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Sleepaway: A Novel
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 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.
Alternating between the perspectives of a 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.
184 pages, Paperback
Published April 19, 2024
About the author
Kevin Prufer
48 books26 followersKevin Prufer's newest poetry collection, The Fears, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2023 and received the 2024 Rilke Prize. His new novel Sleepaway was published in 2024 by Acre Books. He is also the author of several other books of poetry, including The Art of Fiction (2021), How He Loved Them (2018), Churches (2014), In a Beautiful Country (2011), and National Anthem (2008), all from Four Way Books.
He's edited several volumes of poetry, including New European Poets (Graywolf Press, 2008; w/ Wayne Miller), Literary Publishing in the 21st Century (Milkweed Editions, 2016; w/ Wayne Miller & Travis Kurowski), and Into English: Poems, Translations, Commentaries (Graywolf Press, 2017; w/Martha Collins).
With Wayne Miller and Martin Rock, Prufer directs the Unsung Masters Series, a book series devoted to bringing the work of great but little known authors to new generations of readers through the annual republication of a large body of each author's work, printed alongside essays, photographs, and ephemera.
Prufer is a professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston and the low-residency MFA at Lesley University.
Among Prufer's awards and honors are many Pushcart prizes and Best American Poetry selections, numerous awards from the Poetry Society of America, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Lannan Foundation. His poetry collection How He Loved Them was long-listed for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize and received the Julie Suk Award for the best poetry book of 2018 from the American literary press.
Born in 1969 in Cleveland, Ohio, Kevin Prufer studied at Wesleyan University (BA), Hollins College (MA) and Washington University (MFA).
He's edited several volumes of poetry, including New European Poets (Graywolf Press, 2008; w/ Wayne Miller), Literary Publishing in the 21st Century (Milkweed Editions, 2016; w/ Wayne Miller & Travis Kurowski), and Into English: Poems, Translations, Commentaries (Graywolf Press, 2017; w/Martha Collins).
With Wayne Miller and Martin Rock, Prufer directs the Unsung Masters Series, a book series devoted to bringing the work of great but little known authors to new generations of readers through the annual republication of a large body of each author's work, printed alongside essays, photographs, and ephemera.
Prufer is a professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston and the low-residency MFA at Lesley University.
Among Prufer's awards and honors are many Pushcart prizes and Best American Poetry selections, numerous awards from the Poetry Society of America, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Lannan Foundation. His poetry collection How He Loved Them was long-listed for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize and received the Julie Suk Award for the best poetry book of 2018 from the American literary press.
Born in 1969 in Cleveland, Ohio, Kevin Prufer studied at Wesleyan University (BA), Hollins College (MA) and Washington University (MFA).
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
September 15, 2025
3.5 Stars for Sleepaway: A Novel (audiobook) by Kevin Prufer read by the author.
This is the softest and most gentle apocalyptic story I’ve ever read. A storm of sleep is keeps crossing the land and sometimes the sleepers don’t wake. But there’s an alternative, there’s an illegal drug that you can take that will protect you. But there’s side effects that will mess you up. But the drug is running out and the people are staying asleep longer. Is the whole world going to shut down?
This is the softest and most gentle apocalyptic story I’ve ever read. A storm of sleep is keeps crossing the land and sometimes the sleepers don’t wake. But there’s an alternative, there’s an illegal drug that you can take that will protect you. But there’s side effects that will mess you up. But the drug is running out and the people are staying asleep longer. Is the whole world going to shut down?
July 30, 2024
This novel is gorgeous and unsettling. Set against the backdrop of the middle of the 1980s in the middle of the United States, it tracks the intertwining lives of characters living through a slow apocalypse. Kevin Prufer's language is gorgeous and precise (exactly what you'd expect if you know his poetry), and the ending is perfect.
