Sleeping Beauties

A strange sleeping sickness called Aurora is causing the world’s women to stop waking up. Trapped in deep sleep, they form protective cocoons, and if disturbed, they respond with homicidal rage. In the town of Dooling, West Virginia, a mysterious woman named Eve Black might hold all the answers. Eve, who demonstrates precognition as well as the ability to remain awake, is currently locked up in the state women’s prison after murdering a pair of meth cooks. The prison’s psychiatrist, Clint Norcross, pledges to keep Eve alive and well in exchange for her help bringing the women back, but men outside the prison, who hold Eve responsible for Aurora, have other ideas.

Co-authored by Stephen King and his younger son Owen, Sleeping Beauties represents both the best and the worst of what the family has to author. On the one hand, it deploys many of Stephen’s trademark elements (page-turning tension, small-town intrigue, supernatural suspense) with a renewed sense of vigor. On the other hand, it also plays to the worst of Stephen’s excesses and by its latter chapters reads as a preachy, self-indulgent slog.

It is impossible to decipher which King is responsible for which of the book’s 700 pages, but one could read Sleeping Beauties as Owen giving his old man’s usual tricks a fresh coat of paint. From Castle Rock to Derry and beyond, Stephen’s work has often developed a keen sense of place, and in particular, has rendered small-town dynamics with convincing clarity. That much holds true here, but leaving Maine for Appalachia is a welcome change.

Similarly, Stephen’s solo work has featured no shortage of memorable characters, some admirable everymen and tenacious hard-luck women; others bigoted creeps and otherworldly abominations. All of the above can be found here, and while some characters (namely, Clint and the loathsome CO Don Peters) seem true to type, Owen’s contribution seems to be able to write the kinds of characters that Stephen can’t. The elder King has often stumbled writing characters of color, rendering them as Magical Negroes out of an admitted sense of white guilt. Sleeping Beauties breaks this trend in the form of Frank Geary, a black animal control officer who steps up in a time of crisis. Geary’s cunning, competence, and concern for his daughter are offset by a wicked temper and the kind of rules-enforcement sticklerism that would make an accountant blush. King Sr. has also struggled for the past decade to portray teens convincingly, not a surprise given that he is in his 70s. But here, Clint’s son Jared, the boys who antagonize him, and the girl he pines for are all rendered a bit more believably. Other colorful characters include Clint’s wife Lila (the town’s chief law enforcement officer), Van Lampley (an arm-wrestling champion correctional officer), Michaela (the prison warden’s coke-snorting TV news reporter daughter), and Angel Fitzroy (a more malevolent, less intelligent redneck Harley Quinn). Disappointingly, Eve Black remains a cipher for much of the story, her layers never really pulling back.

Speaking of disappointment, Sleeping Beauties features one of the more inept and heavy-handed treatments of theme in recent memory. The book’s very premise is an effective commentary on the way that society undervalues women, but that does not stop the Kings from resorting to filibustering about The Evils of Men for much of the novel’s latter third, a message hypocritically undercut by the number of murders committed by female characters.

Ultimately, Sleeping Beauties is an intriguing letdown, a book brimming with vitality and promise undone by the authors’ stubborn refusal to step off of the soapbox long enough for the story to speak for itself.