"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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