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August 17, 2024Set in the Atari and magnetic tapes retro-future of the early 1980s, Kevin Prufer's novel "Sleepaway" imagines an alt-America and the turbulence of a mysterious plague. Pollen-like mists floating around as invisible storms cause most people to fall into spells of dreamless sleeps, and cause some other people to never awaken, to live interminably alive but asleep. The mists and the story settle on a small town in Missouri, a purgatorial waypoint of the drifting protagonists: Glass, a fog-headed twelve-year-old boy and orphan of the sleeps, and Cora, an ex-English professor whose life has wandered into waiting tables and the cheap thrills of petty kleptomania. Cora is also terrified of becoming one of those who will fall asleep and never wake, and resorts to desperate means to procure Eight Track, an illegal palliative drug that will defend her body from the soporific symptoms of the mists. But being one of the few who can keep awake during the sleeps, Cora becomes a cognizant observer of the gradual decline of civility in her town. Children (and teachers) are skipping school. The power and the phones are out. Lawlessness increases. Lootings and shootings. People begin to behave as though they exist beyond the punishment of any earthly authority. And the government that has pledged to always care for the terminally unconscious, begins to dispose of the dormant bodies in a supposedly humane bureaucratic process. As the Greek historian Thucydides observed, "civilization is a thin veneer." This slow undertow of incivility in Cora's Missouri town looks similar to what happened in Oran, the bubonic plague hot zone of Albert Camus's novel "The Plague." In both novels, conditions of life as the surviving townspeople knew and death as they imagined are suspended.
Belief in Purgatory, a state of intermediacy between life and afterlife, was adopted by the Catholic church in about the twelfth century, to be considered a place of qualia for sinners to purge and purify their souls. While neither Camus nor Prufer completely thematize their novels in terms of Christian theology, what Purgatory might be to the townspeople of both novels is humanity in a condition of stalled hope.
In the isolated Oran of "The Plague," characters are forced to confront not just their mortality, but their morality, and undergo a process of moral transformation through suffering as they watch the civil service efficiently transport the bodies of their loved ones to mass graves. In "Sleepaway's" story, Cora begins to ask exactly what kind of America she is staying awake to live in. Her catharsis comes when she finds herself accidentally responsible for the welfare of the orphaned kid Glass, and accidentally beginning to see the cure for the slumbering world as something requiring more effort than a retreat to her selfish fears. Her transformation is a metaphor of the prognosis for humanity.
Belief in Purgatory, a state of intermediacy between life and afterlife, was adopted by the Catholic church in about the twelfth century, to be considered a place of qualia for sinners to purge and purify their souls. While neither Camus nor Prufer completely thematize their novels in terms of Christian theology, what Purgatory might be to the townspeople of both novels is humanity in a condition of stalled hope.
In the isolated Oran of "The Plague," characters are forced to confront not just their mortality, but their morality, and undergo a process of moral transformation through suffering as they watch the civil service efficiently transport the bodies of their loved ones to mass graves. In "Sleepaway's" story, Cora begins to ask exactly what kind of America she is staying awake to live in. Her catharsis comes when she finds herself accidentally responsible for the welfare of the orphaned kid Glass, and accidentally beginning to see the cure for the slumbering world as something requiring more effort than a retreat to her selfish fears. Her transformation is a metaphor of the prognosis for humanity.
May 25, 2025
A surprisingly deep and thoughtful exploration of a sci-fi trope that has historically been tricky to write well. There's something deeply unsettling about a mysterious, invisible wave of sleep coming every few weeks to knock people out from anywhere between seconds to hours. And some people never wake up afterwards. A great premise, but what made this especially clever was how society simply got used to it and did their best to get on with their lives.
I particularly enjoyed the writing, which played with narrative and perspective while still managing to craft complex characters with compelling story arcs. Every character had a spark of believability to them, which made every relationship and event impactful.
The story was paced superbly and kept me engaged throughout. I was worried the literary writing style would fall into that genre's tendency towards flowery prose and pretentiousness, but thankfully, that didn't happen. Instead, what we got was the piercing insightfulness of the human condition and an emotionally diverse narrative that expertly ratcheted up the tension and paid off the subtle foreshadowing.
It had some minor flaws, like not following through on certain character and plot points. Some elements also lacked believability. Overall, though, this was an engaging read which ticked a lot of boxes for what I enjoy in a story.
I particularly enjoyed the writing, which played with narrative and perspective while still managing to craft complex characters with compelling story arcs. Every character had a spark of believability to them, which made every relationship and event impactful.
The story was paced superbly and kept me engaged throughout. I was worried the literary writing style would fall into that genre's tendency towards flowery prose and pretentiousness, but thankfully, that didn't happen. Instead, what we got was the piercing insightfulness of the human condition and an emotionally diverse narrative that expertly ratcheted up the tension and paid off the subtle foreshadowing.
