October 5, 2009
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.
Starred review from January 1, 2010
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.
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March 29, 2010
Huston's brilliant mixture of sci-fi and noir crime, in dialogue with and arguably improving on such past dystopian visions as the film Blade Runner
and William Gibson's Neuromancer
, features Los Angeles in the throes of a bizarre epidemic that renders the infected sleepless and bound for eventual death, and two narrators: young undercover LAPD cop and family man Parker “Park” Haas and the aging but amazingly resourceful mercenary known as Jasper. The use of dual readers—Mark Bramhall and Ray Porter, as Jasper and Park respectively—helps to identify the points of view. For the cop, a former Stanford professor struggling to care for his family and do his job, Porter employs an intelligent voice tinged by bitterness and anxiety. But it's Bramhall who's given the plum assignment: Jasper is cool, cynical, dryly humorous, and always in control, even when faced with overwhelming odds. He's an actor's dream, and Bramhall's dry, bemused, and at times darkly humorous delivery is stunning. A Ballantine hardcover (Reviews, Oct. 5).