Review: Sleeping Beauties

The premise of Sleeping Beauties, a father-son collaboration between Stephen and Owen King, is compelling: as the world’s women fall asleep, they are covered in mysterious white cocoons. Waking them up is a very bad idea with frequently lethal consequences. The world’s men, together with the dwindling number of women who manage to stay awake, attempt to figure out what’s going on. And the story of the sleeping women turns out to be more complex, as well.

The book focuses on how the crisis plays out in the fictional town of Dooling, West Virginia. King/King bring the characters to life quickly: the driven town sheriff Lila Norcross and her reserved husband Clint, who is a psychiatrist at the women’s prison; the world-weary prison warden, Janice Coates and her daughter Michaela, a national TV news celebrity; the inmates of the women’s prison; the town’s bullies and creeps.

The book’s core strength are these beautifully portrayed characters. They kept me invested over the 700 or so pages. But this length also puts the book’s weaknesses into sharp relief. Almost the entire plot takes place in Dooling. It’s fine for a story about a world-changing crisis to have a hyperlocal focus, but the conceit that only the actions within a tiny American town are truly relevant to what happens in the whole world is difficult to swallow.

After hundreds of pages of build-up, the book’s central confrontation is ultimately resolved in an anticlimactic fashion, with limited payoff or resolution. Confrontations between the book’s characters often don’t add up to much in the larger plot; they serve merely as symbols embedded in an ambiguous allegorical message about gender roles.

Sleeping Beauties is timely; it forces the reader to ask themselves moral questions about their own relationship with men and women: How would I act in this situation? Do I know people who would act like this character? Some may find it “too political”, but it really doesn’t have much of a prescriptive message that it whacks you over the head with, and King has always blended his own liberalism into his work.

But it has other issues. Sleeping Beauties could have been an epic, gripping story like King’s post-apocalytpic masterpiece, The Stand; it could have been a poignant parable about gender and power. Instead, it overpromises and underdelivers. 3.5 stars because of the great characterizations and some powerful ideas that stay with you, but rounded down because it falls short of its potential.

In spite of these criticisms, I hope that father and son will continue to collaborate; there’s a dynamism and attention to detail here that I’ve missed in some of King’s recent works, and that holds the promise of greatness.