Reviewed: Sleeping Beauties

Oh dear, Steve and Owen King wrote a stinker.

The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.

Let me start off by saying that I’m a pretty big Stephen King fan. Christ, I even have a tattoo that was inspired by The Dark Tower. Now that the bona fides have been established:

Sleeping Beauties by Stephen and Owen King is a disaster.

A common criticism of King’s work is that he has a tendency to ramble. Especially with his later work, people think he could use a good editor who’s not afraid to leave things on the cutting floor if they’re not adding to the story. For the most part, I could go either way on it. There’s a lot of fat to his writing that could be trimmed, but if you did that, then you’d lose a lot of what makes King…the King.

His best quality, and why he’s connected to so many readers over the years, is his ability to write characters that people can relate to. There aren’t too many other authors that can make you love or hate a character as much as he can, or who can get you as invested in their relationships and what happens to them. Even still, there’s usually a point.

With Sleeping Beauties, there often is no point.

There’s a staggering number of characters in this 700+ page epic. Anyone and everyone seems to get a multi-page background, but when you see so many of them not doing that much to drive the story forward, you’re left wondering: what’s the point? It’s during these (frequent) moments where the story really becomes a chore to get through.

Sleeping Beauties by Stephen and Owen King. Scribner, 2017.

The second issue with this novel, however, is what’s really going to take a lot to unpack, and that’s to do with its politics. The basic premise of the story is that if women had the chance to build a world without men, what would it look like, and what would they decide? Would they choose to live a life without men, or would they opt for the status quo?

Over and over again you’re hit with the message that men are bad and evil and the lives of women would be so much better without them. For many women in the world that’s true, and I’m not about to try to ‘mansplain’ the reality of women’s lives and the impact that men have on them. But there are healthy relationships between men and women, loving and supporting relationships that we look to as a model for how to enable our partners in kind, respectful, meaningful ways, but this story doesn’t have any of them.

Sleeping Beauties doesn’t have a single positive relationship between a man and a women. Not one. Instead it sees both men and women not as people, but as genders. And with the same hammer that the Kings use to so ungracefully pound home this lazy message, they manage to obliterate any thought for the space that transgendered and queer people take.

In Sleeping Beauties, there are two, and only two, sides: men (bad), and women (good). This is expressed literally throughout the story.

Absent are the wonderfully built and deliciously complex characters and relationships that made us fans of Stephen King to begin with. If a man is introduced, you know he’s going to be bad, even when he’s not ‘supposed’ to be. If a woman is introduced, she’s ‘good,’ or at least sympathetic. Unfortunately that’s as thematically deep as the writing gets.

There really aren’t any scenes of horror here, either. However you define ‘horror’ (tense, disturbing, psychological, atmospheric, scary, et al), it’s really not present. Evidently King did an interview about this book, where he said the idea came from Owen, who pitched it to Dad, who instead told Owen that he should go and write it himself. I’d love to know how much of Stephen is in this, though I’m not sure I spect it’s a whole lot. The writing doesn’t feel like Stephen King.

Politics aside (and I happen to think the idea is a good one), ultimately it’s the characters and the complexity of their relationships that let this down.

The sin is not that sleeping beauties is critical of men, but that the characters and relationships fall completely flat.

Both the men and the women, along with their relationships to one another, are flat, boring, one-dimensional caricatures with no depth, complexity, or care. What should be a complex message explored with thought and nuance is instead barren and overly simplistic, and that’s just lazy writing.