About this book:

"Sleepless Cities" is an urban horror anthology chronicling a single night of a biological infection transforming New York City. The narrative unfolds through 25 chapters, each told from the perspective of different city workers and residents across seven neighborhoods, tracing the crisis from the first uneasy reports to a terrifying, unending dawn. The infection, characterized by a pervasive, low-frequency "hum" and a viscous amber fluid, subverts the city's infrastructure, using power grids, subway tunnels, water mains, and even buildings themselves as conduits and amplifiers.

The story highlights the city's inherent vulnerabilities, revealing how its interconnected systems become weapons for the contagion. Characters like paramedics, graffiti artists, subway operators, bodega owners, radio enthusiasts, doctors, sanitation workers, rideshare drivers, building supers, and even a medical examiner, each experience the escalating horror through the lens of their professional routines. Their individual struggles to comprehend and combat the infection—whether by disrupting frequencies, barricading buildings, or attempting to communicate through failing networks—form a mosaic of localized resistance.

As the night progresses, the infection adapts, shifting from infrastructure-based propagation to proximity and even body heat. A city-wide blackout, intended to disrupt the signal, only forces the infected to evolve new hunting strategies, while the very atmosphere becomes saturated with the amber fluid, making the distinction between the living and the transformed increasingly blurred. The book ultimately portrays New York not as a city under attack, but as an organism undergoing a fundamental, terrifying transformation, where the traditional lines between life and death, and between human and infrastructure, dissolve.

The book concludes with a "morning that isn't," where the sun fails to rise, replaced by a perpetual, glowing twilight emanating from the ground and the saturated environment. The city's systems are irrevocably changed, and the survivors are left in a world where the infection has become the new normal, integrating itself into the city's very fabric. The disparate threads of individual stories converge, suggesting that the only remaining "infrastructure" for humanity is mutual trust and the defiant refusal to be silenced, even as the city hums its new, terrifying song of "perfect, terrifying content."