Sleeping Beauties Book Review

Sleeping Beauties by Stephen and Owen King

From Goodreads: In this spectacular father/son collaboration, Stephen King and Owen King tell the highest of high-stakes stories: what might happen if women disappeared from the world of men?

All around the world, something is happening to women when they fall asleep; they become shrouded in a cocoon-like gauze. If awakened, if the gauze wrapping their bodies is disturbed, the women become feral and spectacularly violent…

In the small town of Dooling, West Virginia, the virus is spreading through a women’s prison, affecting all the inmates except one. Soon, word spreads about the mysterious Evie, who seems able to sleep – and wake. Is she a medical anomaly or a demon to be slain?

The abandoned men, left to their increasingly primal devices, are fighting each other, while Dooling’s Sheriff, Lila Norcross, is just fighting to stay awake.

And the sleeping women are about to open their eyes to a new world altogether…

Trigger warning for sexual abuse, attempted rape, domestic violence, gore and drug use.

Well, this was one super-clunky book. I’ve actually had this on my shelf since around October, when I bought it for my birthday, but the 700+ pages always managed to intimidate me into putting it back down. Thankfully, this month I’m taking part in the BookRoast O.W.L.S. readathon, and I figured this would be my Transfiguration O.W.L. book, since it is about women turning into sleeping cocoon people, so I finally picked it up, wincing at the snap of my wrist as it tried to hold the ginormous weight of this novel in a way that I could comfortably consume.

Like most Stephen King novels, I’ve found this one is a bit of a slow burn. There’s always so much of a build up, like at least 200 pages worth, and then all of a sudden you realize something is happening. There’s an event or two peppered in the next 100 pages to keep you going, luring you in, and then all of a sudden the rollercoaster drops and you’re hurtling towards a stellar, climatic finish. Or at least that’s how it usually is for me. The problem is that you need to be willing to stick in for those slow build-up chapters. This one is a little similar to other novels like The Stand and Needful Things- it dots from character to character for a while, never quite settling firmly on one. Again, I had a few issues trying to keep my interest because of this, since I didn’t really care much about some of the characters and couldn’t remember most of them.

And then, somewhere down the line, I realized that I was actually invested. There were a handful of characters who became my favourites- Clint, Jeanette, Lila, Willy, Nana and Michaela to name but a few. Obviously, having favourites in a Stephen King novel is a pretty pointless exercise, akin to having favourites in a George RR Martin book, but who can resist finding characters likeable?

I say likeable rather than loveable because King and son are really excellent at making realistic characters. None of them come across as overly good or overly evil, and even the awful characters like Don Peters are given space to explain their own thought patterns and beliefs. That doesn’t mean we like them, but I always remember Stephen King explaining how we need good villains in fiction- the key is to make them feel that they’re the good guys. Peters is absolutely terrifying, and I’d never ever want to meet him, but there’s something disturbingly interesting about being given access to his thoughts for a few pages. It really does offer all sides of the story, with a guaranteed shiver down the spine for good measure.

Again, this is really King’s element. He doesn’t so much write horror about external evil so much as he writes about humanity’s dark side. Although the idea of women falling asleep and being cocooned and in a coma-like state is terrifying, and the first part of the novel deals with people trying desperately to stay awake, much of the real horror in the book is reserved for the reactions to this. It is very Lord of the Flies in some sense, with stores being looted, people fist-fighting over caffeine products, police dipping into the confiscated drugs etc. Then, it gets worse. There are people looting sleeping womens’ houses, men who attempt to sexually attack sleeping women [and get a lot more than they bargain for when they try] and a ‘Blowtorch Brigade’ who go around trying to burn the cocoons and the women inside them in order to ‘save’ them from whatever it is they’re experiencing. That humanity falls so quickly to anarchy and chaos is a truly  disturbing testament to how we react to the unknown.

The book also opens up a very interesting debate about sexism and the roles women and men play in society. There are some problematic viewpoints expressed by various characters throughout the book [both misogynistic and misandric [if that’s the correct word: it means a hatred of men]. However, I should point out that, since we are seeing the world through these characters, it would be unfair and unwise to attribute these beliefs to the authors. The scope of beliefs held by the various inhabitants of Dooling are varied and often contradictory, offering up a large smorgasbord of  ideas readers can question and mull over.

All in all, it’s not King’s finest work, but it raises some very interesting questions about what our world would be like without women. Sleeping Beauties is horrifying in its glimpse at the dark undercurrents of humanity, and the way it offers small glimpses of hope amongst that darkness is truly extraordinary. 8.5/10 stars from me.