It had some minor flaws, like not following through on certain character and plot points. Some elements also lacked believability. Overall, though, this was an engaging read which ticked a lot of boxes for what I enjoy in a story.
March 24, 2026
What an interesting story! Dystopian? Sci fi? It’s what, 1984? And a strange cloud causes people to briefly fall asleep for a minute. They often feel like they are in a dream, one that is familiar. As time goes on, the length of time people are asleep grows. There are some people who take a drug that allows them to stay awake but has a physical cost. Some people fall asleep and never wake, not dead but definitely not awake. They need to be taken care of. Children are less susceptible to the longer sleeps, as are people of color. I may have to re-read this at some point in order to follow circling timelines I may have missed.
April 10, 2025
It was interesting and I enjoyed the dystopian style. But the ending I was frustrated at and felt like a cop out.
April 29, 2024
With the first sentence in Sleepaway, Kevin Prufer engages the reader with a catastrophic event that is described briefly and is both familiar and strange: “The invisible mists were falling, fine as pollen, and soon everyone will sleep.” The source of the mist is conjectured to be from a lab, from Russia, space fallout, chemicals, so it reminds us of Covid but actually occurs earlier and later than Covid and into the future. There is no cure, and though medicine may weaken the mists’ effects, that medicine is rare, and itself dangerous. Society has fallen apart in common ways, not enough food, not enough medical facilities, loss of family units, institutions, jobs, stress on the assumed basic values. The situation is dire. It is also like the world we’ve lived in and still do. And yet, Sleepaway is positive, full of hope and even play. It delves into and elevates the nature and presence and promise of the creative spirit.
The setting is a small university town in the heartland of the United States. Though the mysterious mist creates the initial draw, the characters are the heart of the story, especially Glass, whose sensitive nature is a driving force, and his two friends, who establish the normalcy of youth and life in the midst of chaos. Their survival is to root for, in the novel and elsewhere. The other main protagonist, Cora, becomes intricately involved in Glass’s plight. The community is family. Death and grief occur but do not dominate. In one scene we are reminded that “the world ending for you ain’t the same thing as the world ending.”
The real strength of Sleepaway is the uplift, the values laced throughout. Most characters want to help others and do so within their ability. Time gradually seems to be one moment, everything accessible from or happening in that same moment. The structure lends to this concept, with chapter time shifts moving from the present to the past, characters whose minds fly forward and back; references that bring in so many other eras and conjectures. Literature and experience, past and present, inform the human mind and body— the more the better.
I read Sleepaway in one sitting, captivated by its complexity and promise. There is, of course, also the beauty of language. This is Prufer’s first novel, but he is a prominent poet, a master of language. He’s a broad thinking and compassionate observer in all his work, and blends forms, invents them. I look forward to what other worlds he creates.
The setting is a small university town in the heartland of the United States. Though the mysterious mist creates the initial draw, the characters are the heart of the story, especially Glass, whose sensitive nature is a driving force, and his two friends, who establish the normalcy of youth and life in the midst of chaos. Their survival is to root for, in the novel and elsewhere. The other main protagonist, Cora, becomes intricately involved in Glass’s plight. The community is family. Death and grief occur but do not dominate. In one scene we are reminded that “the world ending for you ain’t the same thing as the world ending.”
The real strength of Sleepaway is the uplift, the values laced throughout. Most characters want to help others and do so within their ability. Time gradually seems to be one moment, everything accessible from or happening in that same moment. The structure lends to this concept, with chapter time shifts moving from the present to the past, characters whose minds fly forward and back; references that bring in so many other eras and conjectures. Literature and experience, past and present, inform the human mind and body— the more the better.
I read Sleepaway in one sitting, captivated by its complexity and promise. There is, of course, also the beauty of language. This is Prufer’s first novel, but he is a prominent poet, a master of language. He’s a broad thinking and compassionate observer in all his work, and blends forms, invents them. I look forward to what other worlds he creates.
February 18, 2025
(3.75 rounded to 4.0).
