A perfect book that didn’t work out (“Sleeping Beauties” by Stephen King and Owen King)

You know, there are books that, after an absurdly long time, you’re no longer reading — you’re enduring them. You torment yourself, the book, and start ruining all your reading plans. I’m sure you know exactly the kind of books I’m talking about. Well — Sleeping Beauties by Stephen and Owen King is precisely one of those.

Plot

A mysterious virus called “Aurora” spreads across the planet. Women around the world begin to fall asleep and never wake up. But there is one woman named Evie Black who can still sleep normally. She kills two drug dealers and deliberately turns herself in to the police of the small town of Dooling so they’ll lock her in prison. Once behind bars, Evie gives an ultimatum to the psychologist temporarily acting as the prison warden: if she manages to survive a certain number of days — and isn’t killed by people desperate to learn why she can wake up while other women can’t — she will stop the virus, and all the women will wake up…

Features of the book

The review should probably begin by pointing out that Sleeping Beauties is a very thick book. And if you’re even a little familiar with Stephen King’s writing, you know exactly what that means. That’s right — the story will unfold very, very slowly. There are so many characters that the book includes a list of them at the beginning. And despite the fact that, in the best traditions of King Sr., the book is split into small subchapters, even the fairly long first chapter isn’t enough to introduce the main characters.

The Kings slowly introduce the cast while immersing the reader in the specifics of Dooling. King usually handles large casts brilliantly — just remember The Stand or Needful Things. But this is not one of those cases. By page 100, the reader only learns that there is some kind of disease — but women in town start falling victim to it en masse many pages later, as the book description promises.

Weaknesses

The biggest problem is that the book is extremely drawn-out. Starting from about the second third, it feels like the story stalls and becomes bogged down with a massive amount of unnecessary details. And if earlier these details at least nudged the story forward, the second third is loaded with an overwhelming amount of completely irrelevant nuances, events, and tangents — outright lapses into wordiness that start to genuinely irritate.

And trying to break through the last 200–250 pages (the final third) is very difficult. Not because of what’s written there — but because of everything written before. It’s hard to believe that after several hundred pages of treading water, the Kings will suddenly deliver something exciting.

Around this point, the authors start inserting “deus ex machina” moments by randomly generating new characters. New heroes appear out of thin air, drastically affect the plot, and vanish just as quickly. We get a guy who can casually steal weapons from a police station; criminal brothers who can demolish an entire prison just for fun; mobs ready to storm the place together with the police… and so on. All of this feels like the Kings had no idea where the story should go, and every time they hit a dead end, they simply invented a new character. There’s a saying: if a gun hangs on the wall in the first act, it must fire in the third. In Sleeping Beauties, the Kings rush to hang guns on the wall already in the third act — and immediately fire them.

Ending

And then the ending. As Morton Rainey said, “The most important part of a story is the ending.” Exactly. But in our case — without spoiling too much — it’s bad. The most absurdly ending one could possibly come up with. Read the synopsis and imagine the most incompetently and obvious written ending. I’m confident that in 99 out of 100 cases, you’ll be right.

Oddities in narration

There’s another strange thing. Toward the end, I noticed that within a single subchapter the narrative constantly jumps between characters.

The problem is that in a subchapter told from a specific character’s POV, all references like “he,” “his,” and so on should logically refer to that same character — otherwise the reader gets confused. If you’ve read A Game of Thrones, Dan Brown’s Robert Langdon books, or King’s Needful Things, you know exactly what I mean. But here, in certain moments, everything turns into a muddle. I’ve read nearly all of King’s work, and I don’t remember anything like this before. So there are only two possibilities: either King has completely forgotten how to write, or he simply didn’t bother reading the chapters written by his son.

Trends

Before reading the novel, I had come across opinions that King supposedly bowed to trends, praised feminism, and dove into “woke” themes. To those whowrite such things — did you even read the book?
To close the topic of “tolerance”: look at the main negative character from the men’s side. Now from the women’s side. Don’t see a pattern? The main female heroine is actually a racist and openly admits it.
Same with feminism. Without spoiling too much — the women create an ideal world without men. So ideal that they are ready to abandon it at the first opportunity. I don’t know who saw trend-chasing here, but to me it looks like King is blatantly trolling the entire movement. And doing it very blatantly.

Big Idea

As for the big idea — it’s simple.
Men can’t live in a world without women.
Women can’t live in a world without men.
A sort of ode to the traditional family.
Not that anyone will be disappointed — because not many people will actually finish the book. Even the audiobook still hasn’t been released; apparently the narrator keeps falling asleep during recording.

Ratings

According to ratings, this is currently King’s worst novel. You can argue with that, of course, but I understand everyone who thinks so. Although most of these voters probably haven’t read The Regulators or Lisey’s Story, novels that truly deserve the title of King’s worst. But Sleeping Beauties definitely earns a well-deserved third place.

Conclusion

Sleeping Beauties is a niche novel strictly for hardcore Stephen King fans who will forgive him absolutely anything. It could have appealed to a broader audience (broader than King’s many-million fanbase), because it has all the attributes of a good novel — but its excessive length and endless chewing of the same themes entirely cancel out all its strengths.

I’ll take the risk and give it 6 sleeping pills out of 10, because I am a fan of both Kings and their storytelling style. Still, even I sometimes found Sleeping Beauties working on me like actual sleeping pills.