Sleepaway

A haunting debut novel from celebrated poet Kevin Prufer.

It’s 1984, and the invisible mists are falling, mists that cause people to slip into dreamless slumber--sleeps from which most, but not all, awaken. Those who do wake live in fear of the next mist, and the next, each a little longer and more dangerous than the last.

Alternating between the perspectives of a kleptomaniac waitress named Cora and her twelve-year-old friend Glass, Sleepaway depicts a small-town America turned alarming. This is a place where loved ones are lost to a state between life and death; where denial, delusion, and desperation take hold of those remaining; where dealers of the antisleep drug Eight Track disappear into shadows, and a murderous wannabe kingpin hunts for victims.

As civilization is shaved away one sleep storm at a time, people struggle to go on, making and losing allies and discovering new strengths and weaknesses. Cora sets out on an ill-fated road trip hoping to reclaim her sister’s love, only to discover a more powerful bond than blood. Glass, having lost his only parent to one of the first mists, searches for a stability he has never had and may never achieve. All the while, buildings rise outside town to cope with the mounting number of sleepers. Some see them as hospitals, others as repositories, and yet soon the air around them fills with ash.

An allegory for post-pandemic America, Sleepaway grapples with questions concerning friendship, race, and family amid the horror of inexplicable, arbitrary annihilation.

Kevin Prufer is the author of several books of poetry, including The Fears, The Art of Fiction, How He Loved Them, Churches, In a Beautiful Country, and National Anthem. He is a professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston and the low-residency MFA at Lesley University. Prufer has also edited several volumes of poetry and, with Wayne Miller and Martin Rock, curates the Unsung Masters Series, a book series devoted to bringing the work of great but little-known authors to new generations of readers.