Kept me awake!

No Sleep Till Wonderland, Paul Tremblay’s follow up to The Little Sleep, definitely improved upon the first. Once again, we follow our narcoleptic narrator — P.I. Mark Genevich — as he stumbles around Boston, trying to solve a crime.

“I swoon into a standing eight count. Goddamn, I actually feel my consciousness want to detach and hide like a turtle retreating into a hopelessly soft shell that won’t save anyone.”

In this novel, Mark has already pretty much blown through any goodwill that the public extended him after solving the case in the first book. He took on too much too fast, and now he’s back to scrambling to pay rent. His mother (who, sadly, does not actually appear in this novel) has put a restriction on his lease from her — he has to attend group therapy in order to continue living in her building. At group therapy, he meets a guy named Gus, goes out drinking (bad idea, Mark) and gets involved in a stalker case — that turns deadly!

I found this book a bit more…coherent? Maybe because our narrator — while still hallucinating, falling asleep and occasionally experiencing cataplexy at really bad moments — has a slightly better grip on reality this go round. Which really made things easier to follow. This is a bit more interesting, too. I’m hoping the cop that Tremblay introduced might stick around for a bit as a foil — he was pretty entertaining.