of the characters: tired as hell and not really comprehending what was going on. Seriously, there were nights I forced myself to stay up and read, and I was so exhausted that my right eye wasn't even really focusing. Which is a kinda-perfect metaphor for the half-focused story.

Initially, Huston seems to have written Sleepless only to comment on how the prevalence of online gaming a...more

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Jan 06, 2011 Tony rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction-crime-detection

Huston, Charlie. SLEEPLESS. (2010). ***. The novel is set in a dystopian world that now exists in L.A. The time is the year 2010, and we meet Parker Hass. He was educated as a philosophy major, but ended up joining the LAPD because he believed that he could truly help out his fellow citizens. He had an attitude, though, that ultimately led to his not being able to work with his fellow cops in a world that has run so low on fuel that they had to ride doubly, triply and even quadruply in a squad c...more

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Sep 21, 2010 Clay Nichols rated it 4 of 5 stars

The addiction to Chasm Tide, the World of Warcraft-style game that flows through “Sleepless,” the arresting novel by Charlie Huston, scared me silly. Lately, I’ve been more amenable to genre fiction, due in part to my habit of listening to books while a run (exciting is good, lead to new levels in Nike+), due in part to reviews from sources I trust.

My rewards have been rich and creepy. First Paolo Bacigalupi’s steampunk epic “The Windup Girl” and now “Sleepless.”

The value of virtual goods and ch...more

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Sep 14, 2010 Susan rated it 5 of 5 stars

I did not think I was going to like this book. After reading the Joe Pitt series, I was interested in what Sleepless was going to be all about and I'd heard good things. The first couple of chapters, though, left me with a vague confusion and also a vague dislike for the main character, the unbendingly good cop trying to keep being good in a system that is obviously failing in the wake of what amounts to the coming of the apocalypse.

All that, however, cleared up a couple more chapters in and I w...more

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Jul 23, 2010 Marc rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

I came to Huston from his Joe Pitt vampire noir series, which were amusing enough, not too serious, fun but not very deep. So I took a chance on Sleepless - and I have to say - I'm impressed.

The content seems vastly matured from his genre series. Sleepless is incredibly imaginative, evoking a parallel world USA in the middle of social collapse. It's not post-apocalyptic - it's apocalypse now. It's so up-to-the second contemporary it's as if, today, July 22d 2010 - the book was somehow written th...more

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Apr 21, 2010 Sheehan rated it 4 of 5 stars

So if you like the pulled back at the seams, raging Los Angeles detective stories of James Ellroy, but you also find yourself intrigued by the multivariate ways the world will fall on it's own sword, this story is for you!

Taking place primarily in LA, it is the story of characters in a very recent future grappling with the descent into lawlessness that comes from an increasing plague of sleeplessness. This plague is well researched and based on factual accounts of people with debilitating sleep...more

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Apr 02, 2010 Louvaine rated it 2 of 5 stars

Well, if you like your novels nihilistic and thick with "authenticity", this is the novel for you. I only made it 1/2 way through, though I wish I could have read more. It was simply too vulgar and rife with gaming terminology, which blocked the flow of the book. There are so many f-bombs in this book it's the literary equivalent of Iraq & Afghanistan. It felt like constantly moving around roadblocks to get thru the storyline. And that's a shame, because the actual story and the pacing moved...more

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Feb 20, 2010 Book Calendar rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: science-fiction, suspense, near-future-thriller

Sleepless by Charlie Huston

This book is a noirish police procedural set in a dystopian near future. Parker Haas the main character is an undercover narcotics detective. His job is to track down illegal traffic of a drug called dreamer.

This drug is the only relief for a plague that causes permanent insomnia and slow death. The descriptions are quite frightening. It is based on a real disease that causes fatal familial insomnia. In the story, Parker's wife, Rose has the disease. In the story, 10...more

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Feb 07, 2010 Timothy rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

The hidden secret about Huston's books is the core of humor he displays in them, something that adds a layer of humanity to otherwise dystopic topics like the travails of mass-murdering baseball players and the struggles of hunted vampire private eyes.

Sleepless isn't funny, though -- but might be all the stronger for that lack.

