Sleepless: A Novel

by Charlie Huston Narrated by Ray Porter, Mark Bramhall

Overview

Every day, more and more people have been found to have contracted the illness. It reveals itself gradually, inhibiting sleep, eating away at one's mind, birthing panic and confusion, until the final few months before death known as the suffering. The epidemic has swept the globe, and now infects one in ten people.

Straight-arrow cop Parker T. Haas is working undercover as a dealer in the black-market trade of Dreamer, the only known drug that offers relief for the sleepless. The drug is in small supply and impossibly high demand, and in his darker moments, Park admits to himself that his interest in it goes beyond the professional. His own wife, Rose, has been sleepless for months, and they haven't yet found the courage to find out if their infant daughter is also sick. Though the stress at work and at home are weighing on him, Park presses on, feeling like he's on the cusp of learning something crucial about the disease.

Editorial Reviews

In Charlie Huston's Caught Stealing, a burned out bartender named Hank Thompson is enlisted to take care of a sketchy neighbor's cat. Fifty pages in, a redheaded kid in a disco suit is ripping out staples from Hank's healing side with a pair of needlenose pliers. All this arises out of a needless misunderstanding, but Hank's bad luck doesn't halt Huston from dousing more gas upon this high-octane fire. Within a hundred pages, Hank extracts a few street fighting moves from his foggy noggin and the violent kid is soon spurting up glorious streams of blood. And the kid is only the first in a reliable rivulet of oily thugs. Hank is well on his way to securing his status as a fugitive in a lonely place teeming at a hard boil, a frazzled gasket set to explode over two more books.

The Hank Thompson trilogy was wonderfully exuberant pulp, delivered with a momentum so breathless that single words within dialogue often ended with individual periods. These gritty digs were buttressed by Huston's quirky repetition (one page in Caught Stealing featured seventeen instances of the one-word paragraph "SPANG!" alternating against descriptive lines), certain topographical truths ("It was a typical day for New York pay phones."), and a protagonist who, quite frankly, whined a bit too much and had much of this brutal mayhem coming.

Huston followed the Hank Thompson trilogy with the Joe Pitt quintet, where rival Vampyre clans fought over strips of New York turf, and Huston maimed so many dogs along the way that it was something of a miracle that the ASPCA didn't call for a boycott of the author's work. The Pitt books, much like Abel Ferrara's underrated film TheAddiction, approached vampirism as an unshakeable virus needlessly afflicting the marginalized. Huston saddled his adamantine antihero with a girlfriend named Evie, a late-stage AIDS patient who began to pursue mysticism. These schematic thematics indicated that Huston wasn't just some contemporary answer to Sydney Horler, and his growing ambitions were confirmed with his second stand-alone novel, The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death (just nominated for an Edgar award), an entertaining blue-collar squint inside crime-scene cleanup units that skillfully balanced a love story and an unusual subplot involving almonds.

But Huston's eleventh novel has stretched these narrative aspirations across a canvas that suggests another China Mieville in the making. Where William Gibson, struggling against the tentacles of too many tech developments swaddling the present, has taken to anchoring his novels in the very recent past, Huston has the reverse in mind. He's boldly outlined a dystopian Los Angeles six months from now, where 10% of the population suffers from SLP, an infectious offshoot of fatal familial insomnia that "could not be more effective if it entered the body wearing a balaclava and a vest packed with C-4.

The sleepless are doomed to an early mortality, but this doesn't stop sleazy Hollywood producers from recruiting them as extras. Nor does this hinder predatory industries, both on and off the Dow Jones grid, from tempting this withering demographic with shiny new pharmaceuticals. In one of Huston's sly satirical jabs at the overstimulated life, the sleepless flock to an addictive multiplayer online game called Chasm Tide, where virtual economies bloom as real currencies flounder. This is not an entirely unreasonable premise, considering the many companies that have risen to prominence courtesy of Second Life's Linden dollars. (In fact, Huston cleverly marries this to past associations by including the house where Howard Hughes crashed the XF-11, carefully noting the address "805 North Linden Drive.") Indeed, one of the novel's unexpected pleasures is observing Huston trying to squirm his considerable storehouse of Boing Boing-inspired information into his knack for hard-knock life.

While Huston's nightmarish universe is plagued by food shortages and a relentless military presence, taco trucks and crude ingenuity still flourish. The world may be snagged inside the strain of a pernicious pandemic, but Huston wisely depicts a climate desperately recycling its cultural resources, converting the apparently antediluvian into new representations. Major league baseball has been canceled and parents are forced to sign waivers "relieving the schools of all liability for any harm that might befall their children from morning to afternoon bell," but America still longs for its cultural narcotics. Figures wander the streets dressed in Raiders sports jerseys and teenagers dress up as faded pop icons. At one point, Park even observes a boy in an Atari T-shirt speaking into a digital recorder, "Can't tell if it's meant as camp or homage."

