Sleep No More

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Perhaps this part would be better labeled Part Author’s Note, Part Acknowledgments. If you’re a dedication reader, you may have noticed that this book is dedicated to the survivors of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings. Before you get offended that I dedicated a book about killing teens to the families of slain children, give me a second. The shooting at Newtown was the first national tragedy that really hit me. Columbine happened when I was in high school, but I didn’t know anyone from Colorado and as I was attending a school with fewer students and teachers combined than any single grade level at Columbine, it felt so foreign as to be unreal. I was in college on September 11, 2001. But again, I knew no one in New York City and though I was as horrified as the rest of the nation, it wasn’t personal. But the afternoon the Newtown shooting occurred, the news that an entire classroom of kindergarteners (which is what they incorrectly reported the first day) had been killed came in less than half an hour before I went to the school to pick up . . . my kindergartener. I was overwhelmed by gratitude that when I arrived at the school, my five-year-old son would be alive—and mired in grief that so many parents could not say the same for their tiny children. The grief didn’t go away when I found out it was first graders, it didn’t go away the next week, it lingered and despite again not knowing anyone even indirectly involved in this tragedy, I was so shaken. About this time I got the green light on my proposal for Sleep No More. Now, the plot had been laid out long before the shooting, but once I got the green light, I found myself writing a story about a community dealing with deaths in their midst. As I did, I poured my grief into the narrative. And it became something darker and more personal than I ever expected. I spat this book out in thirty-eight days and when I was done . . . I felt better. I wasn’t filled with that awful sadness. It wasn’t gone, but it was no longer intruding on my daily life. It was a downright easy solution compared to the process everyone in Newton still—I’m sure—faces. But it was the first time I felt that helpless grief and I had to put it somewhere! And that somewhere ended up being this book, which is why it is dedicated to those who had, and continue to have, exponentially more to deal with than I did.

Thanks go to my fab editor, Tara Weikum, who loved this story from the very first pitch, and to my agent, Jodi Reamer, who forgave me for taking it out behind her back . . . sort of. Erica Sussman, you are always there to lend a hand. Usually with the tedious details. Your line edits were priceless. To my publicist, Mary Ann Zissimos, for being an expert juggler. (And ARC-fort maker!) To my sister-in-law, Hollie, who was the first one to hear the story all the way through, and to my long-suffering husband, Kenny, who took all of the kids to the zoo on Christmas Eve so I could get six thousand words written.