Kings create eerily believable fairy tale
Father-son duo’s novel has parallels with current American political scene
That Stephen King passed on a portion of his ungodly storytelling powers to his adult sons, Joe Hill and Owen King, is evidenced by their respective published fiction. How do those talents stack up against their father’s, a reader is tempted to ask, and who would be left standing in a showdown?
Sleeping Beauties, a collaboration between Stephen and Owen King, may not deliver that authorial father-son gunfight, but it opens a fascinating window into the work of two very different but unmistakably linked talents.
The plot is as simple as a fairy tale’s: the world’s women contract a mysterious disease (or possibly an enchantment) that sends them into an irreversible coma. Once asleep, their exposed skin spontaneously generates a cocoon-like covering that, if removed, awakens the sleeper and turns her into a murderous psychopath.
When the disbelieving population finally accepts the extent and severity of the epidemic, some women resort to extreme measures — from energy-drink-spiked coffee to meth and cocaine — to stay awake, while others accept their fate.
A sizable minority of men, meanwhile, resort to caveman behaviour, looting, killing and even burning their cocooned loved ones.
The Kings focus the story on the town of Dooling in Appalachia, home to a women’s prison and not much else. There, Dr. Clinton Norcross, the prison psychiatrist, and his wife, Lila, Dooling’s sheriff, struggle to keep order as the town’s women fall asleep and the men get drunk and itchy for action.
Into this apocalyptic scenario enters the ethereally beautiful Evie, whom we meet in a country meth shack, where she murders two male scumbags abusing a hopeless female addict. When arrested by Lila Norcross, Evie exhibits supernatural powers of strength, telepathy and mind control, although she allows herself to be placed in the women’s prison.
It soon becomes apparent that Evie holds the key to awakening the world’s female population.
When word gets out that she is immune to the disease, a showdown brews between the prison staff and a posse led by a local dogcatcher who wants to save his daughter.
The obvious parallels between Sleeping Beauties and the contemporary American political scene are no doubt intentional. You can almost feel the Kings itching to deliver one of those “In the Age of Trump” speeches so beloved of American liberals. Luckily, we are spared. Readers of Stephen King will recognize scenarios and character types from his previous takes on the apocalypse, especially Under the Dome, but this is not a bad thing.
The plot takes a while to pick up steam but, when it does, the action is irresistible.
The novel’s more fantastic elements, including the depiction of an alternative reality inhabited by Dooling’s sleeping women, are evocative and eerily believable.
Did King senior write the action scenes and King junior the fantasy sequences?
Would women really be better off without men?
Sleeping Beauties offers these and many other interesting questions to ponder.
Now bring on Joe Hill, please. James Grainger is the author of Harmless.