Sleeping Beauties

Sleeping Beauties – By Stephen King and Owen King

Reading this novel, for me, was a bit like eating a wonderful meal at a gorgeous restaurant, but my experience was somewhat ruined by the guy sitting at the table next to me who yakked loudly on his cell phone the entire time I was eating.  There were so many great things within this story that I experienced, but I couldn’t help shaking my head since there were small, annoying things that took away from the overall enjoyment.  Of course, this isn’t the first time I’ve made this comparison after reading a Stephen King novel.

I should also point out that this book is actually a joint effort with son Owen.  There are a lot of people who griped about this book because they said Owen isn’t as good as dad, and had Stephen written this thing solo, it would have been noticeably better. I’m not sure I buy into that theory.  This book seemed par for the course with every other Stephen King novel I’ve read, and since I don’t know how much he contributed versus how much Junior contributed, it’s very easy for me to look at this book as a run-of-the-mill Stephen King novel.

The first 500 pages of this book were great. Without giving away the plot, this is one of those ‘mass hysteria’ King novels where the events affect an entire community/continent/world.  Think of some of his books like ‘The Stand’, ‘Under the Dome’, ‘The Tommyknockers’, or ‘Salem’s Lot’. So as the book progresses, I couldn’t help but wonder, “Are all of the characters going to bind together as and do something useful due to the unforeseen circumstance (The Stand)?  Or are they going to ploddle around like idiotic morons and essentially destroy everything good (Under the Dome)?   It ends up being a mixed bag, yet I was overly satisfied with the direction the book took and the overall end results.

Which then leads me to my complaints. Sadly, these things that I’m about to mention aren’t isolated to this one book.  This book can be construed as one of those ‘male vs. female’ books, and Stephen King is passionately anti-male.  It’s hard to go for more than 5 pages without King making some reference to a particular misogynistic moron in this story, either in first or third person.  Now, I know the world has idiotic males, but in Stephen King’s world, you would think the world is overflowing with them.  Ask yourself this, if women were suddenly supernaturally disappearing, do you really know that many men who would say things like: 

“We should call FEMA so someone can watch my kids. I have a ball game to go to tonight”.   

Or:

 “This is God’s way of punishing women since they now all want to wear pants”. 

 

If you’re reading this review and think that most men act this way, I would respectfully suggest you find a new group of friends.   Yes, there are evil women in this book as well (a large part of the story takes place in a women’s prison), but when women do bad things, according to King, it’s never their fault.  He obviously blames their crimes on these women’s fathers, boyfriends, and husbands.    Again, these sentiments aren’t exactly new within a King novel, but he lays it on way too thick here. (For those that don’t know, Stephen King’s father abandoned him and his family when Stephen was very young, and King’s been venting about it in his books ever since.)

Then we come to the ‘gross’ factor.  Again, pretty common in a King novel.  I seem to remember situations in other Stephen King novels where bullies rub kids’ noses in animal excrement, a racist white kid who poisons a black kid’s dog, and an animal that devours a woman’s dead husband at her feet while she’s handcuffed to the bed.  Fortunately, there isn’t TOO much of that here, but it’s still incredibly distracting and annoying. Do we really need to read things like:

“John sat in the front seat of his car picking his nose”.

And then his companion says: 

“Are you going to wipe that booger under the car seat?”

I simply don’t GET why Stephen King thinks such dialogue is necessary to move a story forward.  I’ve known 12-year olds with a higher level of maturity.  It continues to amaze me how King can be such a great writer and such an awful writer at the same time.

Anyway, back to the book.  Once the ‘showdown’ happens, things move a tad slower than I would have liked.  Drawn out “action sequences” are much more bearable on a movie screen than they are in a book.  I was also a tad disappointed with some of the characters at the end.  In our story, our two main central characters (and I’m trying REALLY hard not to give any plot away) have a simple misunderstanding in the middle of the story. For some reason, they never really resolve their issue.  It seemed a bit disappointing when the whole thing concluded.

If Mr. King happens to read this review, I would love to let him know that I would gladly help him with his next book. No, I’m not good enough to come up with a story that rivals his best work, nor do I have the gift of moving a story along.  What I DO have that Mr. King does not, is the ability to know how real people talk to each other in real situations.  I would also love to teach him how to distance himself from how a 12-year old adolescent normally thinks who is heavily into bodily excrements and fart noises.

This was oh so close to being a great book.