Thoughts on Sleeping Beauties

Sleeping Beauties is the latest from Stephen King, and the first co-written with his son Owen King. Unlike his more prolific brother Joe Hill, I’m not familiar with Owen King’s work. My understanding is that it is not in the horror genre at all, and I seem to recall—but I may be wrong on this—that it leans towards the comedic. All of which is fine, and makes the idea of Owen teaming up with his father an intriguing one. But if Owen has a strong voice of his own, it is not raised anywhere in Sleeping Beauties, which reads one hundred percent like a later-period Stephen King novel.

The plot is simple, if a bit odd: a global event called Aurora causes all women, when they fall asleep, to be cocooned in strange white webbing. The women are still alive, but they don’t wake up. Should one attempt to pull the webbing from them, the women briefly wake up in a savage, zombie-like state and kill the person who has disturbed them. They then fall back asleep and the webbing returns. Though it is said the event started in Australia, the novel is focused on a small southern town called Dooling and its inhabitants. Into their midst, as Aurora is starting, comes Eve Black, who appears to be a normal woman from the outside but refers to herself as an emissary. She is not affected by Aurora and demonstrates magical abilities—mind reading, talking to animals, etc. Did she cause Aurora and can she stop it? The first half of the book is given to a chronicle of Aurora as it initially unfolds. The second half tells the story of a town divided about what to do with Eve and the resulting clashes, as well as what happens to the women while they are asleep.

As absurd sounding as it may be, it is an intriguing idea for a story that could play out a number of ways: social/political satire novel, fantasy novel, apocalyptic end-times novel, straight-ahead thriller, straight-ahead horror novel, or a combination of some or all of these approaches. The novel largely goes for the apocalyptic approach, focused on Dooling but with constant background reminders that the world is falling apart. And it is here that I must confess that it is hard to separate a novel from the personal context in which you encounter it. My personal context is that I’ve simply grown tired of apocalyptic stories at this time in my life. I have apocalypse fatigue. Stories dealing with the end of society have become so commonplace that it is difficult to say anything new, and with the divided, chaotic America I live in seemingly trying to drive itself to collapse, these types of stories aren’t connecting with me right now. I want smaller stories with complex, nuanced characters. It’s not a criticism to say Sleeping Beauties doesn’t provide this, but it hung over me as I read the book.

So what was good and what was bad? Well, I’m not going to go that black and white. Often it’s simply a matter of taste. Let’s look at a few points.

Stephen King has a reputation for bloat, and I generally find that to be unfair. However, it’s a valid criticism of Sleeping Beauties. Knock it down from 700 to 500 pages and you’ve got something. There are too many unnecessary subplots that don’t really contribute to the whole. Characterization, usually such a strength of King, falters a bit and leads to several problems: A)there are too many bit players. Cut even half a dozen of them out and it would strengthen the story considerably. B)King has written all of these characters before, and they don’t say anything that he hasn’t said better elsewhere. C)The teenage characters and overall portrayal of the teenage years, while a small impact on the story, is completely out of touch. D)There are only a few true bad guys in the novel, and they shouldn’t be there at all. They are King clichés and the parts featuring them are dull and predictable, and aren’t even necessary as plot devices—the book is driven by characters who are shaded grey, as most humans are.

Eve, though—Eve is so much fun. She should have so much more screen time. I suspect some will find issue with the book never resolving who she is or who she is an emissary for, but that doesn’t bother me—I think it makes her more believable, fantastical creature though she may be. Her personality and sense of humor is like a cool drink of water on a hot summer day. I repeat: she needed many more pages in the book. I’d much rather hang out with her than the tangle of minor characters the book gets lost in. I wonder if Eve isn’t the one place we see Owen King’s influence. I can’t say she reads like any other SK character and the pages with her make the book worth reading.

I enjoyed the moth motif. Moths are fascinating characters, and I wish the book would have done more with them. In the afterword, the Kings talk about the need to ground a fantasy book in reality, and while I don’t necessarily disagree that it is important to do so in a story like this, I think the book would have benefitted from a deeper dive into the fantastical. I wonder if the story didn’t start that way and then, given the events in the world the last year or two, they ended up feeling the need to slap a more obvious political skin on it. The book has a lot to say about men and women, but it often says it clumsily, and because too many of the characters are not well drawn or interesting, it gets almost preachy. The metaphors are big and obvious—maybe too much so. (C’mon, Eve? A biblical tree?) I’m not saying that it would benefit the book to be subtler—we are talking about a King book here—just that the characterization issue derails some of the good intentions.

I was reminded, more than anything, of Under the Dome. In many ways this is a story of isolation, and territory King has covered before. Like Under the Dome, it’s too long and for some, the lack of resolution on the fantastical elements will be an issue. There are also echoes of Needful Things and ‘Salem’s Lot, with the exploration of the inhabitants of small towns and the eventual destruction of those towns. Sleeping Beauties lacks the superior characterization that made you want to hang out with those folks. On the plus side, it is an imaginative book, and if some of the ideas are not as fully realized as I’d like, I certainly derived pleasure from reading it.

So…good or not? For King fans, I think you will enjoy it. For non-King fans, you certainly won’t find anything to convince you. I’m not going to knock an author, some seventy billion books into his career, for echoing his earlier works. And I think a father and son collaborating on a novel is a pretty cool thing. It’s near impossible for me to dislike a King work—there are only two books in his entire career I derived no enjoyment from—and for whatever its problems, Sleeping Beauties is still a fun read from a master storyteller(s.)