Reviewed by Jefto Pierre for Readers' Favorite

In Sleepers, J. B. Velasquez introduces us to Hugo, a single father whose life in Tucson is currently being held together by sheer luck and a dwindling bank account. To save what’s left of his world, he signs on with Lunatech to earn money while he sleeps, thereby splitting his life in half. During the day, he’s a guitar teacher drowning in the fallout of his wife’s death and his strained relationship with his daughter, Ava. But at night, he’s Hugo of Pod Fifty-Four, a songwriter in a so-called perfect world called Slumbervale. The tension starts when he meets Piper, a cynical hacker who refuses to buy into the sunny propaganda of Level Six spiritual evolution. This "spiritual growth" is really just a corporate ploy to keep everyone happy and productive while they're being used. As the synthetic world inside the simulation begins to glitch, Hugo realizes the forced memory wipes that happen every time he wakes up are actually erasing the very thing he’s fighting for: his mind. Can he find a way out before his identity is wiped clean?

Sleepers by J. B. Velasquez is an addictive thriller that functions like a slow-motion car crash you can’t look away from. Velasquez has a skill for taking fascinating sci-fi concepts and showing how they actually tear apart a hurting family in a world that depends on tech to function. The narrative moves at a good pace, skipping between the heat of the desert landscape and the creepy, hollow vibe of the Slumbervale universe. It avoids the usual genre clichés of robot uprisings, focusing instead on the heartfelt reality of a man whose brain has become a piece of corporate real estate. The other sleepers in Hugo's work group feel like real people caught in a trap, and watching their different reactions to the simulation kept me hooked. Fans of The Truman Show or Inception will love the mind-bending mystery of trying to figure out what’s real and what’s a corporate lie.