Huston's elaborate setup is a club sandwich stacked together from three perspectives: a third-person narrative involving an LAPD narcotics agent named Parker "Park" Haas (a fitting name for a stalled soul sauntering through a car-centric City of Angels and a sly shorthand reference to Donald E. Westlake's famous criminal Parker), Park's journals, and a first-person account from Jasper, a ruthless sixty-year-old freelance badass who lives in an immaculate apartment populated by grisly taxidermy art. Both Park and Jasper are on the lookout for a thumb drive -- a keychain-sized data container -- left at a murder scene, approaching their respective duties from differing objectives. Park's mind is more on his family than the drugs he must deal and the perps he must track. His wife, Rose, has caught SLP and, like many Chasm Tiders, spends much of her time trying to beat the Clockwork Labyrinth. Park pops Dexedrine spansules in solidarity, with the results "twist[ing] the hands from Park's internal clock."  He holds onto an old hand-spring watch given to him by his late father, because "even in the apocalypse, someone should know the correct time."

Jasper, by contrast, is more mercenary-minded, but in denial about his emotions. He may have the fortitude to defy savage torturers with soldering irons as effectively as James Bond in Casino Royale, but, in recalling a clear act of vengeance, he claims that he was "simply behaving in a prudent and professional manner." Like many unreliable narrators, Jasper insists that he has a photographic memory. But as evidenced by his association with questionable conceptual art -- not just the dead animals in his apartment, but an anecdote involving an abstract plywood installation banged up by a motorcycle gang using its skidding tires as brushes -- his is not a mind well set up to comprehend the real.

If this setup beckons comparisons to Phillip K. Dick banging away at his million-word journal from dusk to dawn or the dual perspectives at play in Dick's A Scanner Darkly, it's no accident. The novel's final revelation suggests that what we're reading may be colored by an obsessive faith, one that transcends the limits of the barbaric world being depicted. The book's many paeans to fatherhood make Sleepless more than a sprawling cyberpunk epic. It offers a persuasive case that involuted emotional issues might be unraveled through genre fiction's feral liberties, perhaps more effectively than literary masterpieces. --Edward Champion

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.)

Kirkus Reviews

Thirty million Americans are sleepless, and it's killing them. What began modestly and unobtrusively is now a pandemic-ten percent of the world's population can't sleep. Ever. Zombie-like, the sleepless roam nocturnal streets, desperate to fill endless hours, while their bodies-and minds-disintegrate. This disease is a death sentence, usually within a year. While there's no known cure, symptoms can be alleviated, but only by an increasingly hard-to-get drug named Dreamer. Parker Haas, a young police officer, seems immune to the disease, but his wife Rose is dying of it. Months ago, she passed the stage where she could care for their child in the loving way she used to. Instead, she spends her diminishing time obsessively immersed in Chasm Tide, a complex doomsday video game. On the street one day, Park learns of a possible source for Dreamer, which has become central to a flourishing black market. Then he discovers a conspiracy to artificially control the Dreamer supply in order to protect an exorbitant profit margin. The world may in fact be coming to an end as so many around him insist, but Park keeps it simple. He has never seen any path but the one straight ahead, and the imperative remains what it always was. If there's a conspiracy, his job is to investigate it. If a perpetrator, no matter how powerful, can be identified, his job is to jail the guy. A good cop does what a good cop has to do. For Park, the rest is abstraction. A writer as skilled as Huston (The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death, 2009, etc.) can make an apocalyptic story terrifyingly plausible. Readers prone to depression should approach with care. Agent: Simon Lipskar/Writers House

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169895292
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	01/12/2010
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One


park watched the homeless man weave in and out of the gridlocked midnight traffic on La Cienega, his eyes fixed on the bright orange AM/FM receiver dangling from the man's neck on a black nylon lanyard. The same shade orange the SL response teams wore when they cleared a house. He closed his eyes, remembering the time an SLRT showed up on his street at the brown and green house three doors down. The sound of the saw coming from the garage, the pitch rising when it hit bone.

Techno-accented static opened his eyes. The homeless man was next to his window, dancing from foot to foot, neck held at an unmistakable stiff angle, flashing a hand-lettered sign on a square of smudged whiteboard:

blessings!!!

Park looked at the man's neck.

The people in the cars around him had noticed it as well; several rolled up their windows despite the ban on air-conditioning.

Park opened his ashtray, scooped out a handful of change, and was offering it to the wild-eyed sleepless when the human bomb detonated several blocks away and the explosion thrummed the glass of his windshield, ruffling the hairs on his arms with a rush of air hotter than the night.