Set in what might be best described as a pre-apocalyptic world ("pre" in the sense that, sure, everything hasn't gone to hell yet, but just wait a week or two), the book p...more

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Jan 09, 2010 Tim Niland rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2010-reads

An epidemic of sleeplessness is sweeping the world. Governments are crumbling, chaos is rising and social order is breaking down. The only thing that can help the afflicted is a drug code named Dr33m3r, or dreamer. Los Angeles police officer Parker Haas has a wife among the afflicted and an infant daughter who may or may not be. He has also been offered a chance to really make a difference. Haas must go undercover, posing as a drug dealer to seek out the illegal trade of the special drug. What h...more

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Aug 08, 2010 Mattazuma rated it 4 of 5 stars

I read Charlie Huston's previous book, The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death, and I really enjoyed it. I figured that Sleepless would be somewhat similar.

Nope.

FYI - This is not a happy book. That being said, Sleepless had me transfixed from page 1. It kept me up far too late reading it at night more than once.

The version of L.A. shown in this book is far too easy to see occurring in the future. The author does a great job showing the reader what going through a slow motion apocalypse co...more

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Jul 30, 2010 Ryun rated it 4 of 5 stars

Now that Charlie Huston’s Joe Pitt books have wrapped up, the ever-prolific author has turned his sights on a mid-apocalyptic California for his first science-fiction novel, SLEEPLESS. It’s undoubtedly sci-fi — since Los Angeles is slowly being driven into chaos by a brain disease that turns people into never-sleeping, hyper-obsessive crazies who, at the end, can’t distinguish reality from dreams or memories — but there aren’t any rayguns, aliens or alien languages to trip up SF-phobes.
Like so m...more

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Feb 01, 2012 Kelly rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: listened-to

I'll state up front that i didn't always follow everything going on - even with the help of a gamer spouse, I found the concepts of virtual and real economies confusing. What I can say is that the near future L.A. Huston gives us is so vivid I could absolutely believe that, indeed, this is the way the world will end. Unlike most visions of the apocalypse, individuals in this society do not valiantly fight their circumstances. Ten percent of the population is dying from a prion disease that cause...more

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Apr 21, 2013 Ghilimei rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: dystopia, sf, sleep-insomnia

M-am surprins din nou singură pentru că nu mă așteptam să-mi placă neapărat cartea asta, dar m-am apucat de ea pentru că eram disperată, nu mai citisem de prea multă vreme, eram de-a dreptul în sevraj, iar ea era cel mai la îndemână, cu un titlu care m-a atras întotdeauna - Insomnia. E ciudat cât de mult mă atrage subiectul ăsta ținând cont cât de mult îmi place să dorm.

Am răsfoit-o, am văzut cam despre ce e vorba, m-am gândit că poate o să găsesc vreo viziune nouă asupra somnului/insomniei (dup...more M-am surprins din nou singură pentru că nu mă așteptam să-mi placă neapărat cartea asta, dar m-am apucat de ea pentru că eram disperată, nu mai citisem de prea multă vreme, eram de-a dreptul în sevraj, iar ea era cel mai la îndemână, cu un titlu care m-a atras întotdeauna - Insomnia. E ciudat cât de mult mă atrage subiectul ăsta ținând cont cât de mult îmi place să dorm.

Am răsfoit-o, am văzut cam despre ce e vorba, m-am gândit că poate o să găsesc vreo viziune nouă asupra somnului/insomniei (după cum spuneam, mă pasionează subiectul și cărțile care-l tratează), așa că m-am apucat s-o citesc fără vreun alt background check despre autor sau alte detalii.

M-a prins din primul capitol. Fără cine știe ce introducere sau set-up, a intrat direct în acțiune, ceea ce mi-a plăcut, iar contextul și personajele au fost dezvăluite pe parcurs. Nici nu afli cum arată exact personajul principal până pe la jumătate sau chiar aproape de final, dar pe mine nu m-a deranjat deloc.

Povestea are trei voci narative, care alternează - două sunt ale personajelor ale căror destine se vor întrepătrunde (nu e spoiler - era de așteptat), iar al treilea e naratorul omniscient, care mai face câte-o paranteză. Problema e că nu prea sunt diferențiate aceste voci, iar asta devine confuzant la început. Mi s-a întâmplat de mai multe ori să citesc un capitol întreg fără să-mi dau seama că era narat de altcineva decât cine credeam eu.

Finalul mi s-a părut un pic ilogic, parcă a căutat anume să provoace dramă. Explicația întregului mister în jurul căruia se învârte acțiunea mi s-a părut ușor nesatisfăcătoare, cam prea previzibilă, dar altfel destul de realistă, ceea ce mi-a mai atenuat din nemulțumire.

