Eyes wide shut
A stranger arrives and finds big trouble in a little town.
It’s a familiar plot setup, one that often works exceedingly well in popular culture. Stephen King has used some variation of it multiple times. Think of “Salem’s Lot.” Or “Needful Things.” Or “Under the Dome.” Or “The Gunslinger.” There may be other, better examples among his 50-odd books, but those are a good start.
“Sleeping Beauties,” King’s new collaboration with his son Owen, again uses the small-town trope to good effect. This time, however, the setting isn’t a rustic location in Maine, such as Derry, Castle Rock or Haven. The Kings swap Vacationland for Appalachia — Dooling, W.Va., to be specific. A women’s prison and meth production may be the town’s two biggest industries, now that the coal mines have shut down.
Although it boasts a large cast of characters, “Sleeping Beauties” focuses much of its attention on the Norcross family — Clint, Lila and Jared. Clint is the senior psychiatric officer at the Dooling Correctional Facility for Women, Lila serves as Dooling’s chief of police and Jared attends the local high school.
It is Lila who first experiences the supernatural weirdness about to envelop her home. A killing at a meth lab, where one victim had his head literally pushed through the side of a trailer, brings her face-to-face with a remarkably calm, half-naked woman who calls herself Evie, no last name given. As well as being party to the carnage that occurred in the lab, Evie seems connected to a mysterious phenomenon sweeping the globe.
Reports reach Dooling that women around the world are falling asleep, failing to wake up and exuding a gauze-like material that covers their faces and envelops their bodies. One character explains, “They’re forming these — they’re like cocoons. Membranes, coatings. The cocoons seem to be partly cerumen — ear wax — partly cebum, which is the oily stuff on the sides of your nose, partially mucus, and ... something no one else understands, except it’s a protein with no DNA.”
That’s a sublime bit of Kingian dialogue, with the optimal mix of the creepy, the nauseating and the scientifically unlikely.
Attempting to remove the alien material causes the awakened sleepers to go berserk and lethally attack whoever disturbs them. Sequestered at the prison, Evie seems to be the only woman in the world capable of waking up of her own accord and not indulging in a homicidal frenzy.
Outside the facility, many of the men of Dooling start to panic as they helplessly watch their mothers, daughters, wives and sisters succumb to the Aurora Plague (named for the Disney princess). Some of the locals decide to storm the prison and fetch Evie for study and/or punishment. Evie tells Clint Norcross that, if he can promise to keep her alive for a few more days, there’s hope of bringing the planet’s women back from wherever they’ve gone.
The point of view bounces around among a large cast of characters beyond the Norcross household, and some folks are more pleasant company than others. The villains are suitably awful and reasonably multidimensional. They include a sexually abusive prison guard, an animal control officer deranged by the plight of his sleeping daughter and a couple of backwoods criminal lowlifes toting a rocket launcher.
The female characters aren’t all saints, but the Kings make it abundantly clear which is the more violent and destructive sex.
What isn’t really dealt with, however, is the question of why these earth-shattering events take place in Dooling. What in particular makes the town a supernatural battleground in the war between the sexes?
It’s unproductive to attempt to tease apart the plot and prose of “Sleeping Beauties” to determine what might be the contribution of Stephen or that of Owen, author of “Double Feature” and “We’re All in This Together.” The novel provides enough action, thrills and humor to keep readers burning the midnight oil, but some may feel a bit let down by the book’s familiar air. There’s comfort to be found in tales such as this, but one might wish for more risk taking.
Stephen King’s last major collaboration, “Black House,” written with Peter Straub, felt like something new and unusual, with its weird, omniscient point of view and gonzo “Dark Tower”-related plot. In contrast, “Sleeping Beauties” hits many expected beats but never ventures far into the unpredictable.
Maybe the Kings are too much in sync. Perhaps they could have experimented a little more and let any rough patches remain. However the father-son collaboration worked, “Sleeping Beauties” is nevertheless a well-tooled horror thriller, a worthy venture from a productive family business.
Michael Berry writes the science fiction and fantasy column for The San Francisco Chronicle. Email: books@sfchronicle.com