New King thriller more of a snoozer
Stephen King’s enthralling ‘‘Under the Dome,” published in 2009, dreamed up a small Maine town suddenly covered by an invisible, impermeable dome. The book is one of his best, drawing its terror from human nature, not from a voyage into fantasyland.
Now King and his son Owen have tried something similar in “Sleeping Beauties.”
The small town is Dooling, somewhere in Appalachia. The strange situation: Women who fall asleep don’t wake up, and they grow tendrils that turn into cocoons. If someone tries to brush those cocoons away, the sleeping angel might get angry and gouge out some eyes.
Like “Under the Dome,” “Sleeping Beauties” is straightforwardly written. The less-happy news is that this book is sleepy in its own right. It has a lot of
characters, but few spring to life and many seem repetitive. It feels as if some kind of father-son politesse kept this 700-page book from being usefully tightened.
The main setting is a prison for women, where we meet everyone from the warden to the insomniac who killed her family. We meet Dooling’s sheriff, Lila Norcross, the closest thing the crowded book has to a main character.
And we meet the beautiful Eve Black, who mocks all men, has supernatural powers and commands armies of moths, which provide the book’s only real ■ fright. She is key during the many, many scenes in which women start falling asleep.
Long after we learn that the malady, called the Aurora virus, is a worldwide blight, the women start doing their zombie thing. One group is drawn to a magical haven they name Our Place, as if they are a support group running their own coffee shop.
While the sleeping/ waking women bond and leave behind their conveniently bad marriages, the men act out. Some are righteous. Some are brutes.
For a book about resetting gender stereotypes, this one clings tightly to them. Not even the inevitable zombie apocalypse feels new.
Finally, this father-son collaboration has some prose that the older guy’s fans will find unrecognizable. He has been known to ramble, but he is rarely sensitive or vague.
In one typical paragraph from “Sleeping Beauties,” a character “could ask the question, but her brain could not break it down in a way that allowed a satisfactory answer. Any response dissolved before it could form. ... Why did it feel so bad, just to have done her job? Those answers wouldn’t coalesce, either, couldn’t even begin to.”
Stephen King, newly 70, didn’t become Stephen King by waffling this way.