written past David Steffen

34466922Sleeping Beauties is a drama/fantasy/activeness novel written by Stephen Male monarch and Owen King published in September 2017 by Scribner.

A mysterious condition hits the whole planet in an instant–if a woman falls comatose, threads of what appear to be fungus rapidly envelop her, forming a sort of cocoon.  She continues to live inside the cocoon if left undisturbed.  If the cocoon is broken, she volition wake up and react violently like a rabid animal.  Meanwhile, in the Appalachian town of Dooling, a mysterious stranger who calls herself Eve who is arrested after violently killing a human with manifestly superhuman strength.  There's no stop in sight for the condition that affects only women–the women who are all the same awake try badly to stay that way, some of the men left behind are ready to take desperate measures of ane kind or another, and all hell is going to pause loose.  People find out that Eve tin can sleep without going into a cocoon, and they become violently desperate to find out why.  Clint Norcross, the prison psychologist, husband of the sheriff, has a fierce past from his juvenile days that he keeps to himself, fifty-fifty from his wife, and he takes it upon himself to protect as many women as he tin can, including Evie.

I like the premise of the volume.  Information technology was plenty for me to decide to read the book, and I was interested enough in it to want to stick through it to the stop.  But it took effort to stick with it.  The biggest reason was that the book had, in my opinion, major pacing bug. And too a too-large cast without, in my opinion, any detail reason to root for anyone.  Ensemble casts are i of Stephen King's major skills, many of his best books have ensemble casts: It, Needful Things, The Stand.  Simply those books were very skillful at getting me emotionally invested in most or all of the characters, understanding their strengths and weaknesses so that by the terminate I'm rooting for the outcome.  I did not become that from Sleeping Beauties.  Since the inciting incident isn't introduced in that outset 100 pages, the master purpose of that space must exist to invest me in the characters, simply I felt like it focused nigh entirely on the negative in each person's personality–this person treats this other person badly in various respects but never makes them feel well-rounded.

The Eve plotline and the cocoons plotline, while they are connected, felt like they were actually ii dissever stories, the stories of a supernatural killer and the story of this condition the women take.  Part of the reason I kept reading is that I wanted to find out more about that connexion but I felt similar what I got was just vague handwaving.

The themes of the book, about the human relationship between men and women and how they treat each other and how they behave, could've been great.  But I felt that they relied more on caricatures than on reality, and never managed to exist as profound every bit they seemed to be meant to be.

I feel like this book could've been actually really good with the existing story, if it were 150-200 pages, just cut out that kickoff 100-page segment and got that label in alongside the inciting action and things happening, and information technology could've been an incredible book.  As information technology is, I was interested enough in the end to read the end, but afterward I didn't think the payoff of reading was worth the fourth dimension it took to read.

More on the pacing problems, that might exist likewise spoilerish:
The "inciting" action of local women being overtaken by the cocoons didn't happen until by folio 100.  Usually for the purpose of reviews I attempt to merely discuss what happens within the first 100 pages or then but, there wouldn't be much of a review if I couldn't even mention the cocoons. The next 100 pages are spent seeing the same thing happen over and over over again as women succumb to the cocoons one afterward some other, which has to exist told afresh for each point of view since each person is not familiar with it.  And so most of the book is a long irksome climb to the final confrontation.