Stephen King has collaborated it his son Owen to write Sleeping Beauties, a horror fantasy
fable for the times. As innumerable cases of sexual harassment and atrocities
against women are reported, at least some must have wished for a world without
such men.
Sleeping Beauties is set in a small
town of Dooling, at the centre of which is a women’s prison. The town’s sheriff
is Lila Norcross, whose husband Clint is the prison psychiatrist. One day, Lila is called out to a crime scene,
where a strange semi-nude woman who calls herself Evie, has killed two drug
dealers and blown up their meth lab.
When Evie—who seems to trigger all manner of supernatural occurrences--
is taken to the prison, she is unperturbed. But slowly, women in the town start
falling asleep, covered with a web-like cocoon. It they are disturbed, they
violently assault the person who attempted to awaken them.
This sleeping sickness, given the name of Aurora (after the heroine of Sleeping Beauty), spreads throughout the
world, and baffles scientists. The Kings stay in Dooling, however, and write an
intricate, somewhat overpopulated (70 odd characters, listed in the beginning)
novel with multiple backstories, subplots and even a teen romance.
Women inside and outside the prison start dozing off and nobody can tell
if they will wake up, or are gone forever. Lila and some of her police colleagues
struggle to stay awake on uppers and cocaine. The town goes berserk, the
hospitals are overrun by desperate families, medical supplies stores and
supermarkets are looted and destroyed.
Eventually
word gets out that the only woman not afflicted by Aurora is Evie. The town’s
hothead Frank Geary, who wants to save his daughter’s life, instigates the men
to arm up and attack the prison to capture Evie and send her to a lab to find
an antidote. Dr Clint Norcross gets his posse together to defend the prison and
save Evie.
The Kings
write with perspicacity about what is means to be a man today—Frank and a bunch
of school bullies think violence and aggression is manly. Clint and Lila’s son Jared is kind and
protective, but the girl he loves prefers a nasty thug-ish kind of boy.
Smaller
stories unfold under the huge 700 plus page umbrella, Lila’s unhappiness with
her husband’s possible infidelity, a tender love between two prison inmates,
and, amusingly a Mercedes owned by a doped out doctor makes an appearance. (Stephen King’s novel Mr Mercedes was a bestseller with two sequels).
A fake
social media post says that the cocoons should be set on fire to end the epidemic
and hordes of rabid men go around hunting for women to burn alive. One soap box
speaker rants that this virus is punishment for women wearing pants and trying
to get ahead of men. In this apocalyptic scenario, gender politics rear up eventually—it would
be a spoiler to reveal what happens to the sleeping women, but the novel tends
to get dull and repetitive after a point. There was no need for so many
characters that it is difficult to keep track of them—some are totally
redundant.
What the
book, rambling on over peace and war, asks in Evie’s voice, “I think it might
be time to erase the whole man-woman equation. Just hit delete and start over.
What do you think?” It is an idea whose
time has come.
Sleeping Beauties
Stephen & Owen King
Publisher: Scribner
Pages: 702
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