"Sleeping Beauties"

Sleeping Beauties

Written by Owen King and Stephen King

Review written by Diana Iozzia

The famous and infamous Stephen King and his son, Owen, wrote Sleeping Beauties in 2017, but I feel that its premise rings true in 2020 and will be relevant for years to come. This science fiction novel from the two of them asks the question, “What will happen to the men of Earth if women died or vanished?” The Kings create a bit of interesting satire in their cautionary tale about men and women. In today’s society and in the past, we have always seen a divide between men and women. Women, like myself, often ask when angry with their husbands, “where would you be without me?” Sleeping Beauties answers that question, by portraying chaos, insanity, and crime.

In Sleeping Beauties, Eve Black is an ethereal and mystical being, who has chosen, with the elements of nature, to cause all females, women and children, to enter a cocoon once they fall asleep. This phenomenon is named “Aurora”. As the females attempt to stay awake as long as possible, using drugs and coffee, the men being to panic. We are introduced to an ensemble of characters throughout the small Appalachian town, Dooling. The characters span from plain old citizens, news reporters, police, and especially the prisoners and guards from the town prison. Great and caring men hide the cocoons, once realizing that attempting to break the women out of the cocoons cause them to react like wild and rabid animals and murder their ‘prince’. Horrible and evil men burn the cocoons, killing the women. A burst of moths appears and vanish when each woman was killed. Moths also often appear whenever Eve is using her ‘magical powers’, as well as rats.

The plot continues in a fun and interesting way, as in Part 2, we see the women wake up in an alternate reality of their own town. The men are absent and so are their bodies. The women begin lives of purity and more simple ways of living. We see a favorite character, Tiffany, ride wild horses as she believes she can finally be happy. Two of the more prominent characters are Lila and Clint Norcross. In the other world, called Our World by the women, Lila becomes one of the leaders and attempts to help the other women return to a life of normalcy. In the true world, Clint attempts to protect the women and stop the ones who are causing pandemonium. Frank Geary is a caring father but a hothead and possibly abusive husband, who spends his time keeping his daughter, Nana, safe. He also, with other characters, plan to attack the prison to get to Eve.

The climax and the conclusion of the story feel similar to Needful Things by Stephen King. The characters descent into “good vs. bad” as they allow their true intentions to come to the surface. We have many showdowns and murders, as the good characters protect Eve and the tree entrance back into the new world, while the bad characters attempt to destroy the tree and hurt Eve. We readers draw lines, based on our own opinions, to decide who we agree with, which the Kings use to show us our own morality through this lens.

In conclusion, I personally believed this to be one of the better Stephen King books, and I loved Owen’s contribution. In the later years, I feel Stephen’s work to have mellowed, using less violence and cruelty towards women. I highly recommend this to anyone interested in trying a King book. I felt this wasn’t gruesome, and it could not even be considered horror. The only scenes I felt particularly scary were the ones in which women awoke from their cocoons.

Unfortunately, I believe that readers should carefully consider the format of which they choose to read this book. I do feel that with my listening to the audiobook, I felt that I easily lost track of certain characters and needed to remind myself who each were. I felt that I also became bored, due to the long listening time of 22 hours, when I know I would have accomplished the reading faster on paper. However, Marin Ireland proved to be an incredible narrator, with many voices and accents that brought each character to life in a way that a print copy wouldn’t. I hope that Owen and Stephen create more work together, because I was highly impressed. This is definitely a bestseller that deserves its praise.