Sleeping Beauties by Stephen King and Owen King | Spoiler-free review

Sleeping Beauties is a timely discussion about gender and the differences between men and women, wrapped up in Stephen King's trademark shocking violence and horror.

The catalyst for the events in the book is a strange event: When women fall asleep, they become cocooned in a substance like a spider web.

As with so many King books, it's a slow build to the craziness that is sure to ensue when half the population falls ill to the sleeping sickness the world eventually calls Aurora, after the heroine of "Sleeping Beauty."

The way society breaks down when 50 per cent of the population essentially goes missing is fascinating to watch, and reminds me a lot of King's classic The Stand.

The gender debate

Gender has been an area of hot debate in North America for some time now, so I commend authors Stephen King and Owen King for writing about such a divisive topic.

For the most part, they take a humanist approach to the topic of gender, clearly showing that people are people and neither gender is better than the other, only different in some regards.

But there is an overall theme that men are more violent than women and wouldn't be able to run society without the other half. The resulting chaos of that premise makes for an exciting story, but I don't know that I agree with the sentiment.

700 pages, 72 characters

Gender politics aside, this is a good read. You could enjoy the whole story without worrying once about what the message is saying about the world.

It's an incredibly long book, though, clocking in at 700 pages, and there are a dizzying number of characters to keep track of -- 72 characters, who are listed at the beginning of the book with a short description.

I actually only referenced the lengthy character list once, though. The characters all have distinct voices and storylines, so I didn't have much trouble telling them apart.

Does skin colour matter?

The crazy number of characters may have been part of the reason why I didn't know three of the characters were black until the middle of the book, and found out another character was black at the very end of the book.

For the most part, the characters' skin colour didn't change the story -- until it did because of racism. I tried to flip back in the book to see if skin colour was mentioned, but it's a bit of a challenge due to the size of the book and the number of characters.

Did the authors purposely obfuscate the skin colour, or did I just miss it? If someone else has read the book and knows, I'd be curious to hear!

Father and son collaboration

A book with two authors is an interesting quirk, and that the authors are father and son is doubly interesting, but it didn't change the story for me. If I'd read the book not knowing it had two authors, I would have never known.

The book reads very much like other Stephen King books I've read, which makes me curious to read some of Owen King's solo work. Is his writing much like his father's? Is Stephen King trying to position his son as the heir to his storytelling empire? I didn't even know Stephen King had a who writes, but now I'll be looking out for his name. 

What did you think?

Have you read Sleeping Beauties? Were you aware of the gender politics behind the book, or did you just enjoy the story? Did you know Jeannette, and Frank and his family were black from the beginning? Does it even matter what their skin colour is?