Book Review: Sleeping Beauties By Stephen & Owen King

Sleeping Beauties By Stephen & Owen King

hardcover, 702 pages Published September 26th 2017 by Scribner

When Stephen King released Doctor Sleep (his best novel of this century in my opinion) he went on a book tour with his son Owen who had just released his first novel Double Feature. While on the road apparently Owen pitched his father an idea that he thought sounded like a Stephen King novel. On that tour more than once King suggested that he wanted to write it with Owen. Five years later we have 700 page door stop and The King family has three members in the NY Times bestseller top ten at the same time.

I reviewed Owen King's debut novel Double Feature here on my blog when it was released. The book was humorous and I really enjoyed the first 100 pages but I didn't enjoy the book as a whole. Owen King certainly has talent and it has got to be hard to be the youngest in a family of writers who have all (Tabitha King included) seen the bestseller list. While Joe Hill has done everything he can to forge his own path without the help of his Dad's legacy. Owen has been more indifferent. I don't blame him for wanting the experience to write a novel with his Dad, what an amazing experience that would be.

On the surface Sleeping Beauties is a very Stephen King idea, in the vein of Cell or Under the Dome it is a weird speculative Apocalypse novel. The story is global but the point of view is narrow and focused much like Cell. It has almost the page count of The Stand but not the scope. There is a very clear influence or feel of the HBO show The Leftovers. The book is 700 pages and honestly didn't need more than 400 pages to tell this story.

In this novel the women of the world are subject to a pandemic called Aurora. The women affected fall asleep and their faces break-out in a cocoon that keeps them asleep but alive. In the days that follow men have to deal with the loss and certainly most men in our world don't understand everything important that women do. A few women are trying desperately to stay awake and some of their struggles provide the novels most suspenseful moments.

Focused on a fictional West Virginia town called Dooling the novel follows events in the town and in the near-by women's prison. The book has enough characters that it starts with a glossary of them, I suspect most regular King readers wont need it. The Kings do a great job of making the characters vivid. We know this is a family strength. The early build-up is great and there are many really intense moments of creepy-ness related to the face cocoons which I found scary to think about.

Alot of the best moments of horror and story come in moments that I consider spoilers. There are lots of really great character moments. I have seen reviews that diminished Owen's role in the overall book but everyone has to remember he pitched this idea as a SK novel and I am sure he was writing to match that feeling. There are moments of syntax, dialogue and structure that felt different to me as a life long King reader, but I think that was symptom of a third voice.

The early tone of the novel is science fiction but over time the pandemic and related events become more and more supernatural. The story makes less and less sense as the scope narrows and gets more weird at the same time. Almost 100 pages is devoted to a siege of the prison that should have been a chapter at most. None the less the book is peppered through out with great moments of character and tension so I kept turning pages. I think most readers not thinking like writers will not have as many problems as I did.

Story wise I still found it compelling and enjoyed the ride the less I thought about it.I think story wise it is a four out of five star book, Politically it is a 2 out of five. So I am ending up with a 3/5 rating. It is hard to talk about it without mostly major spoilers. I am going spoiler ahoy. Without spoilers I will say this novel has problematic political implications from unintentional patriarchal notions despite being written by two progressive men. This idea is one that would have benefited from a female voice.

In some of the press tours Stephen King has said some cringe-worthy things about how men would react to a world without women. "Who would do the dishes?" I know this can be a generational thing but thankfully The book handles this a little better until the final act. There are plenty of excellent female characters including the Sheriff Lila, that was not the issue it was the notions that were under the surface. More details in Spoilers...

Spoilers: First the positive. There was a chapter about half way into the book where the story took a huge turn, and I admit when it happened I groaned. You see it is 500 pages into the novel that we discover that the sleeping women are living on in an alternate reality without men. This reveal shifted the tone so heavy at first my reaction, was no, just no. But after one chapter it was paid off. The chapter before featured the novel's bully and prime asshole Don Peters talking about wanting set one of the sleeping women on fire just to see what happens. I forgot about them doing this, because of the slight of hand in the form of a huge story shift. The first chapter ends with a woman in the alternate reality suddenly and shockingly dying. When you flip to the next chapter you realize it was the work of Don Peters and young recently deputized man just experimenting.

This was a super effectively reveal. Great storytelling for sure.

As for the bad. I can't believe after Spike Lee complained about Stephen King's use of the "magical negro" in books like the Green Mile and the Stand he would return to the trope but he does. Even naming the woman Evie Black. Evie is in prison for killing a meth dealer and she becomes the key to the whole thing. She is like the gatekeeper between the two worlds.

Even worse is that when she leads the women to discover the path back to our world through this tree portal there is a scene where the women in this new world meet and decide what to do. For a reason I was not clear about they all had to agree and vote on weather to to say in the male-less world that most agree was a better place. In the end they all have a unanimous vote to return to our world.

I can't believe that EVERYONE of them would vote that way. The Kings give the reason that many did not want to be separated from their sons. A better argument is would be that their bodies would always be at risk in the male world. I also didn't understand how the rest of the globe was liberated by Evie's action.

I came away feeling uncomfortable about the ideas at the end of this novel and felt that this story needed a woman's touch.