Sleepwalk brings together an unlikely father-daughter connected via the same crime organization. It's got vivid, well-formed characters and situations that tweak reality just enough to shine a lens on our society and why some want to disconnect but get drawn together despite themselves.

As a mercenary living under many aliases in the near future America Will Bear lives off the grid with no stable home, no friends or families, and no long-term commitments. He spends most of his days on the road with his dog Flip doing odd jobs for shady businesses. One day, a young woman named Cammie called one of his many burner phones claiming to be his biological daughter. Half certain she's Al, Will must now find Cammie's whereabouts to discover the hidden truth that involves his employer, enemies, long-lost friends, and potential family in a world where no one can be trusted.

Sleepwalk is a character-driven and slow-paced novel. The book is told from Will's perspective and jumps back and forth between his memories and current events. I love how complex Dan Chaon made Will. There are many stops along the way that allow the main character Will to reckon with his past and determine which direction his future will take. At times Will is this seemingly unhinged henchman, and at times, Will shows his compassion even towards his targets. I didn't expect to connect so much to a 50-year-old assassin, but I actually did!

What a unique and original story! Highly recommend.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for sending a digital ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I will be thinking about this book for a long time. It has so many things that usually annoy me - we don't get a full picture or detailed world building, the ending doesn't really tie things up, and overall the tone is ... kind of meandering? But here, all of that works. And it swept me up and took me along and I would have read 300 more pages. There's not a great way, I don't think, to describe this book, so I'll just say, if you read it, just go with it and let it do its thing.

I'm fairly impressed, not going to lie. I enjoyed the humor and the grit packed in this one. Enjoy some sci-fi? Fast paced crime drama? Do you laugh at things you probably shouldn't? Pick this up and thank me later.

QUICK TAKE: I had zero expectations going into this one and had on idea it would take a sci-fi left turn in the back half, but i actually really enjoyed it. Great main character and the audio was really well done.

The humor of this threw me a loop, but never really took off for me. I think I've read too many thrillers this year to appreciate this.

This novel was mildly entertaining if not particularly memorable or unique. I have been much more impressed with other works by Chaon.

This novel gripped me from beginning to end. It's a mysterious rare talent that comes along once in a while where a writer picks the perfect pace to tell a story and where the plot as it zings along feels utterly unique, even if it is evergreen. It made me wonder why I haven't read more Dan Chaon up to now.

Sleepwalk is an oddball, dark, but absolutely appealing tale of bad guys, almost–good guys (the exception being a thoroughly excellent dog), and the sheer work necessary to confront fate when it comes your way. The protagonist, a career mercenary who lives well outside the boundaries of society, never quite has an official name; he calls himself the Barely Blur, a nod to his shifting identities, but averages out along the way to Will—the principle of self-determination being something he grapples with throughout the novel. He’s deeply damaged, and does some terrible things, but he’s the kind of character Chaon writes so well: amiable, a bit befuddled, thoughtful right up to the point where his introspection can take him no further. Will is jogged out of his track as a cog in a dark network when a woman claiming to be his daughter—the result of a series of sperm donations he made for the money as a young man—manages to track him down (wonderful image of a bucket of burner phones suddenly, and horrifyingly to Will, all vibrating).

There ensues a bit of a road movie, bit of a shaggy dog tale, bit of a musing on the limits and uses of paranoia in a vaguely dystopic near future (which is not all that far removed from the present day, honestly—lots of surveillance and shadow societies in the mix). But Will is also one of those characters that Chaon writes so well, introspective and slightly bemused, damaged but with a solid core of decency. I don’t know what you’d exactly call this—sympathetic noir?—but I liked it a lot.

Unfortunately I didn't like this book as much as I wanted to. It was hyped online, but I couldn't connect with the characters.

