Stephen King, Owen King - Sleeping Beauties

Author: Stephen King, Owen King

Title: Sleeping Beauties
Language: English
Format: hardcover
Rating: 3.5 stars
No of pages: 718
Read: 02.03.2021

Goodreads

BLURB:

In this spectacular father/son collaboration, Stephen King and Owen King tell the highest of high-stakes stories: what might happen if women disappeared from the world of men?

All around the world, something is happening to women when they fall asleep; they become shrouded in a cocoon-like gauze. If awakened, if the gauze wrapping their bodies is disturbed, the women become feral and spectacularly violent…

In the small town of Dooling, West Virginia, the virus is spreading through a women's prison, affecting all the inmates except one. Soon, word spreads about the mysterious Evie, who seems able to sleep – and wake. Is she a medical anomaly or a demon to be slain?

The abandoned men, left to their increasingly primal devices, are fighting each other, while Dooling's Sheriff, Lila Norcross, is just fighting to stay awake.

And the sleeping women are about to open their eyes to a new world altogether… 

It has been a while since I read something like that. A world together with a parallel world. And action is ongoing in both of those.

Everything in this book happens in the duration of a week. So as you can assume, it is pretty detailed. I kind of liked that (sometimes it was a bit confusing) the story was told form multiple points of view - you can really see what really matters to different characters.

In the beginning of the book, I had the assumption that it is going to be an horror story - I mean the title and cover of the book kind of suggest it and then the beginning of the book (and well, yeah, the fact that it was written by King, well, both of them). But turned out that it wasn't a horror story. So yeah, I was expecting something else, but I still liked it.

Overall the story was nice and detailed. As it turns out, the authors did a lot of research beforehand. At times it was a bit slow and kind of confusing. Considering how many different characters and point of views there were, I think it is expected.

Unfortunately, I did not really understand why was Dooling the "chosen" place here. I mean, the virus was happening all over the world, why that place was chosen? What was so important there?  It might be, that it was explained and I just didn't catch it, or maybe it wasn't. Just something to wonder about...