Sleeping Beauties

A Novel

In this spectacular New York Times bestselling father/son collaboration that “barrels along like a freight train” (Publishers Weekly), Stephen King and Owen King tell the highest of high-stakes stories: what might happen if women disappeared from the world of men?

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.

I've Read and Listened to Every King Book

I've read and listened to every King book and I guess you could say he is my favorite author. I didn't finish this one. The story held my interest, but didn't rivet me and quite honestly, I forgot about it until now. It has an interesting and unique concept and I think it's worth the read if nothing else is floating your boat, but I'm pretty sure this is the only King novel I've never finished. I probably will one day, but today is not that day.

Good idea but way too long

This book could have been so much better if only it wasn’t so long. So many characters to keep track of made it a bit confusing. But the idea was certainly interesting.

Not Kings Best

Too long, formulaic, weird when you kind of expect it and dull too much of the story. Perhaps this was going to be an entry for American Horror Story.

The Never Ending Story

Meh, typical Steven King. There are so many characters though that it gets confusing - by the end, you just want it to be over. The narrator is okay - she does a good job differentiating between the old hillbilly guy and the young hillbilly inmate, but throughout the book there's this annoying tendency to hush the end of the sentences. I found myself constantly having to adjust the volume. One minute, one of the speakers would be almost whispering, the next would be a shrill hillbilly falsetto that drove straight into your eardrum. Ouch. Kind of an interesting concept, but I would wait for the cliff notes.

The story didn’t do it for me

The narration of this book was fantastic but the story just seem to pander so much to women as victims that it was almost an insult and I’m sure it was insulting to many men. He completely ignores the real risk to women that if they chose to stay what might become of their bodies back where they were cocooned. I won’t say more since I don’t want to give anything away, but if you read the book you know what I mean. I think that would’ve been one of my first concerns. It’s like the whole story just tried to teach a moral lesson and the authors weren’t even subtle about it. I love Stephen King, but this was disappointing.