Paul Tremblay’s Survivor Song was recognized by Suspense Magazine and National Public Radio as one of the Best Books of 2020, in keeping with a pattern that has seen all of his releases of the past few years hit major year-end “best of“ lists. William Morrow’s re-issue of THE LITTLE SLEEP, the author’s first novel, provides the Tremblay fandom—and all readers who appreciate smart, literary suspense—the opportunity to re-experience Paul Tremblay's wickedly entertaining debut novel, featuring narcoleptic detective Mark Genevich.

The Little Sleep is Paul Tremblay's nod to Raymond Chandler starring a PI who nods off. Mark Genevich is a South Boston private detective who happens to have a severe form of narcolepsy, which includes hypnagogic hallucinations, like waking dreams. Unsurprisingly, his practice is not exactly booming.

Then one day the daughter of an ambitious district attorney and a contestant on the reality talent show American Star named Jennifer Times comes to him for help--or does she? A man has stolen her fingers, she claims, and she'd like Genevich to get them back. When the PI wakes up from what must surely be a hallucination, the only evidence that his client may have been real is a manila envelope on his desk. Inside are revealing photos of Jennifer. Is Genevich dealing with a blackmailer or an exhibitionist? And where is the mysterious young lady, who hopefully still has her fingers attached?

The detective has no choice but to plunge into what proves to be a bad dream of a case, with twists and turns even his subconscious could not anticipate. Chloroforming the hardboiled crime genre then shaking it awake and spinning it around, Paul Tremblay delivers a wholly original, wildly imaginative, gleefully entertaining noir mystery--guaranteed to keep you up all night, even if Mark Genevich won't be joining you.

PAUL TREMBLAY has won the Bram Stoker, British Fantasy, and Massachusetts Book awards and is the author of Growing Things, The Cabin at the End of the World, Disappearance at Devil's Rock, A Head Full of Ghosts, and the crime novels The Little Sleep and No Sleep Till Wonderland. His essays and short fiction have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Entertainment Weekly online, and numerous year's-best anthologies. He has a master's degree in mathematics and lives outside Boston with his family.

Ex-mob enforcer-turned-private investigator Isaiah Coleridge pits himself against a rich and powerful foe when he digs into a possible murder and a sketchy real-estate deal worth billions.

Ex-majordomo and bodyguard to an industrial tycoon-cum-U.S. senator, Badja Adeyemi is in hiding and shortly on his way to either a jail cell or a grave, depending on who finds him first. In his final days as a free man, he hires Isaiah Coleridge to tie up a loose end: the suspicious death of his nephew four years earlier. At the time police declared it an accident, and Adeyemi isn't sure it wasn't, but one final look may bring his sister peace. So it is that Coleridge and his investigative partner, Lionel Robard, find themselves in the upper reaches of New York State, in a tiny town that is home to outsized secrets and an unnerving cabal of locals who are protecting them. At the epicenter of it all is the site of a stalled supercollider project, an immense subterranean construction that may have an even deeper, more insidious purpose...

LAIRD BARRON spent his early years in Alaska. He is the author of several books, including The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All, Swift to Chase, and Worse Angels. His work has also appeared in many magazines and anthologies. Barron currently resides in the Rondout Valley writing stories about the evil that men do.

Paul Tremblay in conversation with Laird Barron