Nu pot să spun că e o carte extraordinară, dacă ar fi ecranizată probabil ar ieși un film de categoria B, dar mie mi-a plăcut pentru că mi-a oferit exact ce aveam nevoie în momentul în care am citit-o. O recomand cui are chef de o lectură ușoară, în pas alert. Mi se pare foarte bună pentru citit în tren, avion, aeroport sau alte situații similare cu ceva mai mult timp la dispoziție.(less)

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Dec 30, 2010 Adam rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: heart-of-darkness, horror-disguised-as-literature, literature-disguised-as-science-fic, noir, spy-vs-spy, black-comedy

Sleepless is a mix of zombie movie,a future is now(actually an alternate present), a hard boiled thriller, and strangely a meditation on a family. This is written in a more convoluted style than Mr. Huston usually stripped down style for a couple reasons I suspect, mainly his use of invented author as the teller of this story and I suspect a mild overload on research. He is using punctuation marks on his dialogue so any of those lunatics who find this stylistic trait so annoying as to write off...more

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May 01, 2010 Doug Cornelius rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: read-in-2010, kindle

Imagine if the recent Great Panic financial crisis of 2008 was accompanied by a realization that an illness had spread across the population. On top of the subprime meltdown, a devastating illness has left a huge portion of the population unable to sleep. It takes about a year of zombie-like existence for the sleepless to die. The world has fallen into chaos, isolation and martial law. Sleepless is set in this post-apocalyptic Los Angeles.

The two protagonists in Sleepless are Park, an undercove...more

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May 24, 2010 Jonathan rated it 3 of 5 stars

This book isn't quite what I expected: I was imagining an introspective, world-gone-awry story with shades of the apocalypse and medicine, a quiet watch-the-world-burn sort of story. I'm a sucker for post-apocalyptic fiction and the premise--a disease that robs people of their sleep and, eventually, their life--was fascinating, conjuring up images of whole cities just staying up all night because they cannot sleep.

What I got was, unquestionably, pulp fiction. This book was written in January of...more

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May 20, 2012 Garrett VanderLeun rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I didn't finish.

One of my favorite contemporary authors, and I didn't finish.

I was almost 100 pages in when I realized I was tracking two characters. Or at least I thought I was. I still don't quite know what was what in this confusing narrative. I admire Huston's attempt at trying something different and new, but I felt like this book was so far removed from his normally rock-solid style that it lost it's way.

It's set in the future, not too far, but far enough to necessitate lots of new jarg...more

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Apr 06, 2010 Bookmarks Magazine rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: may-jun-2010

Readers pigeon-hole Charlie Huston at their peril. The only certainties about Huston's work are his penchant for deeply weird and flawed characters (Hank Thompson is a failed baseball player with some addiction issues and remarkably bad luck; PI Joe Pitt is a New York vampire ...) and his deliciously warped sense of humor. And few genre novelists are as literary (""writing ... simply too good to be genre-constrained,"" praises the Denver Post). With back-to-back hits in The Mystic Arts of Erasin...more

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Sep 19, 2011 Maxi rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: dystopian, thriller, horror

This was (unexpectedly) my best read this year! (…so far ;-)
Can’t get this story out of my head (that’s why I write this review 4 month after I finished the book!)

Sleepless is set in an apocalyptic L.A. where the population is infected with a spreading prion protein (SLP), which causes insomnia. There is no cure and infected people die after horrible suffering from the slowly advancing inability to sleep. Only one drug brings some relief, DREAMER, which is sold on the black market and suspiciou...more This was (unexpectedly) my best read this year! (…so far ;-)
Can’t get this story out of my head (that’s why I write this review 4 month after I finished the book!)

Sleepless is set in an apocalyptic L.A. where the population is infected with a spreading prion protein (SLP), which causes insomnia. There is no cure and infected people die after horrible suffering from the slowly advancing inability to sleep. Only one drug brings some relief, DREAMER, which is sold on the black market and suspiciously turned up just after the SLP prion started to spread.

Nobody knows where DREAMER comes from, and this is why LAPD officer Parker Haas goes underground as a drug dealer to find out the source. But apart from his dangerous job, Parker has problems at home. His wife, Rose, is infected and due to her condition and the resulting confusion and hallucinations she is unable to take care of their small baby girl, which she refuses to have tested for SLP. As Parker strives to find the responsible agents for the SLP outbreak in an attempt to make the world a place for his daughter to grow up in, he increasingly neglects his family.

The other narrator of the story, Jasper, has given up on the world and only wants to pursue his extravagant amenities as long as he still can. Highly pedantic, with a fine taste in food, drink, art and music he is a skilled professional killer and the cynical counter part to Parker Haas. As Parker’s, Rose’s and Jasper’s ways cross, the plot leads up to the pivotal point where Jasper is left with the baby, representing a hope and a future, which had no place in his life before.