He flinched, the change falling from his hand, scattering on the asphalt, the tinkle of it hitting and rolling in every direction, lost in the echoes bouncing off the faces of the buildings lining the avenue, the alarms set off when windows were shattered and parked cars blown onto their sides.

By the time the coins had stopped rolling and the homeless man had gotten down on his hands and knees to scrabble for his scattered handout, Park was reaching under his seat for his weapon.

The Walther PPS was in a holster held to the bottom of the driver's seat by a large patch of Velcro. Clean, oiled, and loaded, with the chamber empty. He didn't need to check, having done so before he left the house. He took it from its holster and dropped it in the side pocket of his cargo pants. It was unlikely any of his customers would be this far west, but it would be typical of the universe to send one just now to see him with a sidearm clipped to his waist.

Climbing from the car, he closed and locked the door, secure in the knowledge that the traffic jam would not be breaking up before sunrise. He was working his way through the cars, all but a very few of them sealed tight now, their occupants rigid and sweating inside, when the street was plunged into sudden darkness.

He stopped, touched his weapon to be sure of it, and thought about Rose and the baby, asking the frozen world to keep them safe if he should die here. But the darkness didn't invite any new attacks. Or if it did, they were yet to come. More likely it was an unscheduled rolling blackout.

He edged between the cars, watching a man in a sweat-twisted suit pounding the horn of his newly scarred Audi, raising similar protests from the cars around his. Or perhaps they were intended to drown out the screams coming from the flaming crater at the intersection.

Those flames were the brightest illumination on the street now, almost all the drivers having turned off their engines and headlights to conserve gas. He could feel them on his face already, the flames, baking the skin tight. And he remembered the cabin in Big Sur where he took Rose after they first knew about the baby, but before the diagnosis.

There had been a fireplace. And they'd sat before it until nearly dawn, using what had been meant as a weekend's supply of wood on their first night.

His face had felt like this then.

He tried to recall the name of the cabin they had stayed in. Bluebird? Bluebell? Blue Ridge? Blue something for sure, but blue what?

Blue Moon.

The name painted just above the door had been Blue Moon. With a little star-accented teal crescent that Rose had rolled her eyes at.

Are we supposed to think we're in fucking Connecticut, for Christ's sake?

He'd said something in response, some joke about not cursing in front of the baby, but before he could remember what it was he'd said, his foot slipped in a great deal of someone's blood, drawing him back to the pres?ent, and the flames here before him.

The wiper blades on a Hummer H3, one of the few vehicles with intact glass this close to the blast, were beating furiously, cleaner fluid spraying, smearing blood, batting what looked like a gnarled bit of scalp and ear back and forth across the windshield, while the young woman inside wiped vomit from her chin and screamed into a Bluetooth headset.

Looking at a man on the edge of the crater, his entire jawbone carried away by a piece of flying debris, Park only wondered now at the instinct that had made him take his weapon from the car rather than his first-aid kit.

zzz

it wasn't the first human bomb in Los Angeles. Just the first one north of Exposition and west of the I-5.

The sound of the detonation rolling across the L.A. basin and washing up against the hills had brought me out to my deck. One expects the occasional crack of gunfire coming from Hollywood on any given night, but the crump of high explosives in West Hollywood was a novelty. A sound inclined to make me ruminant, recalling, as it did, a pack of C-4 wired to the ignition of a VC colonel's black Citroen in Hanoi, as well as other moments of my youth.

Thus nostalgic, I came onto the deck in time to see a slab of the city, framed by Santa Monica, Venice, Western, and Sepulveda, wink into blackness. Looking immediately skyward, knowing from experience that my eyes would subtly adjust to the reduction in ground light, I watched the emergence of seldom seen constellations.

Under these usually veiled stars, the city burned.

Only a small bit of it, yes, but one of the more expensive bits. A circumstance that would no doubt have serious repercussions.

It's all well and good in the general course of things if Mad Swan Bloods and Eight Trey Gangster Crips want to plant claymore mines in Manchester Park, or for Avenues and Cyprus Park to start launching RPGs across Eagle Rock Boulevard, but suicide bombers less than a mile from the Beverly Center would not be tolerated.

Uncorking a second bottle of Clos des Papes 2005, I rested secure in the knowledge that the National Guard would be shock-trooping South Central and East L.A. at first light.

Nothing like a show of force to keep up the morale of the general citizenry in times of duress. The fact that the display would be utterly misdirected and only serve to brew greater discontent was beside the point. We had long passed the stage where the consequences of tactical armed response were weighed in advance. Anyone with the time and wherewithal to put a map on a wall and stick pins in it could see quite clearly what was happening.

I had such a map, and said wherewithal, and many pins.

