Sleeping Beauties

by Stephen King & Owen King
702 pgs

The end result of Stephen King’s collaboration with his son, and fellow writer Owen King, is an entertaining and eerily timely story centered around the question, “What would happen if all the women in the world were gone?”

Nobody knows what caused it. They don’t know if it was a virus, or some sort of spell. But it affected half the planet’s population seemingly all at once. It’s dubbed the Aurora virus, and it affects only females. Any female who falls asleep quickly becomes sealed up in a fibrous cocoon-type shell and doesn’t wake up again. They don’t die, but if anyone disturbs their cocoon, the woman wakes up as a zombie-like creature and kills the person who touched them.

Women begin taking caffeine and more powerful drugs, as they try to stay awake as long as they can, but eventually the inevitable happens and they succumb to sleep. Only one woman, Evie Black seems immune to the effects of the Aurora virus.

Evie arrives in Drooling, a small town somewhere in Appalachia that the Kings set their story in, shortly after the Aurora pandemic begins. She’s incarcerated in the local prison for committing a murder, but she, unlike every other woman on the planet, continues to wake up anytime she falls asleep. As attention begins to focus on her, it quickly becomes apparent that she’s the key to unlocking what’s happening to all the other women on earth.

I read an interview with Stephen and Owen King, in which they discussed the process they utilized in writing the book together, and I have no doubt King Jr. was just as instrumental in writing the book as King Sr. was. But it reads heavily like a Stephen King book, which is certainly not a criticism from me. It’s reminiscent of the types of books he was writing many years ago, books like Insomnia, Under the Dome, and The Stand.

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