What happens when you mix supernatural horror and feminism
SLEEPING BEAUTIES by Stephen King and Owen King (Hodder, £20)
WHAT would happen to men if all the women in the world fell asleep? This was the original idea for a novel that Owen King pitched to his father. “All the lights went green inside my head,” was Stephen King’s response. The son thought the father should write it, the father thought the son should, so “collaboration was our compromise” and this is the result, a sprawling, 700page mixed bag of a book, a mix of supernatural and feminist horror.
Like so much of King Senior’s fiction, this is a story about what happens to a small town community when it is invaded by evil. Set in Dooling, West Virginia, it begins with the appearance of a mysterious, beautiful, naked woman called Evie Black, who has brutally murdered two crystal meth cookers — both men — in their trailer. The police arrest her, clothe her and take her to Dooling Correctional Facility for Women, where she continues to exert her strange powers: reading minds, bending people to her will, seeing the future, communicating with animals and levitating — from inside her cell.
Crucially, she sleeps and wakes as she likes, while all the women around her — and all over the world — are falling asleep only to be enshrouded, in a strange fibrous white cocoon with plagues of moths everywhere.
Any man - usually a witless husband - who makes the mistake of trying to wake a cocooned woman — or worse, to rape one, will find himself confronted by a snarling, rabid zombie and having his head pounded to a pulp. Women who have managed to stay awake are frantically downing uppers, caffeine and anything else they can get in order not to succumb to what quickly becomes dubbed the Aurora virus. So far, so creepy, so brilliant.
When word gets out that Evie may either be the cause of or hold the antidote to the virus, a posse of guntoting men desperate to get their women back, band together to come and lynch her. Clint Norcross, prison shrink and mostly all round good guy, has the unenviable task of protecting Evie , since she has told him that if she is killed, the sleeping women will be lost forever. No pressure, then.
Elsewhere, bereft men are fighting each other, committing suicide and generally not coping. The message is clear: men need women and a society without them will quickly fall apart. How different to the world of the sleeping women, who wake up to find themselves in a parallel Dooling, where everything works, everyone gets along and the worst problems are being stung by poison ivy and missing “a good old Friday night fuck”.
Sleeping Beauties has a familiar narrative structure, some terrific dialogue and great jokes that Stephen King fans will enjoy, inspite of a heaving cast of characters and occasional laboured Old Testament overtones, including a serpent and a tree of life, not to mention Evie herself.
The problem is that it’s an unhappy hybrid. For all the horror, it can’t help sounding like a feminist tract about men behaving badly. In a recent joint interview, King Senior said, “How would men fold their shirts, who would clean the ring in the toilet, all these things men don’t do?” to which one answer might be that they would learn. But then his skill as a storyteller has always been to turn the banal into the terrifying. King Junior, on the other hand, who has published comic short stories and a well-received novel, Double Feature, has shied away from the supernatural, saying he doesn’t write “genre” and that he has never wanted “anyone to buy what I wrote thinking they were going to have a Stephen King experience”. Sleeping Beauties is something else.