I admit that the writing is a little but hard to get into, for one reason because of the language (especially for a not native English speaker as me the slang was difficult to understand at first) and the point of view changes a few times before you really get into the story. But it’s totally worth the effort!!

The set up is marvelous in all its details. You have the central idea of the SLP prion, spreading sleeplessness among the population with no way to cure them and the resulting chaos.
Everybody has experienced those nights, when he/she just could not get any sleep for some reason and knows what it feels like. Now, extrapolate, what happens when large parts of the population of a city cannot sleep at all for weeks. They wander the streets, suffering, disturbed and confused, out of control.
In the story the sleepless seek diversion by losing themselves in an on-line role game called Chasm Tide, which plays a central role in the story. Even as a never-seriously-played-a-computer-game-in-my-life girl, I loved the idea how the virtual characters, weapons and recourses are traded I real life.

Some of the characters became vivid pictures in my head, especially Lady Chizu with her strange collection of typewriters. The character of Parker Haas is strangely more defined by his father (who committed suicide) and by his wife Rose (though, independent and constantly using swear-words) and their apparent incompatibility. I hated - and was totally fascinated by - Jasper and his strange exclusive tastes and efficient breaking and killing methods.
(I actually re-read the story in only the parts which are narrated by him…)
(less)

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Dec 29, 2009 Sera rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: End of Days; Gamers

Recommended to Sera by: First Read

Shelves: first-reads, thriller-suspense, own

I would give this book 4.5 stars. I really enjoyed it but I believe that the subject matter will have a limited audience for two reasons. First, some readers may not be interested in the end of days theme. Second, and more importantly, there is an sub-theme that includes the MMO gaming world that I'm not sure to which many readers would relate. I used to play WOW for about 2 1/2 years, before I had the baby, and I really appreciated how Huston connected the virtual with the non-virtual world in...more I would give this book 4.5 stars. I really enjoyed it but I believe that the subject matter will have a limited audience for two reasons. First, some readers may not be interested in the end of days theme. Second, and more importantly, there is an sub-theme that includes the MMO gaming world that I'm not sure to which many readers would relate. I used to play WOW for about 2 1/2 years, before I had the baby, and I really appreciated how Huston connected the virtual with the non-virtual world in this book. However, if the reader has no knowledge of these types of games, then I'm not sure that she would appreciate the nuances of what that world really means to gamers and how they tie into to the plot of the book.

What I liked most about this book was how thoughful Huston was in regard his understanding of people and what motivates them. I thought that Huston's observations about the human psyche really separated him from other author's in this space. I found that his use of this approach throughout the book really took it up a notch in regard to adding credibility to the overall story. It helped me as a reader to really identify with different aspects of each of the characters.

The story itself is very depressing, but again, well thought out on the part of Huston. He creates a complicated maze of events based upon current circumstances that could actually play out in the world. Again, Huston gives the story much credibility by taking current world happenings and taking them in directions that the reader can buy into as ways in which the world could come to an end based upon certain economic, enviromental and medical factors. Although the title of the book indicates a society where a certain segment of the populace are unable to sleep, the real story is why and how they ended up in that state in the first place. I really appreciated Huston's coming up with the context of how the issue developed, unlike Blindness, where Jose Saragamo fails to ever explain to the reader why 99% of the world went blind at a given moment. This approach forces the reader to suspend disbelief while reading the story, whereas Huston provides the reasons for how the world got to be in the shape that it's in in the story, which took the story to another level. Readers are also able to compare the ending of Sleepless to The Road to see where Huston ends up on his view as to what might happen next, which I found to be very interesting.

Huston's writing is sound and captures the tone of what the sleepless world would be like. Moreover, his ability to play out an action sequence is very good. Every move is played out as it should be and I could vividly see these scenes unfold in my mind as I read them. I also appreciated that the violence wasn't obscene or over the top as in similarly-themed novels. I don't think that authors need to shock the reader to give the impression that times are tough in the world where the story takes place.

I've never read Huston before, but I'm glad that I was given this book as a first read so that I could give him a try. I will definitely try some of Huston's other books, especially those from his earlier series to see how far he has come as an author. (less)

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Jun 19, 2010 Lilla Smee rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This novel has totally restored my faith in good writing (sorry Mira Grant – as the last book I read, your novel Feed has paled into insignificance next to this!)

