I’m glad that I was able to finish Charlie Huston’s Sleepless, but goddamn did it take a while to do so. Throughout the first half of the book, it was like I had to do stretches and splash some fucking water on my face and other shit to psyche myself before picking it up. This is a major shift for Huston because usually dude’s prose is so tight and stream-lined that you just free-fall through the book. He’s long been the smoothest read in crime fiction, all action and dialogue served up hot and nasty as fuck. This time out though dude is one-fucking-eightying like a madman and that’s cool and all, but I don’t know if many of his readers are gonna be willing to take the turn with him.
The year is 2010 and a plague of sleeplessness has infected ten percent of the population. The Afronzo-New Day corporation has developed a drug that gives the infected some relief, but it’s in short supply. Officer Parker Haas spends his days undercover as a drug dealer in what few affluent neighborhoods of L.A. are left, looking to make a bust on black market “Dreamer,” his nights at home with his infected, increasingly erratic wife and their baby daughter. Then Park finds his hook-up murdered, a travel drive with information connecting the Afronzo family to illegal sales of Dreamer on it, which brings him on the radar of the man hired to get the travel drive back: the fearsome mercenary only known as Jasper.
If that sounds like a cool fucking story, that’s because it very much is. Thing is, the book is just fucking packed with exposition to the point where the story often feels totally inert. And there’s a ton of cool shit in said exposition, no doubt about it. Huston has this complex world down cold, and his ideas for a realistic breakdown of Los Angeles and the world at large are fucking brilliant and often fascinating. But good lord can reading all that shit be a fucking slog. I mean, the “vampyre” world of the Huston’s Joe Pitt books is very involved and complicated but I never felt bored or over-burdened reading about that universe’s intricacies.
The prose style is also vastly different from what one might expect from Huston as well. The book switches from three different perspectives throughout: first-person Jasper, third-person Park, and entries from Park’s journal. That’s all well and good, but all three are, to risk sounding like a total fucking philistine, awful “wordy.” Huston actually offers an explanation for the style in the novel’s final chapter, but still. Huston fans should not expect the Cormac-McCarthy-minus-the-endless-fucking-landscape-descriptions-and-archaic-terms style of his other novels.
But like I alluded (big word for a philistine, ennit?) to up top, the second half of the book is really strong. The story finally kicks in and shit starts to go down, the bigger picture starts becoming clear and we’re finally cooking. As ever, Huston’s action scenes are unbeatable, and Jasper’s a fucking combat machine, able to assess any situation in seconds then bring down his fucking wrath in an eye blink. Also, the ending is very powerful shit – sad and despairing but with the smallest ray of hope.
If you’ve never read a Huston novel before, this is probably the last place you should start. Instead, crack open Caught Stealing and then do the rest of the Hank Thompson trilogy (Six Bad Things, A Dangerous Man), the three of which make up one of the greatest stories in the history of crime fiction – no bullshit. This shit is strictly for hardcore Huston fans looking to see what else he’s capable of or sci-fi fans whose speed is along the lines of William Gibson or Philip K. Dick (which, admittedly, ain’t the Nerd’s speed in the slightest). I mean, good it is, but it easy it sure as shit ain’t.
I agree that the book is difficult to absorb at first due to the point of view changes and the alien nature of the setting, but the effort in my mind was worth it. Park and Jasper are the antithesis of each other when you consider their methods… a collision that is reached in Park’s house. I felt a satisfaction in the ending because of the juxtaposition of roles.
I have not read any of his other novels, so I am unaware of the change in style, but I can tell you that the psychological aspects reminded me of Hawthorne (in theory). Excellent novel, thought-provoking… science fiction at its best.