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A review by xterminal
Sleepless by Charlie Huston
4.0
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. ****
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. ****