I struggled with Sleepless at first - and for my lazy reading, I must sincerely apologies to Huston. The true quality of this novel was lost on me in those first chapters. The book is mesmerizing. Gripping. Set in a world that is struggling to cope with the global pandemic of SLP – Sleepless – a fatal disease that renders the sufferer l...more

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Feb 16, 2010 Russell Allison rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: best-of-2010

Wow, what a fantastic book. I've liked/loved everything Charlie Huston has written so far, and this is easily my favorite stand alone novel by him. Setting is very near future Greater Los Angeles, in the midst of a gradual breakdown of all society. Over and over again, I was struck by the insights Huston offers in how people would handle the end of the world coming by inches instead of all at once. As with the Caught Stealing and Joe Pitt books, the characterization in this book is awesome and I...more

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Mar 11, 2011 Debra rated it 4 of 5 stars

Sleepless, a well-crafted story told well, presents a realistic dystopian LA landscape ravaged by a worldwide plague of sleeplessness—a terminal disease that infects indiscriminately (young, old, rich, poor). The city teeters on the edge of chaos, yet somehow also maintains an indulgent elite with enough toys and money to distract it from the surrounding devastation. And everyone, whether or not privileged, must carry on. For me, Huston’s details hit the mark almost every time, from his descript...more

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Feb 08, 2010 Spuddie rated it 5 of 5 stars

I'm not sure how to describe or even classify this book. Part mystery, part sci-fi/fantasy, part dystopian fiction, Sleepless is set in the present, but with an alternative near-past. There is a voracious new plague out there, but it won't kill you outright. It involves a brain prion related loosely to 'mad cow disease' and something called FFI--Fatal Familial Insomnia, which oddly enough I'd just been reading about a few weeks before.

Basically, you get the prion, it starts eating holes in your...more I'm not sure how to describe or even classify this book. Part mystery, part sci-fi/fantasy, part dystopian fiction, Sleepless is set in the present, but with an alternative near-past. There is a voracious new plague out there, but it won't kill you outright. It involves a brain prion related loosely to 'mad cow disease' and something called FFI--Fatal Familial Insomnia, which oddly enough I'd just been reading about a few weeks before.

Basically, you get the prion, it starts eating holes in your brain and soon you simply cannot sleep. At all. Ever. Until you die a while down the road, having suffered horrible hallucinations, delusions, memory lapses, the whole gamut of what happens with sleep deprivation. This is the story of two people--Parker, a Los Angeles policeman whose wife Rose is sleepless, and who fears his infant daughter may also be infected, and Jasper, an ex-military mercenary of some type who does 'odd jobs' for high-paying clients--mostly procuring difficult to come by things.

Parker, an undercover cop posing as a drug dealer to try to get close to the person who is selling black market DR33M3R, the drug that combats the sleepless prion, stumbles on a gory mass murder at a 'gold farming operation' (which is related to the video gaming industry and will take too long to explain here) and walks off with a computer hard drive that Jasper's employer wants. Their paths are bound to intersect and they do, eventually, but not ultimately in ways you would expect.

This is a bleak and hopeless scenario as Huston's books usually are, but with a kernel of hope and a whiff of the possibility of goodness, or at least survival. Picture a country near martial law, with the basics we have come to rely on in short supply, gangs of insane sleepless, zomboid people roaming the streets, with shortages and chaos becoming the norm. Imagine a time when it's no longer quite so easy to 'do the right thing' because doing the wrong thing is the only way to survive. Imagine a world where it is infinitely more appealing to immerse yourself in an online game because the real world no longer makes sense.

There are times when the book is confusing, as it switches back and forth between Jasper and Parker's point of view, and sometimes it isn't clear who's who until a few paragraphs in. There are also things that might be confusing to those who aren't acquainted with MMORPG games. I have noticed a pattern with my reaction to every book of Huston's I've read: first I start devouring it, mid-book I want to throw it against the wall, and by the end, he's got me thinking, deeply thinking, and I end up reflecting on things for a good while to come. This book was no exception. It's not a book to be 'enjoyed' but it is another great story. (less)

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About Charlie Huston

Charlie Huston is an American author of Noircrime fiction. However, according to a recent interview with Paradigm, he prefers to be classified as a writer of Pulp, due to how he writes.

More about Charlie Huston...

Books by Charlie Huston

The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death

Half the Blood of Brooklyn (Joe Pitt, #3)

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Quotes from Sleepless

“Things are as bad as you fear they are. People are as bad as you think they are. The Universe does not care.” — 16 people liked it

“Once we understand how they think, we can predict their behaviour. And once we predict it well, we can manipulate it. That is diplomacy.” — 9 people liked it

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