Books: Sleeping Beauties By Stephen King and Owen King (2017)

“In a future so real and near it might be now, something happens when women go to sleep; they become shrouded in a cocoon-like gauze. If they are awakened, if the gauze wrapping their bodies is disturbed or violated, the women become feral and spectacularly violent; and while they sleep they go to another place. The men of our world are abandoned, left to their increasingly primal devices. One woman, however, the mysterious Evie, is immune to the blessing or curse of the sleeping disease. Is Evie a medical anomaly to be studied, or is she a demon who must be slain?”

Much of Stephen King and his youngest son, Owen’s Sleeping Beauties plays out like an elongated morality tale that owes a lot to The Twilight Zone, the 2016 presidential election (and the consequences that bleed on as I write this of that election), the many dystopian novels (including the elder King’s The Stand, Under the Dome, and even Joe Hill’s The Fireman) that have become popular over the last decade or so (insomuch as these type of novel tropes never really go away), Netflix’s Stranger Things, The Andromeda Strain, and (if I can use the word) the feminist movement.

While this book plays out as a fantasy novel (with King’s family patented ability to create a real, breathing world), it also a book designed to be a mirror on our current state of mind. It reflects issues such as women’s roles in our society (and setting the story within a women’s correctional facility helps bring these themes forward), what they must do to keep men happy (and who are, as always, generally the ones whom start the problems), and contemplates that while some women are born bad, there is a possibility that some whom are incarcerated were put there by the treachery of men.

So, as I’ve done over the last few years of reading the books by Stephen King and his two sons, Owen King and Joe Hill, I see his tales less as horror novels and more political with some deeply metaphorical meanings that I take into the real world. The elder King has always excelled at trying to figure out the motives of the humans he creates in his novel (and something the Joe Hill has done in his novels, as well as Owen did with his books). In many ways the tropes that come forward, the people who do bad things, are not evil in any real sense (well there are evil people in King’s novels), but people who do bad things in pursuant of goals they believe is right.

Take Frank Geary as an example in Sleeping Beauties. He has anger issues and has not addressed them. Those issues have destroyed his marriage, but the love of his daughter Nana propels him to horrible things as the book progresses. You do have sympathy for him, and the writer’s make the reader aware that Geary kind of hates what he has to do, but then that’s the point, I think. Both King’s make their agenda pretty well known (as the elder one does on his Twitter feed) that most of all our world’s problems can be lain at the doorstop of men, men who believe they are doing the right thing when all they’re truly doing is what’s best for them.

The novel really does not explain how this Aurora virus (or whatever it is) comes from, why it started. The same goes for the mysterious women emissary that goes by the name of Evie. You get the impression that she is some sort of higher being (though she says she’s as human as anyone else) but who or what she is (the ghost of Christmas past, present, or future?) is never fully explored but she is the fulcrum on which hangs an Earth with women or one that has just men (and doomed to extinction).

And on the other side, the King’s version of the Upsidedown, is a world that has moved on without men and the women who awake there who now have the ability to set their destinies and reset the once burned out world on a path to new enlightenment.

It’s hard to say if the book is overtly over-long, but clocking in at 700 pages, I did find at times where the narrative could’ve used a few trims that would've not impacted the tome. But that is another trope of the King family.

But as I noted, out of all Stephen King’s books, Sleeping Beauties may be his most unconcealed political one. Neither father nor son shies away from blaming a huge amount of our world’s problems on men, who use guns to solve all their problems, instead of trying to figure out how to solve them by coming together. They attack our patriarchal society with aplomb, they attack the current president in the White House (without ever making it obvious), and they point out the absurdity of a small Appalachian town that has an arsenal worthy of our military.

There is much more here, and maybe it needs a deeper, more critical look than I can give, but I simply enjoyed the book. That’s what counts for me. But it also clearly showed me something I’ve felt for a long time, that maybe our patriarchal needs more women in control. Because in the end, when everything done and blown up, women survive, clean up and move on. That’s what makes them heroes in my book of life.

And I wish, oh so do I wish, I could be like them (not that I want to be, physically, a women, but have their innate abilities to be able to solve problems without violence).