If red pins are acts of violence committed by people traditionally profiled as potentially criminal perpetrated against those who have not been so profiled, and yellow pins are acts of violence perpetrated between peoples traditionally so profiled, and blue pins indicate acts of violence carried out by uniformed and/or badged members of the soldiering and law enforcement professions upon peoples so profiled, one can clearly see patterns of tightly clustered yellow pins, encircled by blue pins, concentrated to the far south, east, and north of the most prime Los Angeles real estate, which is, in turn, becoming pockmarked by random bursts of red pins.

It is, on such a map, the vastness of the territory devoted to yellow-on-yellow acts of violence and blue responses in relative proportion to the wee acreage dotted with red, that should give one pause.

It looked, upon little or no reflection, like the pustules of a disease spreading inexorably against the feeble resistance of a failed vaccine, carrying infection along the arteries of the city, advancing no matter how many times the medics raised the point of amputation up the ravaged limb.

That it was a symptom of a disease rather than the disease itself was an irony I never chuckled at. There being little or no humor to be found in the prospect of the end of the world.

But I did appreciate it. The irony, and the fact that the disease that was killing us ignored the classifications and borders that defined so clearly for so many who they should be killing and why.

The disease didn't care for distinctions of class, race, income, religion, sex, or age. The disease seemed only to care that your eyes remain open to witness it all. That what nightmares you had haunted only your waking hours. The disease considered us all equal and wished that we share the same fate. That we should bear witness as we chewed our own intestines, snapping at what gnawed from the inside.

It wished that we become sleepless.

I could sleep.

Choosing, that night, not to.

Choosing, instead, to pour another glass of overrated but still quite good Rhone into an admittedly inappropriate jelly jar, and to settle into an overdesigned Swedish sling chair to watch that small, expensive fragment of the city burn.

Herald, I knew, of worse.

7/7/10

today beenie said something about Hydo knowing "the guy." What's encouraging about this is that I didn't ask. Hydo called for a delivery and I went over to the farm to make the drop (100 15mg Dexedrine spansules). He asked if I wanted a Coke and I hung around long enough to scroll through my texts and map my next couple deliveries. Beenie was there, making a deal to sell some gold he'd farmed, but mostly just hanging out with the guys. Hydo passed around the dex to his guys and they all started speed rapping while they hacked up zombies and stuff. One of them (I think his name is Zhou, but I need to check my notes) started talking about his cousin going sleepless. The other guys all started telling their own sleepless stories. Beenie asked if I knew anyone. I said yes. They all talked some more, and the one guy (Zhou?) said he put an ad on Craigslist to trade a level 100 Necromantic Warlord for Dreamer to give his cousin, but the only response he got was from a scammer. That's when Beenie looked at Hydo and said, "Hydo, man, what about the guy?" Hydo was in the middle of an exchange in Chasm Tide. His front character was on his monitor in the Purple Grotto, getting ready to pass off the gold to a Darkling Heller as soon as one of the guys confirmed that the PayPal transfer had come through. But everyone stopped talking right after Beenie spoke. Just Hydo talking to the Darkling on his headset, telling him he'd throw in a Mace of Chaos for another twenty euro. He was acting like he hadn't heard what Beenie said. But he gave him a look. And Beenie started shutting down his MacBook and said he had to roll. I pocketed my phone and finished my Coke and said later.

Beenie was my first in with the farms. I met him at a party on Hillhurst. He knows a lot of people. They like him. If he says Hydo knows "the guy," it might be true.

In any case, I didn't say anything. I just walked out of the farm behind Beenie. We talked while he was unlocking his Trek and putting on his helmet and elbow and knee pads. He said he was looking for some opium. He has this thing for old Hollywood and read somewhere that Errol Flynn described smoking opium, "like having your soul massaged with mink gloves." Now he wants to try it. I told him I'd see what I could do. Then he pedaled north on Aviation, probably headed for Randy's Donuts.

I made a note to ask around about opium. Made another note to look over my list of Hydo's known associates.

Finished deliveries.

A suicide bomber on the way home.

I did what I could. Not much. I think I stopped a boy's bleeding long enough for him to get to the hospital. Who knows what happened to him there. Traffic got messed up for miles. Once the EMTs and paramedics showed up, I spent most of my time passing out water. A lady thanked me when I saw her fainting in her car and got her a bottle.

A witness said the bomber was a woman, a New America Jesus insurgent. He said he knew she was a NAJi because she screamed "something about Satan" before she blew herself up. He also said she was staggering like she was drunk. NAJis don't drink. A Guard told me that looking at the size of the crater she left, she was probably staggering under the weight of the bomb. He said that kind of blast was what they got in Iraq from car bombs. I said something about how at least he wasn't there anymore, and he asked me if I was "fucking joking."

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