“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).
