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Sleeping Beauties: A Novel Kindle Edition
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.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherScribner
- Publication dateSeptember 26, 2017
- File size3165 KB
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“It’s a violent, dystopian thrill ride that will leave you horrified– and hooked.”--People
“Entertaining. . . Sleeping Beauties is a bulging, colourful epic; a super-sized happy meal, liberally salted with supporting characters and garnished with splashes of arterial ketchup. This epic feels so vital and fresh.”-- The Guardian
“King fans who enjoy his blunt language and vivid gore will find lots to like.”-- Associated Press
“A fast-paced thriller [that is] ambitious and sympathetic, Sleeping Beauties is both a love letter to women everywhere and an incisive look at what drives men to violence, neatly wrapped in enough fantasy elements to soften the more caustic edges of the commentary. From “Carrie” to “Dolores Claiborne” to “Lisey’s Story” and beyond, Stephen King’s compassion for women is an identifying characteristic of much of his work, and “Sleeping Beauties” continues the trend. The Kings have created deeply textured women to populate their book.”-- Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“Sleeping Beauties is an ambitious work that combines some age-old Stephen King themes with a distinctly sci-fi premise. Sleeping Beauties is no “take your kid to work” project on Stephen King’s behalf. Owen King is an accomplished author in his own right, and their collaboration reflects positively on both. No matter which King was tapping the keys, readers will enjoy a riveting novel with plenty of characters to root for, and to root against … and, in another King trademark, to root both for and against.”-- Bangor Daily News
“This delicious first collaboration between Stephen King and his son Owen 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. The authors’ writing is seamless and naturally flowing. Once the action begins, [SLEEPING BEAUTIES] barrels along like a freight train.”-- Publishers Weekly
“Another horror blockbuster, Mercedes and all, from maestro King and his heir apparent…In a kind of untold Greek tragedy meets Deliverance meets—well, bits of Mr. Mercedes and The Shawshank Redemption, perhaps—King and King, father and son, take their time putting all the pieces into play: brutish men, resourceful women who've had quite enough, alcohol, and always a subtle sociological subtext, in this case of rural poverty and dreams sure to be dashed…A blood-splattered pleasure.”-- Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Following the renewed interest in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and an increasing climate of wolf-whistle politics, this examination of gender stereotypes, systems of oppression, and pervasive misogyny within American culture feels especially timely…The large cast of characters allows for a multitude of narrative perspectives—from both the affected women and the men they’ve left behind. Violent, subversive, and compulsively readable. The true horror of this father-son-penned novel derives more from its unflinchingly realistic depiction of hatred and violence against women than from the supernatural elements.”-- Library Journal
“The novel provides enough action, thrills and humor to keep readers burning the midnight oil....There’s comfort to be found in tales such as this... Sleeping Beauties is a well-tooled horror thriller, a worthy venture from a productive family business.” —San Francisco Chronicle
About the Author
Owen King is the author of The Curator, Double Feature, and We’re All in This Together: A Novella and Stories. He is the coauthor of Sleeping Beauties and Intro to Alien Invasion and the coeditor of Who Can Save Us Now? Brand-New Superheroes and Their Amazing (Short) Stories. He lives in upstate New York with his family.
Product details
- ASIN : B06XWDGVT1
- Publisher : Scribner; Unabridged edition (September 26, 2017)
- Publication date : September 26, 2017
- Language : English
- File size : 3165 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 717 pages
- Page numbers source ISBN : 1473681294
- Best Sellers Rank: #47,350 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #34 in Horror Fiction Classics
- #145 in U.S. Horror Fiction
- #215 in Horror Suspense
- Customer Reviews:
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About the authors
Stephen King is the author of more than fifty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. His first crime thriller featuring Bill Hodges, MR MERCEDES, won the Edgar Award for best novel and was shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger Award. Both MR MERCEDES and END OF WATCH received the Goodreads Choice Award for the Best Mystery and Thriller of 2014 and 2016 respectively.
King co-wrote the bestselling novel Sleeping Beauties with his son Owen King, and many of King's books have been turned into celebrated films and television series including The Shawshank Redemption, Gerald's Game and It.
King was the recipient of America's prestigious 2014 National Medal of Arts and the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for distinguished contribution to American Letters. In 2007 he also won the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America. He lives with his wife Tabitha King in Maine.
Owen King is the author of Double Feature, and We’re All in This Together: A Novella and Stories. He is the coauthor of Sleeping Beauties and Intro to Alien Invasion and the coeditor of Who Can Save Us Now? Brand-New Superheroes and Their Amazing (Short) Stories. His next novel, The Curator, will be published in March 2023. He lives in upstate New York with his family.
