Review: Sleeping Beauties

Sleeping Beauties by Stephen King
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There's nothing like a big, thick Stephen King novel, and this is nothing like a big, thick Stephen King novel....

Actually, that's not true. 'Sleeping Beauties' is big and thick (700+ pages) and is very like a Stephen King novel, possibly too like some of his previous books but that doesn't make it a bad book. I enjoyed it a lot. King excels at long narratives with large casts of character. When it works (The Stand, IT) it works brilliantly. In the odd case (Tommyknockers) when it doesn't work, the results can be a car-crash (and not the horribly graphically described car-crash a Stephen King would excel at...). Like 'Under the Dome', 'Sleeping Beauties' is closer to the former than the latter but, unlike 'Under the Dome' doesn't, for me, have and ending which lets it down.

The book is written with Owen King and, not having read Steve's younger son's work, I am not qualified to say how much of the book, or which parts, Owen writes. 'Sleeping Beauties' reads like a Stephen King novel although it there are fewer horror-tropes and more fairytale fantasy elements than usual (perhaps down to Owen?). There is also a very strong feminist subtext.

Like 'Under the Dome' the plot here involves a small town subjected to supernatural, unexplained events. In 'Sleeping Beauties', the women of the town fall into a deep, cocooned sleep and the men fight over whose fault it is. The phenomenon is worldwide but the focus of the story is on the town of Dooling and much of the action is concentrated in the nearby women's prison, a setting which allows the Kings to examine male/female relationships in a more black and white way; there are few shades of grey and little in the way of allegory. While this can become a little heavy-handed at times, the current exposure of sexual predators in the political and film worlds suggests the exaggeration may be warranted.

So, not King's best but a very entertaining big, thick novel.

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