Stephen King - Sleeping Beauties

Stephen King & Owen King - Sleeping Beauties

Scribner, 2017

Recently, I read Stephen King’s newest book titled Sleeping Beauties which he wrote with his son Owen King. Published by Scribner at the end of 2017. It is a book that takes a stance on equality and on the current status of women around the world in an unique way. Once again King cleans the table with a neverseen before story that takes the reader to a completely different time and world were everything is not what it used to be. The events take place in the town of Dooling in the United States were various characters go through different times when the pandemic Aurora virus drops on the world like some fairytale enchantment.

The spectrum of characters goes far and wide. There are characters from many ethnic minorities, including different religions, sexualities and so called races. They are all just normal people who are living their life with their best ability until the epidemic strikes and causes mass hysteria. When the plot starts to form, there is a couple of characters that have a significant role in the following events.

There is Lola who is one of the few female police officers in town, she is married to the county prison’s psychiatrist and has a 18-year-old son, Jared, with him. Lola and Clint are probably the most important characters while the plot formed because of their statuses. When the epidemic keeps folding, they both are being forced into different leading positions where they have to take more resbonsibility than they would like to.

Moreover, the center of the events is the Jane Doe of Dooling, Evie Black, or at least that is the name she gave to the police. The mysterious black haired woman appears out of nowhere just before the disease starts to took down women one by one. She murdered two local drug dealers and ended up in the county prison. There is one thing about her that gets more attention, it is the fact that she is able to sleep and wake up, the disease does not affect her in any way.

When I read more and more of the book, I started to focus more on the plot and realized that Sleeping Beauties has a few similarities to one of Stephen King’s earlier works, Under The Dome. It is not a bad thing at all, but I think it is worth of mentioning. In addition, there is one really interesting thing about the style of writing. As I mentioned earlier, the book is written by Stephen and his son, Owen, which means that it contains two styles of writing. To my own surprise, I was actually able to recognize the two styles and tell them apart. That did not bother or distract me, and I think that if the book is read by a person who does not know Stephen’s production by heart, they probably will not be able to tell the difference unless they especially focus on it.

To me, this book is about women and their importance in the world. Nowadays, we live in a society where equality is not met, not yet. There are still some parts in the world where women are just objects to men. They do all the tasks at the house, stay at home with the kids and are not even allowed to leave the house without male company. It is really hard to explain but I think that the book is actually about the fact that women are just as important as men and a place without women just could not possibly exist. Mainly, because it would not work and that is not how the nature was designed to work.

In the end, I can say that it was absolutely worth of reading and I will probably read it again at some point and get more into the thoughtful side of the book rather than focusing on the plot itself. I definitely would recommend this book to everyone because it gives a lot of food for thought and really makes the reader think about equality and the World’s current situation in general. In my opinion, this piece of literature is more about the inventely hidden message than the actual story. If that is not art in its most impressive form, I do not know what is.