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The Evil Sleep!"The Evil Sleep!"
by Evan Hunter
Falcon Books, Inc., 1952
     The back cover reads: "The long nightmare...Ex-musician Ray Stone will do anything for a shot of heroin--steal, swindle, grovel, even forget at times that he's ever been a human being. But there's one thing he draws the line at--murder! Then one morning he wakes up to find a beautiful dead blonde stretched out besides him, a bullet wound in her chest. Ray's dope-ridden mind works feverishly as he tries to persuade himself he has not turned murderer, too, in his neverending quest for heroin. But the more he remembers, the more the terror grows. Out of a fog of painful recollections, slowly Ray begins to reconstruct his actions over the past twelve hours in the hope of ferreting out the truth behind the brutal murder. But those twelve hours have been lost in a world of drugged unreality, have become nothing more than a long, violent nightmare in which he cannot always determine what is real and what is only his own excited imaginings, now that he has been suddenly and torturously cut off from his regular supply of heroin. THE EVIL SLEEP! is not a nice novel--but is a vivid, revealing and disturbing novel--one that will stay with you long after you have put it down, a story that rips the lid off a world of sickness and despair that most people fortunately remain in ignorance of throughout their lifetimes. You will wander through a horrible dreamworld with discomfort and dismay--revulsion too, perhaps--but above all, with compassion, as the author brilliantly describes Ray Stone's struggle against illness in his fight to find out what, during his long nightmare, really did happen--in order to prove what did not!"
     The Evil Sleep! is basically an exploitation novel that is trying to be hardboiled. Hop head Ray Stone spends his time split between trying to find his next hit and trying the find the murderer of a woman he just met. The logic seems a bit strained, but it's not a piece of work if you're just in it for the ride. As with all great exploitation works, it's enticesments and titillation are there just to teach, or so they say. All the sin in the world is fine as long as the guilty gets their comeuppance in the end. This is the one element that keeps it from being a true noir/hardboiled classic like a novel from Jim Thompson or maybe a Mickey Spillane. Still, The Evil Sleep! has some great cover art going for it and back cover blurb that hits all the right points when it comes to lurid literature.




 
 

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