"There is something Edgar Allan Poe-like in the inexplicable way the wind turbines tax some of Blaashoek's inhabitants...Sleepless Summer is determined to leave you with a sick feeling in the pit of your stomach, and its Coen Brothers-meets-Stephen King nightmare of an ending is sure to do the trick." —Hank Stephenson, Shelf Awareness
"Dehouck creates a melancholic and wistful atmosphere in a world dominated by dark egocentrism. Uncanny, original and haunting" —Flanders Literature
"A clinically perfect development of mania from annoyance, published by the exclusive World Editions and translated insightfully by Jonathan Reeder….Bram Dehouck has written a gem of a book" —Jeffrey Mannix, The Durango Telegraph
"Following the lives of various inhabitants of a sleepy village who, increasingly rapidly, turn their surroundings into a living hell, is one of Stephen King’s trademarks. Dehouck is better at it—without involving the occult or taking up more pages than necessary" —NRC Handelsblad
"Dehouck obviously loves the written word and manipulates it with impressive precision. It is a small miracle how he brings to life over twenty characters in barely two hundred pages" —Het Parool
"A gem. With Sleepless Summer, this Flemish writer proves that his award-winning book De Minzame Moordenaar (The Mild-Mannered Murderer) wasn’t just a one‐off success" —Algemeen Dagblad
"Masterly. Definitely worthy of the Golden Noose prize" —Vrij Nederland
"A worthy successor to Reservoir Dogs" —Knack
"Sleepless Summer is a surprising book that exudes an atmosphere of melancholy. The minute descriptions of the events in the village lead almost unnoticed to a furious finale" —Thrillerweb
"It’s like the blackest version of Midsomer Murders you could possibly imagine, infused with the dark, psychological tinge of the finest Scandinavian crime fiction. I loved it" —Raven Crime Reads
"A compact and original story, with a heart-stopping denouement. Dehouck writes effectively and concisely. With the right words in the right place, he only needs a few pen strokes to get to the heart of his story. A beautiful book, a relief" —Jury, Golden Noose Awards
"In this book everything is exactly right and everything is the result of something else. Sleepless Summer is really well written and equally well conceived" —De Lees Fabriek
"The language is compact and effective; this is a book that never bores. A beautiful, compact, universal, and exciting story about how a seemingly insignificant occurrence can lead to unprecedented disaster. Bram Dehouck once again proves his talent with this exciting and often comical novel" —Misdaadromans.nl
"An incredible story in which everything is perfect" —Thrillers Leestafel
2019-03-17
An innocuous disturbance leads to a series of grotesque calamities in a Belgian town.
The innocuous disturbance is the sound of a wind farm's turbines, which prevents the town butcher from sleeping at night. That's it. That's the impetus for a story that leads to charges of indecent exposure, assault, murder, animal poisoning, attempted rape, and several graphically described bouts of diarrhea. The sleep-deprived butcher is the means by which the book proceeds along its escalating course of outrages. Along the way the novel takes care to detail the surliest, most suspicious, sadistic, or racist thoughts of the inhabitants. It's not that these are people whose flaws inadvertently draw them to disaster. Many of them are awful to begin with, and even the marginally sympathetic, or at least unobjectionable ones, are held at such a distance that no emotion is expended on them. This is the type of book that, as soon as a dog is introduced, you wait for it to be horribly killed. The narrative concern is not so much with, say, a person being killed as it is with the person's head exploding in blood and bone matter.
The tension the book produces is not so much what's going to happen as how much you are going to have to go through before reaching the end.
