Finished the last page of Charlie Huston's latest book Sleepless, which I enjoyed tremendously. Sleepless is an apocalypse-in-progress book set in LA of 2010.
The culprit behind humanity's imminent destruction is a widespread outbreak of a 100% fatal, prion based disease (mad cow 2.0). The kicker to it all is that it takes up to a year to kill you, and it's biggest symptom is that those afflicted can't fall asleep. Ever. For anyone who's suffered insomnia like I have, it sounds like a truly wretched way to go. Naturally, the world is in shambles - total social and economic meltdown. Huston does a great job portraying LA spiralling into the toilet (which neatly takes my mind off of rainy Seattle in the wintertime)
Huston, btw is a really fantastic author - one of my new favorites. He's cranked out 10 books in about 6 years.
There's the Hank Thompson trilogy: hapless NYC East Village bartender agrees to look after his neighbor's cat while neighbor is out of town. Hijinks immediately ensue. You can read the Hank Thompson trilogy as a free set of ebooks. First one is found here.
Then there's the Joe Pitt Case Files - vampire detective noir (and as my coworker Matt always likes to say "Of course it's a noir. It's a vampire book!") set in the NYC present day. The first book "Already Dead" is a free Kindle book too! You can grab that here.
A couple stand alones as well: "The Shotgun Rule" and "The Mystical Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death", which are each a lot different from his previous books.
Note: I just realized that most of the links are to Kindle based books. This isn't a clever way to drive business to the Kindle - it's just how I read my books these days. Go buy the books from a different source in a different format if you wanna. But hey, if you're looking for free shit to read, I just steered you to 4 different books sucka!
Where I feel the Joe Pitt and the Hank Thompson books are pretty similar, The Shotgun Rule, Mystical Arts.., and Sleepless all have a different feel to them. I really enjoy them all, and am really curious to see what Huston will come out with next. Check him out if you're into it. I hope you won't be disappointed.
Saturday, January 30, 2010
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