Sleeping Beauties by Stephen King
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
I don’t know what went wrong, here. I suspect the youngest King sibling just isn’t up to the snuff of his father and older brother.
While reading this, I frequently felt as though the two authors were fighting for control. One would go off on a tangent of limited importance, often garbled by what felt like overblown political correctness, and in the next handful of pages you could almost physically feel someone grabbing hold of the helm and dragging it back to course… painfully, and not always successfully.
The premise – every woman in the world falls asleep and goes into a cocoon, what happens now? – is interesting enough, but I felt the execution was frequently lacking. Most sequences felt as though I’d seen them, in better shape, elsewhere; by the halfway point I was wondering if Owen dug through dad’s junk drawer, pulled out a pile of random first draft pages of other books – especially Under the Dome, The Stand and Cell – then asked dad to help him glue them together somehow. It sounds kind of harsh to put it that way, but…
I found the whole thing difficult to care about. There were dozens of characters, but unlike other King works where a large cast – like The Stand, ‘Salem’s Lot, or the Dark Tower saga – features, I had difficulty telling them apart. Most of them were faceless and interchangeable, and descriptives for the majority of them only came when a hammer was about to be brought out for a bit of virtue signaling. Clint and Lila are well done and interesting, but their marital conflict feels forced and stupid, and blows over way too easily, leaving you asking yourself what the point of it was.
The last gripe about the characters comes in the form of who one might arguably call the “main” character of the book; Evie Black. Without spoiling much, she’s the key to everything, and has the standard set of mystic mumbo-jumbo for the magic MacGuffin. She has the potential to be interesting, but despite having several chapters from her POV and multiple other characters commenting on her emotional state, we never really get to understand what she’s doing. She seems to be playing both sides against the middle for no reason, despite obvious distaste for it and sympathy on both sides. If there was some more insight into her motives, her nature, or what the hell she was actually hoping to accomplish, it might have been better off.
And then there’s the ending. We’re treated to roughly twenty pages of staccato notes on what everybody did after things were resolved, feeling like one of those 80’s movies that puts text over still images of the main characters, only even less satisfying. It’s not their fates that are the problem; it’s the presentation.
All in all, I feel this wasn’t really worth my time. It was… okay, at best. Maybe worth grabbing if it’s on the cheap or you absolutely MUST have everything King has written, but probably skippable otherwise.
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