The iconoclastic Charlie Huston is using quotations marks?Yep, that must have been a pig that just flew past the window.

But if Huston has yielded to convention, it's done nothing to blunt the raw power of "Sleepless", a savage novel told with grace, style and sophistication, making it clear that Hank Thompson and Joe Pitt and "Shotgun Rules" and "The Mystic Art of Erasing All Signs of Death" were merely artist's sketches, simply practice in refining the brushstrokes and darkening the pallet for this, Huston's Stygian masterpiece.

It is the summer of 2010, and the world is in a pandemic of terminal sleeplessness, "SLR", a devastating disease that robs the ability to sleep, creating a zombie-like existence short on dreams but long on nightmares - a hell on earth of martial law in the days leading up to full anarchy and certain apocalypse.Parker "Park" Haas is a Stanford PhD and an LAPD cop, a serious and seriously committed young man assigned deep undercover to crack the illicit trade of "DR33M3R", the drug that won't cure SLR, but will ease the suffering of those condemned to an agonizing death of wakefulness.

Park's wife has contracted the disease, while the health of their infant daughter is unknown.Meanwhile, Jasper, an aging but more-than-capable assassin, embarks on a mission to recover a stolen disk drive from the diabolically mysterious head of a ruthless paramilitary contractor.As LA sinks further into chaos, reality shifts from concrete and steel to avatars and binary bits, virtual web artifacts take on value greater than their material world counterparts, and team of the sleepless flock to computer screens in the online game "Chasm Tide".

As day and night blend and lose meaning, these strung out souls create in-game persona's that will live and continue to play long after their corporeal identities have died and been forgotten.Across this tormented landscape that is both war torn and addictively electronic, Park's Quixote-like quest is aimed as much at repairing the broken world as it is busting the bad guys and rescuing his wife and child.

Comparisons will likely be drawn to William Gibson's "Neuromancer" or "Idoru", and to Ridley Scott's sci-fi classic "Blade Runner".

But "Sleepless" is mostly what McCarthy's highly acclaimed "The Road" should have been.Both revel in stylistic prose that leaves deep canyons between them and the common and overdone post-apocalype novel, both are dark, both hopelessly bleak, both tip the balance between pride in and disdain for the human spirit closer to the latter.Yet Huston's "Sleepless" is more complex, more insightful, a journey into American culture that sees the wafer-thin barrier separating that $5-buck Starbuck's Double Latte from mass starvation.

If Van Gough were a writer, instead of a tortured canvass the result would look a lot like this.

"Sleepless" is a staggering example of American fiction that redefines "noir", succeeding in combining science fiction, crime, and suspense with a thoughtful and intelligent dissection of 21st Century America.With each new effort, Charlie Huston moves further ahead of a growing pack of talented and exciting new writers contemporary crime fiction.

Read it before it becomes a classic.