Sleep No More: A Tribute to Greg Iles

Greg Iles defied expectations. He was diagnosed at age 36 with multiple myeloma in 1996, but unlike many who succumb to the illness within a few years after diagnosis, it didn’t reach the critical stage for him until the 2020s. He died on August 15 of this year. In 2011, he was severely injured in a car accident, which resulted in amputation of his left leg. That was a three-year recovery period, but established author Iles continued his writing and produced what is perhaps is most lauded body of work, known as The Natchez Burning trilogy. Years before that collective magnum opus, he dabbled in the horror genre. Sleep No More, published in 2002 by Putnam, is outlandish in theme but still compulsive reading. The premise of a maniacal dead woman’s soul hopping from living body to body (gender be damned), to reunite with her very much alive former lover is loopy and ludicrous. But Iles pulls it off through prose that, particularly when read aloud, is mesmerizing. The book is steamy and sultry, emulating the febricity of the author’s beloved Mississippi.

Protagonist John Waters is jolted while coaching his seven-year-old daughter’s soccer game. A new woman in town is eyeing him in a provocative way, and mouths the word “soon” to him. The silent utterance was a catchword between him and a volatile former lover who had been dead for several years. Naturally, memories get stirred: “Now he could see Mallory as he had known her in the beginning. What he most recalled was her beauty. That and her life force, for the two were inextricably bound. The first thing you noticed was her hair: a glorious mane of mahogany, full of body, a little wild, and highlighted with a shining streak of copper from the crown of her head to the backs of her shoulders. Anyone who saw that streak thought it had been added by a stylist, but it had come in her genes, a God-given sign of the unpredictability in her nature. You couldn’t miss Mallory in a crowd. She could be surrounded by a hundred sorority girls in the Grove at Ole Miss, and the sun would pick out that flaming streak of hair, the cream skin, rose lips, and Nile-green eyes, and mark her like a spotlight picking the prima ballerina from the chorus.”

Waters is going through a tough time professionally and personally. A petroleum geologist, he is concerned about an EPA evaluation and his partner’s shady business dealings. At home, his sex life is suffering because his wife has not recovered from the traumatic loss of two pregnancies. She is dutiful, but detached. So, when the lady of mystery who reminds him of his former passion enters his life, he is ripe for the picking: “He’d been away from Eve Sumner for twenty minutes, yet the sense of being close to her had not left him. She had disturbed him on a level far deeper than that of reason. Against his will, she had reincarnated the feeling he’d had whenever he was close to Mallory Candler. He had no idea what subtle chemical signals were transmitted and detected by lovers—pheromones, or whatever the scientists called them these days—but whatever they were, he and Mallory shared them, and Eve Sumner emitted exactly the same ones. And she knew it. She had known that her mere presence was working on him in away that her secret knowledge of his past never could.”

Author Iles acknowledges the notorious 1987 film Fatal Attraction in the narrative, which is very appropriate since Mallory was jealous and controlling like the movie’s psycho Alex, and Waters has a female child who is approximately the same age as the daughter in the film. Plus, both bonkers stalkers had a thing for self-injury/cutting. Rationalization and rhapsodic illicit-dangerous sex go hand in hand, as Waters expounds: “He sensed in Mallory a sexuality of limitless scope, like a man looking through an open door at a closed one, yet sensing that behind that door lay still another, an endless succession of doors, each concealing its own mystery, each mystery folding into another, the inmost circle unreachable, impenetrable, an essentially feminine core that he had no choice but to try to reach and understand.”

 Sleep No More isn’t a representative Greg Iles novel, although it does feature, in a supporting role, one of his most renowned characters: Lawyer-turned-writer Penn Cage. This foray into supernatural horror is an anomaly in the oeuvre of Iles, an atypical exercise in his output that I found engrossing. There are many sex scenes and, especially with the transmigration of souls theme, kinkiness abounds. Two quotes appear together in the volume before the title page. The first is from psychotherapist Carl Jung: “The normal man is a fiction.” The other exemplifies crazy love in literature: “Cathy! Cathy!” shouted by Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights. Greg Iles (1960-2025) had a great talent for writing and a rare gift for seeing deep into the psyche. He will be profoundly missed.