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mothwing 's review for:
Sleeping Beauties
by Stephen King
The most pressing question first: Why is this thing 800 pages long? This is basically an Outer Limits episode, would have made sense as a Buffy episode (or Xena episode, for that matter), but the excessive pages and the odd pacing do not do the book any favours.
Also, the very, very gender essentialist premise leaves me with a loooot of questions. What happens to non-binary people, for instance? Sleep, no sleep? Do they cocoon up, but stay awake? To bigendered people? Do they fall half asleep? Sleepwalk? Cocooned, but awake? Awake, but cocooned? There's a lot of bullshit to unpack here and I... just do not want to. King fans, you tackle this one. I just don't wanna.
I was expecting a creepy horror novel and I got a very lengthy, convoluted tale which seems not to know what it wants half the time. It wants to be both a sweeping dystopian horror tale of Emmerichian proportions AND a claustrophobic smalltown horror tale.
It can't be both, and that's point at which this completely falls apart for me. I did not really care for the cast of thousands and at some point just stopped learning names and referencing them, it did not matter for the most part who everyone was, which ought to be more of a problem. That it was not confirms that the characters were mostly cardboard.
As a small-town horror story it falls flat because it just is not that creepy. A lot of the time there were moments which I can see working as jumpscares in a movie version, but that does not mean that I felt terribly frightened at any point during the novel. There was little suspense to me at all, in fact, the most interesting thing to ponder for me being, "When will this finally end and who thought it was a good idea to mash these different things together?" I had a similar problem of scale with [b:The Outsider|36124936|The Outsider|Stephen King|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1524596540s/36124936.jpg|57566471], so maybe that is just how King writes these days? I don't know.
As a feminist horror novel it is way less scary than, say, [b:The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories|99300|The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories|Charlotte Perkins Gilman|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1327909237s/99300.jpg|1467808]. It paints its views in broad strokes and this makes the ending all the more unfitting to me. And that is mostly due to the way things were set up in the novel.
I'm glad that Mr King must have enjoyed Orange is the New Black - the autobiographical novel as much as I did, though.
Also, the very, very gender essentialist premise leaves me with a loooot of questions. What happens to non-binary people, for instance? Sleep, no sleep? Do they cocoon up, but stay awake? To bigendered people? Do they fall half asleep? Sleepwalk? Cocooned, but awake? Awake, but cocooned? There's a lot of bullshit to unpack here and I... just do not want to. King fans, you tackle this one. I just don't wanna.
I was expecting a creepy horror novel and I got a very lengthy, convoluted tale which seems not to know what it wants half the time. It wants to be both a sweeping dystopian horror tale of Emmerichian proportions AND a claustrophobic smalltown horror tale.
It can't be both, and that's point at which this completely falls apart for me. I did not really care for the cast of thousands and at some point just stopped learning names and referencing them, it did not matter for the most part who everyone was, which ought to be more of a problem. That it was not confirms that the characters were mostly cardboard.
As a small-town horror story it falls flat because it just is not that creepy. A lot of the time there were moments which I can see working as jumpscares in a movie version, but that does not mean that I felt terribly frightened at any point during the novel. There was little suspense to me at all, in fact, the most interesting thing to ponder for me being, "When will this finally end and who thought it was a good idea to mash these different things together?" I had a similar problem of scale with [b:The Outsider|36124936|The Outsider|Stephen King|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1524596540s/36124936.jpg|57566471], so maybe that is just how King writes these days? I don't know.
As a feminist horror novel it is way less scary than, say, [b:The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories|99300|The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories|Charlotte Perkins Gilman|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1327909237s/99300.jpg|1467808]. It paints its views in broad strokes and this makes the ending all the more unfitting to me. And that is mostly due to the way things were set up in the novel.
Spoiler
Like, is that masculine wish fulfillment? I love my brother and my male friends and could not imagine being separated from a male child. But. Had I been one of the women who had lived in the town we were introduced to, violent abusers and with their "bitchbags" and rapist teenagers and all, you BET I would have used that veto and stayed in Magical [b:The World Without Us|248787|The World Without Us|Alan Weisman|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1441986417s/248787.jpg|241063] Land and left everybody male to fend for themselves.I'm glad that Mr King must have enjoyed Orange is the New Black - the autobiographical novel as much as I did, though.