Sleeping Beauties

A Novel

By: Stephen King, Owen King

Narrated by: Marin Ireland

In this spectacular New York Times bestselling father/son collaboration that “barrels along like a freight train” (Publishers Weekly), Stephen King and Owen King tell the highest of high-stakes stories: what might happen if women disappeared from the world of men?

In a future so real and near it might be now, something happens when women go to sleep: they become shrouded in a cocoon-like gauze. If they are awakened, if the gauze wrapping their bodies is disturbed or violated, the women become feral and spectacularly violent. And while they sleep they go to another place, a better place, where harmony prevails and conflict is rare. One woman, the mysterious “Eve Black,” is immune to the blessing or curse of the sleeping disease. Is Eve a medical anomaly to be studied? Or is she a demon who must be slain?

Abandoned, left to their increasingly primal urges, the men divide into warring factions, some wanted to kill Eve, some to save her. Others exploit the chaos to wreak their own vengeance on new enemies. All turn to violence in a suddenly all-male world. Set in a small Appalachian town whose primary employer is a woman’s prison, Sleeping Beauties is a wildly provocative, gloriously dramatic father-son collaboration that feels particularly urgent and relevant today.

one of my bottom 5 King novels

The performance was amazing, loved the narrator. The story starts out strong, however, is plagued with too many characters to keep up with, a confusing and boring middle and lackluster ending. It's worth listening to, but only if you can get it for free.

Terrible choice for narration

I’m a huge Stephen King fan and was very excited for this book with his son, but the story was weak. And whoever thought this poor woman should read this book with the redneck accents was way off!! Made it very hard to enjoy. That was not a story being told, but reading in agony!

For Stephen King bad

The reading is horrible, with few exceptions all voices sound the same and obviously the male voices do not sound male! The story is underdeveloped it's lacking a lot of information.

Captivating, but a bit too political

The book was interesting and kept me wondering what was going to happen next. Aside from this there were many points that were heavily political touching on topics of feminism that just seemed a bit much to the point where it would distract from the story. Worth a listen, but definitely not one of Kings best. The performance was absolutely excellent!

Meh

The narrator does a splendid job of keeping characters voices distinct and separate from each other in a large ensemble. The story was kinda meh. All the women are asleep and they're the only ones who are civilized and men are at best ineffective and at worst violent animals. As to what the inciting incident was - seems to have disappeared in a magical poof. The ending is torturous. An hour or so of a summary of each character's life after the story. The bad ones have become good, the good ones are ambivalent, some of them die, etc. This novel could have been 23 hours without losing anything in the plot.

Overall - if you're hungering for your Stephen King fix, this is good enough. It's got plenty of "ew, OMG" moments. It's nowhere near the quality of works done by SK without a co-author, but if your expectations are to have a read from an emerging author who needs a few false starts before coming into his own, you'll enjoy it well enough.