Emily May's Reviews > Sleeping Beauties

Once a serious conflict commences—a fight to the death—objective reality is quickly lost in the smoke and noise.
Also, many of those who could have added their own accounts were dead.

As I was reading Sleeping Beauties, I was trying to find the words in my mind to sum up what I felt about the story - and Stephen King's stories in general - but then I got to the Authors' Note and discovered that they had done it for me: "If a fantasy novel is to be believable, the details underpinning it must be realistic."

^This is what I think makes King Sr's stories so strong. King integrates the supernatural seamlessly with the everyday. There’s no big explosion out of nowhere, no aliens suddenly arriving on a giant ship… just the quiet everyday lives of these nuanced characters until something disastrous slips in. Slowly. Naturally, even. As if this could happen right now. To me and my family. It's extremely effective.

You can look at Sleeping Beauties in two different ways. As simply a really great horror story, or as a deeply metaphorical and political work. On the one hand, it's a creepy tale of a "sleeping sickness" that affects only the female population. As women around the world go to sleep, the men around them find they are not waking up. And what's more, gross, sticky threads start forming a cocoon around them. Attempts to remove this web have dire consequences.

One woman, the aptly-named Evie (or Eve), seems immune to the sickness and obviously knows something about what is going on. Maybe she even caused it. Why won't the women wake up? What made this happen? Are they gone for good? Have their minds gone somewhere else? What will the men do now? Can the few women still awake battle the delirium and fight off sleep? So many questions.

“In a terrified world, false news was king.”

And then, on the other hand, it's difficult to not see this as a gender politics tale. You can't have a supernatural tree, a snake, and a woman called Eve and pretend not to notice the parallels. Plus, it's also an absolutely stellar takedown of Donald Trump, sexism, those who are opposed to women’s rights and equality, sexual assault dismissed as “locker room talk”, police shootings of unarmed black men and women, and the belief in sensationalist news stories on the Internet. King², it seems, has written a critical tale of our times disguised as a dark horror fantasy.

There's definitely room to go into an in-depth analysis with this book, and perhaps I will sometime. But for now I will just say that I enjoyed this sinister, clever novel very much. Like with a number of King Sr's works, I feel like some parts could have been cut down without losing anything valuable, and that while detail is good, he sometimes crosses the line into "too much" territory. It's a small criticism, though. Once again I am reminded why he is such a popular author among horror fans and literary snobs alike.

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