Book Review: Sleeping Beauties

Sleeping Beauties, by Stephen King and Owen King.

This is the first book King has written with his son Owen. King and his eldest boy, Joe Hill, have written short stories together, and I have enjoyed them. I'll put this book in the five-star category.

Its underlying premise is simple: The woman of the small West Virginia town of Dooling are falling asleep. But it's a strange sleep: Once they doze off, the women become wrapped in cocoons and do not wake up.

Where the women wind up, and the psychological, social, and practical implications of what comes next -- and why -- is the heart of the 699-page tale.

Dooling is your basic Appalachian town. It's poor; it's sole major employer is the state's women's prison, and it has the wide assortment of characters that populate King's novels. You have your criminals, your drug dealers, and your bullies.You also have your people just trying to get by, along with those working to battle their inner demons while trying to set things rights. King and King get us into the minds of these people, so we know not only what they do, but their thoughts and rationales for why they do it.

At its heart, the story explores the different ways men and women deal with problems. Men use violence to get what they want; women cooperate and try to work things out. Men are desperate to protect and try to bring back the women; the women are like, "yeah, we miss the guys, but we can live without them." The story starts off as a fight of good against evil, but soon becomes more nuanced, with both sides softening and realizing the other gender is needed.

But it certainly explores the different ways men and women look at life. It notes that a society of females could survive, first through the use of frozen sperm, and later through natural means. A society of men would never make it past the current generation. Beyond that, the Kings explore whether a matriarchal society could change the essential nature of women and men.

Women alone could be "building something new, something fine," one character says near the end of the book. "And there will be men. Better men, raised from infancy by women in a community of women, men who will be taught to know themselves and to know their world."

But, says one of those surviving men, a psychiatrist at the prison for women: "Their essential nature will assert itself in time. Their maleness. One will raise a fist against another. ... You're looking at a man who knows."

Perhaps, responds the woman: "But such aggressiveness isn't sexual nature; it's human nature. If you ever doubt the aggressive capacity of women, ask your own Officer Lampley."