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I definitely appreciated the approach of the story, ultimately being about how our culture encourages men and women to behave differently, and especially when the chips are down in one way or another. None of us is at our best when stressed and facing unknown outcomes even when we think we are doing our best. We may be doing the best we can under the circumstances, but we are still not at our best.
Not surprisingly, these authors did focus a lot on the men in the story, and the women didn't always get as much attention. One woman character who stayed awake during most of the ordeal, for example, started off as one of my favorites, but then spent half the novel wandering around in the background giving the reader almost no idea of her motivations. Then she is used in a big climatic moment, and we're supposed to believe she had only one motivation that had only been discussed almost as an aside early in the story. It was a bit of a muddle.
Also muddled was the experience of the cocooned women. That was when the book came alive for me, but we kept shifting back to the angry and depressed men, which had parts I literally only skimmed, because it was repetitive and boring. And while I can imagine the men doing all the things they did, why did no character in a story that deals so much with the ways in which many women are physically and emotionally vulnerable to the men in their lives, even think to point out the ENTIRE vulnerability of women in cocoons, whose cocoons - while somewhat protective - were not infallible. Once in a cocoon, a woman had no way to either fight back or escape WITH AGENCY if attacked by the men around her. I think I know what the authors were hoping to symbolize, but they didn't do this correctly, in my opinion. Any power seeking to help women see how they might survive on their own, without men, and with agency, would have made it happen without making their physical bodies (and, by necessity, their emotional well being) ENTIRELY dependent on men.
I was also disappointed in the climax. It felt more like an anticlimax, in that a lot of questions that had been raised were not well answered. I don't need a complete explanation - we are supposed to use our imaginations when we read after all, and fantasy/horror/sci-fi does require a willingness to suspend disbelief. But we need SOMETHING to kickstart our imaginations, and there were too many gaps there, in my opinion, to do that well.
All-in-all, it was an interesting thought exercise, and had its good moments. It also might be more rewarding for men reading. For this woman, however, it will not be one of those King books I reread with joy. I doubt I will reread it at all. Sorry guys.
7/10 stars rounded up on Amazon to 4/5.
The main problem (for me, anyway; ymmv) is that the characters just somehow never come alive. By the very end of the book, I was still experiencing moments when a character would be mentioned and I would ask myself, "Who is that? And what am I supposed to remember about them, and where do they fit into the story?" (I'll contrast that with "The Stand" or "Under The Dome" in which, even with their casts of thousands, I never had any trouble remembering who's who and why I should care.) And even the better-drawn characters (the ones I could actually keep track of) seemed oddly two-dimensional.
Which is related to my other main problem with the book: The allegorical and sexual-politics aspects of the work are handled in a very thudding, heavy-handed way, and often to the detriment of any sense that the book describes real people doing real things. In particular, the way that some of the character-arcs resolve feels patently false; not like natural outworkings of where psychology and experience would lead that particular person, but instead just where the story needed them to be to fit the points the authors are trying to make. This works in a short book like "Animal Farm", but in a work like "Sleeping Beauties", in which you're expected to spend 700 pages with these (so-called) people, it's rather unsatisfying.
On the other hand, the central conceit of the story -- the engine that makes it go -- is an interesting one, and fun to play with mentally. And the story is action-packed; it drags you right along. So I'll probably reread this book sooner or later, and enjoy entertaining its concepts again. But without any characters I can truly believe in, it's not a book I'll ever love.
May we be kinder to each other.
Top reviews from other countries
"If a fantasy novel is to be believable, the details underpinning it must be realistic."
Right? Absolutely right.
Sleeping Beauties is a joint effort by the Father and Son King duo and the plot is very very interesting. The idea that women who fall asleep start to get covered in a cocoon, a white sticky thread(Something similar to the ear-wax), intrigued me. The whole incident happens just like any other normal day-to-day activity in our life where people eventually start freaking out at the happenings. There's a lot happening.
We all know how much King hates Donald Trump and that is evident in Sleeping Beauties.
There are a LOT of characters in the book and the list of characters at the beginning of the book scared me. I shouldn't be surprised that I didn't have to look at that list to remember the characters.
There were references to a dead cat and Mercedes. Is the fanboy in me connecting dots or are they for real? :D
Sleeping Beauties is a metaphor that lasts 700 plus pages. Its a fable on how the current world has taken the opposite genders for granted. Its a great book no doubt, but I wish it had a tighter ending.