Charlie Huston: Sleepless

Everything that I can remember of myself in this story about your mother and father is blurred by the gravity of that moment. Time bent around the mass of you when I realized that I would not leave you with Chizu, that I could not complete my work until I had ensured that you would be able to start your own. And I cannot say any longer if the person I have described here is me as I truly was, the killer of men and women and children, or a warped reflection of that man, his true brutality obscured by a lens of distortion.

A native speaker of your parents’ language, and a deft student of my own, you will have to decide if I have bared all or, as warned against by your grandfather, exposed myself through lies.

For Omaha, the story you ask most often to hear,written in my own hand, JasperGrass Valley, November 13, 2022

Some debts to source material are more profound than others.

To say that I would have been unable to write this book if I had not first read D. T. Max’s The Family That Couldn’t Sleep is considerably more than an understatement. A book of exhaustive research that plumbs the histories of both fatal familial insomnia and the prion itself, Max’s book is everything that mine is not. Which is to say that it is a book of fact and science. Footnoted and well-referenced, it is a book that one can learn from. And the many mistakes, misunderstandings, and oversights regarding FFI and prions that can be found in Sleepless should be understood as a product of my own ignorance, laziness, and/or liberties taken with reality in the desire to tell an entertaining story.

This is also a book that I would not have written without virtually unlimited access to the Internet. My morning cruises through the Web; clipping, pasting, and archiving, provided a great deal of the primary and incidental details that helped flesh out the world of Sleepless. Some of the sites to which I am most indebted for making me aware, or setting me on the trail, of any number of oddities, technological trends, obscure current events, artworks, and ephemera are Dinosaurs and Robots, warrenellis.com, boingboing.net, beyond the beyond, NewScientist, nytimes.com, and many others.

Source material and references for many of the ideas, settings, and bits of technology found in this book can be found on my own website, www.pulpnoir.com, in the Sleepless category.

CHARLIE HUSTON is the author of the Henry Thompson trilogy, the Joe Pitt casebooks, and the bestsellers The Shotgun Rule and The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death. He lives with his family in Los Angeles.

Sleepless is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.