SLEEPWALK is such a unique book: part road novel, part exploration of filial obligations, part introspection of mental illness, part thriller, part noir, part dystopic future. I've never read anything quite like it. Will Bear--one of his many identities--is a mercenary for Value Standard Enterprises, a seemingly ubiquitous outfit that wields considerable power in the underworld of a near-future United States. While driving between a geographically wide variety of locations across the U.S., one of Will's many burner phones rings: it's Cammie, a woman claiming to be Will's biological daughter (the product of a donation to a fertility clinic during his uncareful youth). But, is Cammie really his daughter, and is she even real, or a product of Artificial Intelligence? Value Standard Enterprises considers "Cammie" a threat, and orders Will to kill her. But could he do that if she really was his own biological daughter? And, why? The details of place and circumstance, and Will's first-person introspection, make this novel shine. Chaon draws you right into the story and the action, giving the reader just enough set dressing and props to become fully immersed in Will's often suspenseful and sometimes horrifying journey.

I am going to start out by saying that I loved the main character - Will - I loved his outlook on life, his braids, his dog, and his custom decorated camper. But...I did not love this story. It was too slow and just never came to fruition. Despite my love for the main character, I kept having to force myself to pick it up. Some people may really like this one but it was not for me. Thank you NetGalley for the chance to read and review this book.

A singular violent yet also elegiac riot of a novel, running through a future that has gone to hell in an alarmingly plausible way. Dan Chaon is nothing if not a writer of multitudes in his work and SLEEPWALK proves that once again.

Reminiscent of Hunter S. Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” and Chuck Pahalniuk’s “Invisible Monsters”, this trippy, dreamy, and drug-fueled Great American Road Trip novel told from the point of view of a 50-year-old mercenary/illegal-errand-boy who’s working off what’s essentially his dead mother’s life debt for a shadowy underground organization in a future America when he finds out he quite possibly has a daughter borne of some “donations” he made on a whim to earn easy money when he was younger is an entertaining, thoughtful, and engaging read with a whole lot of vivid and mind-bending imagery and outright weird scenes that just keep you wondering what’s going to happen next as you keep turning pages.

Like “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”, it has that devil-may-care attitude toward the use of illicit substances while driving and interacting with the public, along with a warped sense of space and time and a tendency to just get lost: in your mind, in your head, and in the world at large. Like “Invisible Monsters”, there’s that POV of the main character telling us the story and telling us stories within the story. The unreliable narrator and characters who may not be who they seem to be. The large road trip, the casual attitude toward crime, and pills, pills, pills.

The book definitely has a faster first half than second half, but I found that to be okay. A lot of stuff has to happen in the first half for the second half to even happen. The pacing slows down quite a bit until around the 70% mark, and then it picks up for a little bit until settling down into what will be the ending around the 80-85% mark or so.

It’s a weird book, but an oddly touching book all the same. About the notion of family, about nature versus nurture, about the family you're born into and the family you choose, about fatherhood and trust issues. I’ve never read anything quite like it, with its quiet melancholy and we’re safe-for-now ending. But I enjoyed it.

Thanks to NetGalley and Henry Holt & Co. for early access to this title in exchange for a fair and honest review.

Unfortunately SLEEPWALK did not really do it for me – but the writing is so good, I was halfway through the book before I realized I wasn’t enjoying myself. The prose is really, truly top-notch: downright poetic, full of clever little turns of phrase. I liked the Barely Blur a lot, and the near-future, mid-apocalyptic setting, and the glimpses into the shadowy life that Will lives, with his creepy employers and his off-the-grid jobs and his eighteen cell phones. I liked the glimpses into his past, too, with his mom. It all felt very human.

The plot is where it fell down for me. Despite the intriguing concept – an off-the-grid dude, a secret daughter who’s possibly an AI, etc. – nothing really *happens* in this book (at least not in the first half). Will mostly drives around and talks on the phone and thinks about stuff. It’s one of those books where I kept on waiting for something to happen, and eventually I came to the conclusion that nothing was really going to.

I received an eARC from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

3.5 stars

I am grateful to the publisher Henry Holt & Company for sending me an advanced copy of this book for review.

