- Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
- Publication Date: September 26th, 2017
- Length: 25 hours 22 minutes
- ISBN: 9781508250340
- ISBN-10: 1508250340
- Author: Stephen King
- Author: Owen King
- Read by: Marin Ireland
Sleeping Beauties by Stephen King and Owen King is a fairly typical Stephen King type story. It is far from his best, but if you like Stephen King then you will probably like this one well enough. Writing it with his son, Owen King, it is interesting to see the father-son collaboration. Apparently, they went to great lengths to obscure who wrote which portions of the book. Maybe if they spent a little less time obscuring and a little more time writing, it might have been a better book. It’s not bad, and I am not sorry I listened to it. I find Stephen King books are good as audiobooks for listening on my commute. He has a tendency to overwrite and to not edit and clean out the tangents and random descriptions that don’t really add to the story. On in the background while driving, these are easy to just let play. I don’t think I could have read this whole thing in paper format.
I’ve suggested a lot of negative in the above paragraph, but it’s not a bad book. It just is not a great book. The father and son seem like they are trying to write from the female point of view. They (mostly rightly) detail the evils of men and how men have led to most of the world’s major problems. When nearly every woman on earth falls asleep and they wind themselves into cocoons, the men behave badly. A strange otherworldly woman may be the key to the problem. She may be the cause or maybe just an emissary from the ultimate cause. Of course, this means a bunch of men have to try to (and often succeed at) killing each other. It’s a bit over the top with the semi-idyllic female ‘our place’ juxtaposed against the violent male dominated earth.
I understand the thought that most of the world’s problems are generated by men and machismo much more than women, but this book hits you over the head with it so much that it loses some of its power. As I said before, if you are a big Stephen King fan, there is enough of him here that you will enjoy the book. I did. If you have not read much Stephen King, then start with something else first.
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And if you like speculative fiction about different types of people coming together to solve a hard problem, why don’t you read: Plastivore. Click here for a free preview of the first few chapters. It’s free if you have Kindle Unlimited.
