Marilynliz's Journal

I had written this review for Talk About Sleep a few months back. For various reasons it hasn't been published in the newsletter yet, but the boards are slow so I thought I would pre-view my book review here. 

Released March 2009

Reviewed by MarilynLiz

Mark blinked and she was gone. Or was she really ever there?  An American Star contestant who had her fingers stolen? Ok, probably not. But someone had been there. There was a manila envelope with strange photos on his desk and a new set of nonsense words written on the note pad. Someone had hired him to do something. First he has to clear the muck from his brain and figure out who and what. So begins Paul Tremblay’s first novel, The Little Sleep.  Mark Genevich, a Boston PI, is the first PWN I met after getting diagnosed last January.  Mark is a very unlikely hero. He smokes too much, He drinks too much. His humor can be grim and self-deprecating. Yet through Mark, Tremblay presents the experience of living with narcolepsy with compelling and compassionate style. Narcolepsy is not just a gimmick to give the story line a few twists.  The reader is seductively immersed in the experience of narcolepsy through intricately articulated prose throughout this compelling, neo-noir style detective novel.The immersion experienced reminded me of reading “The English Patient” by Michael Ondaatje.  In “The Little Sleep”, as in “The English Patient”, the reader shares with the narrator cognitive and consciousness shifts that result in moments of disorientation- Reviewing and questioning whether an event was a real external event, a hallucination, a dream, or a REMing mind’s creative blending of all three. Mark explains the cognitive fog and confusion which result from his little sleeps, “Every time I sleep -- doesn't matter how long I'm out -- puts more unconscious space between myself and the events I experience," he reflects, "because every time I wake up it's a new day. Those fraudulent extra days, weeks, years add up. So while my everyday time shrinks, it also gets longer. I'm Billy Pilgrim and Rip Van Winkle at the same time." From the publisher, “(Mark) suffers from the most severe symptoms, including hallucinations that wreak havoc for a guy who depends on real-life clues to make his living”..There are mishaps, and serious fumbles along the way.  He is helped and hindered by an array of sometime comically cliché and sometimes richly complicated characters. Mark’s relates a long-recurrent dream about working with his dad cleaning dog poo out of the yard; his dad identifying the specific neighborhood dog who produced of each pile. In this detective novel, Mark ultimately, through pure tenacity and a motivated by a belief in for truth and justice, succeeds in sorting through years of “poo” and naming names to solve the crime.In a rare moment of when he gives into self-pity, Mark laments, “I remember what it was like. (before narcolepsy)  I was awake, always awake. I didn’t miss anything.  I could read books for more then a few pages at a time. I didn’t smoke. I watched movies from start to finishing a real goddamn movie theatre…I stayed up late on purpose. Woke up and went to sleep when I wanted. Sleep was my pet, something I controlled, scheduled took for walks…Now there is only me and everything is on the periphery, just slightly out of reach or out of touch or out of time”… I was deeply touched by the section. I paused in my reading and thought about all the people who would read the book and perhaps, along with enjoying an interesting, page-turner of a detective novel, also gain a little deeper understanding of the experience of narcolepsy. I asked the author about how he came to write The Little Sleep.  “A few years back, I had this image of a woman coming into a PI's office and showing off her hand: she'd had her fingers stolen and replaced with someone else's digits. Initially, I planned on writing a strange, anything-goes, near-future science fiction/horror/noir mix. I wrote the first chapter, but didn't get anywhere with it. I put it away for almost a year until I stumbled upon narcolepsy while doing online research into something completely unrelated. When I read about the horrible affliction that is narcolepsy, that put-away first chapter suddenly made sense to me. I have no personal experience with narcolepsy, but during the mid-to-late 90s I actually suffered from a sleep disorder: sleep apnea. There was a solid two-to-three year stretch when I never really got a good night's sleep because I would stop breathing, and then would wake up, gasping for breath. Not fun. My daytime symptoms weren't nearly as disruptive or incapacitating as what Mark Genevich experiences, but I do remember the crushing fatigue, and the frightening occasions when I briefly nodded out while driving. Thankfully, I never injured myself or others, but my condition was serious enough that in January of 1998 I had surgery: uvuloplasty, which is the removal of the tonsils and uvula--that's right, I don't have that punching bag in the back of my throat anymore--and I also had my deviated septum fixed as well. While I don't recommend having the surgery a month before getting married, like I did, the surgery was a success.”  Paul G. Tremblay, a two-time nominee of the Bram Stoker Award, has sold over fifty short stories to markets such as Razor Magazine, CHIZINE, Weird Tales, Last Pentacle of the Sun: Writings in Support of the West Memphis Three, and Horror: The Year's Best 2007.He is the author of the short speculative fiction collection Compositions for the Young and Old and the hard-boiled/dark fantasy novella City Pier: Above and Below. He served as fiction editor of CHIZINE and as co-editor of Fantasy Magazine, and was also the co-editor (with Sean Wallace) of the Fantasy and Bandersnatch anthologies. The sequil to “The Little Sleep”, “No Sleep till Wonderland” has been accepted by the publisher and is scheduled for released in 2010.