Nope. Sorry. Not this one.......
Co-written with his novelist son Owen, it falls into the same category as the "The Stand" or "Under The Dome".......a massive, lengthy Apocalypse, heavily populated with a teeming cast of characters that almost requires its own mini-phone book to list them all.
But this is no fundamental good vs. evil tale.....it's a huge boiling-over pot of social issues, a shapeless, mostly directionless mess swirling around the eternal clashes, collisions and unions between men and women.
The King Boys firmly fall on the side of females.......as they imagine how our current world would handle a supernatural affliction that not only puts the women on earth into a deep slumber, but cocoons them like insects in white webbing.
Any man foolish enough to tear away this self-generated shroud does in fact wake up his sleeping beauty, turning her into an insane murderous zombie for a few minutes until she goes back to sleep and re-cocoons. Oops...so much for a true love kiss....
This plays hell with the global social structure and before you know it, the men of the world commence behaving like the crazed, torch-wielding villagers in "Frankenstein", setting fire to women napping in their plain white wrappers.......
Yes, it's a whole lot to swallow.......and we hate to say it, but the book isn't very good at making any of this convincing.......
The Kings place their Ground Zero in Dooling, West Virginia, where the whole crazy shebang appears to be administered or overseen by an immortal, beautiful female entity named 'Evie'. Like many King otherworldly creatures, she possesses enormous powers and confounds one and all with her pop-culture wisecracking. (She might have existed for eons, but still does a mean John Wayne imitation....)
Evie's patter makes for some funny stuff in the book, as do the rest of the enormous cast of Dooling townsfolk.......a collection of the usual King suspects.........a few benevolent good-hearted souls and a slew of morons, bullies, wife-beaters, drunks, and assorted people in serious need of enforced anger management. (And as any King Constant Reader knows, the very worst of this bunch will somehow end up in positions of authority, the better to cause more tragic violence....)
Halfway through the book's 700 plus pages, the story's mythology expands and deepens to hammer home the Kings' premise that women are inherently good and men are the true architects of hell on earth........but it comes off like a lumpy mixture of stuff gleaned from old childrens' storybooks.....
And just in case we didn't get the point of all the man/woman comparisons, the Kings concoct a finale that reads like their own spectacularly gory version of "The Illiad"......with the ever mysterious, unknowable Evie as the contested Helen Of Troy, awash in a sea of crushed broken bodies.......
We can't do much jumping up and down about this one...........it's a long, slow read with generally unsatisfying payoffs. We couldn't even rouse ourselves through those final pages when the Kings dole out happy, sad or tragic fates to their many characters......like Vegas blackjack dealers tossing out random cards.
As much as we wanted to adore this, we'll yawn out 2 stars (**) for "Sleeping
Beauties"......rare for a Stephen King epic, it barely kept us awake.....
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