Dan Chaon is one of my favorite authors, so naturally I was excited to pick up his newest release. I was also really curious about what he was going to do for his second novel following Ill Will, which I really enjoyed. This book was interesting. The story is set in a futuristic world which is very similar to current day except for just a couple of science fiction elements we encounter throughout the story. We follow a morally grey main character who seems to be some sort of mercenary/assassin/hench-man (and his dog). At the beginning of the story he is contacted by someone that he doesn’t expect, and this starts him on a journey to understand himself and ask questions about his life that he never has before.

This story is full of twists and turns, unexpected characters, and developments which I found was quite interesting for a science fiction. The character work was very strong and reminiscent of Chaon’s earlier work. If I had to compare this story and setting to another, I would say that it reminded me of Tiger Flu by Larissa Lai. I found being in this character's head to be very interesting and the landscape of the America that he was dealing with to be quite bleak but realistic (considering our present situation in 2022).

Ultimately, I found the pacing to be even, the story to be very well written, the characters to be interesting, and the setting to be quite intriguing. Yet, while I liked this story, I didn't love it.... which was disappointing. This may have been a matter of my expectations being too high though. This is definitely one that I think I will re-read in the future to see if on a second read I enjoy it more. But I would still recommend it to anyone who is interested in a literary, near-future, Sci-fi story.

I have always enjoyed Dan Chaon's work and was excited to see he had a new publication coming out. I've been waiting since I finished Ill Will! This was sort of a departure for him - a bolder kind of dystopian experiment. The main character is a hired assassin who basically lives in his truck, traveling from state to state to carry out dreary assignments for a gigantic corporate entity he's owned by. The book is set in the not-so-distant future, where the rules of modern civilization have broken down and there is a mob rule -- corporations, drones, and renegade groups are the new rule of order. There is no more privacy -- humans are chipped (or something - wasn't sure on the detail here) and can be monitored from anywhere, anytime. Our main character discovers from a series of phone calls from someone who alleges she's his daughter (he was a sperm donor long ago), that his safety may be compromised and he goes on the run.

I can recommend this to fans of dystopian fiction, which there's no shortage of. It just wasn't my cup of tea. I will say that if I were reading this book in the fall, or winter, I may have been more receptive to it in colder weather. It's sad and the hero/anti-hero of the story is quite pathetic.

Many thanks to NetGalley, Henry Holt & Company and Macmillan Audio for gifting me both a digital and audio ARC of the latest book by Dan Chaon - 4.5 stars!

We meet Will Bear (one of many aliases) on his road trip for his job, a murky underworld job, that takes him across the country, flanked by his trusty rescue dog, Flip. At 50 years old, Billy lives totally off the grid - or so he thought, until a supposed daughter born from a sperm donation somehow contacts him on of his burner phones. And she needs his help. Not really trusting her or himself, the cat-and-mouse game of his life continues.

I started reading the digital copy but when I switched to the audio, I never went back. The narration by John Pirhalla is spot on - he sounds like the burnout stoner that Billy is and the somewhat stream-of-consciousness narrative is portrayed perfectly. This is a dark and dark comedic tale that touches on practically every aspect of modern politics and life, while taking place in an obscure near future world as well. I loved hearing Billy narrate his road trip through places I've lived. This probably won't be for everyone but I loved the dark humor.

I wanted to like this book because I have read other books by Chaon and had enjoyed them. And this one started out good—thought It would be more in the nature of a dystopian thriller but it turned into a vague story with meandering philosophical musings. Also it has what I call a slow reveal plot where whats going on is only slowly revealed which I find frustrating. I like to know what’s going on early in the book. Doesn’t mean the slow reveal is not a good device - its just not to my liking. Chaon can write — I was just a bit let down.

An odd, off-kilter, pretty fun road novel. More of a "good hang" than a tightly-plotted page-turner; while there is a theoretically propulsive mystery plot the main character takes most things in such a laid-back state (a combination of being a consummate pro and the plot details being bewilderingly odd, plus perhaps all the LSD micro-dosing) that you kind of just let it wash over you, which is good because the resolution of the book is a little shaggy.