Trying to keep up with Stephen King is a sisyphean task. He seems to put out at least three a year and half of them are 700 pages plus. Like this one.712 pages in this rather handsome copy.
This one is co-written with his less famous writer son. The story is fairly high concept. Mother nature has had enough. Women are falling prey to a sleeping sickness. If they fall asleep, they become encased in a weird cocoon and don't wake up. If someone does try to wake them or remove the webbing from their faces, they become psychotically violent, kill whoever is in the immediate vicinity and go back to sleep.
The men are left wondering what the hell is going on and their worst nature is coming to the fore. The cocooned women are waking in a strange new world which they can make better than the world they just left.
A mysterious stranger arrives in the town of Dooling. The first thing she does is violently kill a pair of meth cooks before allowing the sheriff to take her to the nearby prison. She can commune with animals, and appears to hold the key to what is happening.
I'd be interested to see what femininsts make of this novel. It's very very pro-female and men seem to get the blame for all life's problems.
This is the first King novel I've seen with a character list at the start. As usual with his enormous books, he builds an entire community. We get to know most people of import in the town and in the prison.The character list is irrelevant though as I never really felt the need to refer back to it at any point.
The pace of the book is good. The prose is the usual King - very easily readable and keeps you turning the page almost compulsively. Even in a book this size, I don't see the "bloat" that many people complain King packs his books with. He makes each character important to the story in some way and doesn't let them just fade out of the story randomly. (see my review of Blood forge which felt bloated at half the length of this book). Even the minor parts are recognisable and distinct characters.
Amusingly, Joe Hill (King's more famous writer son) gets a shout out when one of the convicts is wheeling a trolley of library books around the prison.
It's not perfect. A pair of escaped convicts are introduced to the storyline very late on - like page 600 ish. The brief backstory they're given could easily have been slotted into the narrative in the early chapters - and then let them reappear at the apposite moment. This would have been a far more effective way to bring them into the final stages of the plot. It would have led to an "Oh shit, they're back" moment rather than the "Who the hell are these guys?" moment we had instead.
The mysterious stranger's powers seem to fluctuate. She could have helped a lot more in the final chapters than she does. Her motivation seems less than clear. Is she really just trying to provoke the male of the species into more and more violence?
And why does one of the characters choose to drive out of town to get help instead of just picking up the phone?
It's a hefty tome but I got through it in a relatively short time. It was never boring in the slightest. It might not be classic King, but less than classic King is still better than many horror writers out there at the pinnacle of their talent. Not thinking about Blood forge at all when I make that comment.
I'll give this one a 7/10
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