In this book we follow two characters as they adjust to a new normal for their 1984 small town. A strange mist has begun to drift in to cover the whole area and the people drift into a deep, dreamless sleep…but some don’t wake up. The hospitals are full, there are fewer people to be caregivers, there are fewer and fewer resources and supplies, there are fewer resources to deal with the dead and you never know when or where the next mist will appear. We follow Cora, a waitress in a small town diner and Glass, a 12 year old boy coming to rely on her as the adult in his life. Transportation is coming to a halt. Communication is breaking down since there are no mail services and infrastructure necessary to keep things running are breaking down with no one left to fix them. There is a drug, Eight Track, that prevents people from entering the deep sleep brought on by the Mists that people are hoarding and will do just about anything to procure.
Cora decides to take to the road to look for family, and agrees to take Glass along. On the journey they are exposed to denial, delusion, and desperation. The Eight Track dealers of the drug hide in the shadows with one murderous aspiring boss willing to cross any line to take control.
In a post-pandemic country, this book deals with family, friendship, race and how people adapt to unexplained annihilation and the break down of society. Well developed characters, a surreal setting for a story of dystopian society and a perplexing cause for the loss of civilization. Recommend to readers of science fiction, dystopia, disaster, and survival.
In this book we follow two characters as they adjust to a new normal for their 1984 small town. A strange mist has begun to drift in to cover the whole area and the people drift into a deep, dreamless sleep…but some don’t wake up. The hospitals are full, there are fewer people to be caregivers, there are fewer and fewer resources and supplies, there are fewer resources to deal with the dead and you never know when or where the next mist will appear. We follow Cora, a waitress in a small town diner and Glass, a 12 year old boy coming to rely on her as the adult in his life. Transportation is coming to a halt. Communication is breaking down since there are no mail services and infrastructure necessary to keep things running are breaking down with no one left to fix them. There is a drug, Eight Track, that prevents people from entering the deep sleep brought on by the Mists that people are hoarding and will do just about anything to procure.
Cora decides to take to the road to look for family, and agrees to take Glass along. On the journey they are exposed to denial, delusion, and desperation. The Eight Track dealers of the drug hide in the shadows with one murderous aspiring boss willing to cross any line to take control.
In a post-pandemic country, this book deals with family, friendship, race and how people adapt to unexplained annihilation and the break down of society. Well developed characters, a surreal setting for a story of dystopian society and a perplexing cause for the loss of civilization. Recommend to readers of science fiction, dystopia, disaster, and survival.
February 28, 2025
Sleepaway was a beautifully written novel. Add in the backdrop of the 80's and it was close to perfect.
The idea of going in ones sleep is ideal, I think that most of us would agree that if we had to pick a way to go that would be it. But what would you do if you knew it was coming for you? That each time one of these sleep storms stopped over your town it might be your turn. What sort of life would you live?
The idea of going in ones sleep is ideal, I think that most of us would agree that if we had to pick a way to go that would be it. But what would you do if you knew it was coming for you? That each time one of these sleep storms stopped over your town it might be your turn. What sort of life would you live?
April 26, 2025
Picked this up because I do love a good dystopian end-of-the-world book, but it just didn’t do much for me. I did like Glass and Cora’s relationship, and seeing how that unfolded. But overall I wished there was more hope, and more of a resolution… I didn’t like the ending at all, it left me feeling like ‘what was the point of this?’
Also, I think this would have better if a voice actor narrated instead of the author. His reading / style was a bit robotic.
Also, I think this would have better if a voice actor narrated instead of the author. His reading / style was a bit robotic.
March 17, 2025
A singular novel outlining an almost banal 'apocalypse'. Undoubtedly taps into our recent collective COVID experience to create an unsettling sense of the narrowness of the margin between control and dissolution.
May 3, 2025
I was into it but I hated the ending… it just kind of ended. Kept waiting for some kind of revelation. Could have done so much with the 8 track reality and the dreams.. idk. Just felt undone or something.
December 7, 2025
Just “ok” with a weak ending. It felt like we were building up to something, but no great twist or outcome came. Kind of a limp book. We got the drama from the very beginning, but there was no real conclusion, no confirmation of who was narrating the book. Just kinda “meh” from start to finish.
February 18, 2025
Such a beautiful story
April 10, 2025
A 3 for the writing. But this novel left me feeling mostly despair. I can't quite get to the ephemeral hope of it.
April 20, 2025
Really good book. Short, different. writing style very unique. The author narrating the book did a very good job I enjoyed the flow and the mystery. Good job.
July 11, 2025
What an amazingly unexpected and refreshing book
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews