Sleeping Beauties
A Novel
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4.2 • 773 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
In this spectacular New York Times bestselling father/son collaboration that “barrels along like a freight train” (Publishers Weekly), Stephen King and Owen King tell the highest of high-stakes stories: what might happen if women disappeared from the world of men?
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, a better place, where harmony prevails and conflict is rare. One woman, the mysterious “Eve Black,” is immune to the blessing or curse of the sleeping disease. Is Eve a medical anomaly to be studied? Or is she a demon who must be slain?
Abandoned, left to their increasingly primal urges, the men divide into warring factions, some wanted to kill Eve, some to save her. Others exploit the chaos to wreak their own vengeance on new enemies. All turn to violence in a suddenly all-male world. Set in a small Appalachian town whose primary employer is a woman’s prison, Sleeping Beauties is a wildly provocative, gloriously dramatic father-son collaboration that feels particularly urgent and relevant today.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Stephen King collaborated with his son Owen on this spellbinding, spooky story about an Appalachian town afflicted by a strange pandemic affecting only women. The Kings’ talent for grab-you-by-the-collar storytelling, gloriously real characters, and grimly hilarious dialogue is on full display. Sleeping Beauties is a long novel, but it's fantastically entertaining.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This delicious first collaboration between Stephen King (Doctor Sleep) and his son Owen (Intro to Alien Invasion) is a horror-tinged realistic fantasy that imagines what could happen if most of the women of the world fall asleep, leaving men on their own. No one in Dooling County figures the sickness will affect their rural Appalachian life, but TV images of women asleep and unable to be woken, with white membranous stuff wrapped around their heads, makes residents undeniably distraught. Dr. Clinton Norcross of the Dooling Women's Correctional Facility finds himself unexpectedly in charge of 114 female prisoners when an unhappy guard slips a bunch of Xanax into the coffee of warden Janice Coates, causing her to fall asleep and succumb to the sickness. Clinton's wife, county sheriff Lila Norcross, is called to the scene of a double murder and explosion; en route, she nearly runs down a half-naked woman standing in the middle of the highway. That woman, Evie, seems to have some connection to the peculiar goings-on, though no one knows what it might be. The authors' writing is seamless and naturally flowing. The book gets off to a slow start because of the amount of setup needed, but once the action begins, it barrels along like a freight train.
Customer Reviews
Entertains. Slow at first but picked up and was worth reading
Liked it pretty well but wouldn’t read it again.
Worst King title in the library.
I have read and enjoyed most of King’s books. I did something with this one I have never done: quit halfway through. I could not take any more preachy political man-hating. There is a reason Joe Hill has not depended on his father’s last name. His books are fantastic. I will not be reading any more with Owen King’s name on the cover.
So the Kings are political now?
Interesting story, typical King page-turner, but King just can’t resist the urge to insert politics into his story. Trump is awful, white cops are bad, and all men are angry. I miss the old King.