The Little Sleep by Paul Tremblay

 

Found this in a book store a few months ago, and I'd read some Tremblay and enjoyed it--and the thought of a riff on Chandler kinda appealed, too. Alas, it turns out that Tremblay is much better when he's writing horror, which this is not. The choice to have a narcoleptic narrator is, er, tiresome; he never really seems to figure anything out, solutions just seem to land on him. Maybe that's not far from Chandler, but this is at best a pale shadow of that. The prose seemed almost lifeless, and the characters all seemed blurry and vague. If I didn't like Tremblay's more recent horror so well, this would just about put me off him.