Sleeping beauties

Title:

Sleeping beauties

Author:

King, Stephen, 1947- author.

ISBN:

9781432842406

9781432842413

Personal Author:

King, Stephen, 1947- author.

Edition:

Large print edition.

Publication Information:

Waterville, Maine : Thorndike Press, a part of Gale, a Cengage Company, 2017.

Physical Description:

917 pages (large print) ; 25 cm.

Series:

Thorndike Press large print core

Thorndike Press large print core series.

Abstract:

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 wanting 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 women's prison, Sleeping Beauties is a wildly provocative, gloriously dramatic father-son collaboration that feels particularly urgent and relevant today--Provided by Publisher.

Subject Term:

Demonology -- Fiction.

Women -- Fiction.

Dystopias -- Fiction.

Survival -- Fiction.

Large type books.

Large type books. (OCoLC)fst00992678

Genre:

Added Author:

Document ID:

SD_ILS:2275697

Holds: Copies:

Available:*

Library	Collection	Collection	Call Number	Status
Searching... Delhi Branch Library (Merced Co.)	Searching... Unknown	Large Print	LP KIN	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Dinuba Library (Tulare Co.)	Searching... Unknown	Large Print Area	LT FIC KING STEPHEN	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Dos Palos Branch Library (Merced Co.)	Searching... Unknown	Large Print	LP KIN	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Gustine Branch Library (Merced Co.)	Searching... Unknown	Large Print	LP KIN	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Kingsburg Branch Library (Fresno Co.)	Searching... Unknown	Large Print Book Area	KING ST Sleepin	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Los Banos Branch Library (Merced Co.)	Searching... Unknown	Large Print	LP KIN	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Mcfarland Branch Library (Kern Co.)	Searching... Unknown	Large Print Fiction	LP FIC KING STE	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Merced Main Library (Merced Co.)	Searching... Unknown	Large Print	LP KIN	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Orange Cove Branch (Fresno Co.)	Searching... Unknown	Large Print Book Area	KING ST Sleepin	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Visalia Library (Tulare Co.)	Searching... Unknown	Large Print Area	LT FIC KING STEPHEN	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Winton Branch Library (Merced Co.)	Searching... Unknown	Large Print	LP KIN	Searching... Unknown

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

A #1 New York Times BestsellerAn Edgar Award-winning AuthorIn 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 wanting 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.

Author Notes

Stephen King was born in Portland, Maine, on September 21, 1947. After graduating with a Bachelor's degree in English from the University of Maine at Orono in 1970, he became a teacher. His spare time was spent writing short stories and novels.

King's first novel would never have been published if not for his wife. She removed the first few chapters from the garbage after King had thrown them away in frustration. Three months later, he received a $2,500 advance from Doubleday Publishing for the book that went on to sell a modest 13,000 hardcover copies. That book, Carrie, was about a girl with telekinetic powers who is tormented by bullies at school. She uses her power, in turn, to torment and eventually destroy her mean-spirited classmates. When United Artists released the film version in 1976, it was a critical and commercial success. The paperback version of the book, released after the movie, went on to sell more than two-and-a-half million copies.

Many of King's other horror novels have been adapted into movies, including The Shining, Firestarter, Pet Semetary, Cujo, Misery, The Stand, and The Tommyknockers. Under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, King has written the books The Running Man, The Regulators, Thinner, The Long Walk, Roadwork, Rage, and It. He is number 2 on the Hollywood Reporter's '25 Most Powerful Authors' 2016 list.

King is one of the world's most successful writers, with more than 100 million copies of his works in print. Many of his books have been translated into foreign languages, and he writes new books at a rate of about one per year. In 2003, he received the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. In 2012 his title, The Wind Through the Keyhole made The New York Times Best Seller List. King's title's Mr. Mercedes and Revival made The New York Times Best Seller List in 2014. He won the Edgar Allan Poe Award in 2015 for Best Novel with Mr. Mercedes. King's title Finders Keepers made the New York Times bestseller list in 2015. Sleeping Beauties is his latest 2017 New York Times bestseller.

(Bowker Author Biography)

Reviews (1)

Guardian Review

The master of horror collaborates with his son on this epic, colourful story of global pandemic, and shows a youthful vigour not seen in years The Aurora virus is a pandemic that drops on the world like some fairytale enchantment. It seals the women inside fibrous cocoons and leaves the men in a state of bull-headed disarray. There are riots outside the White House; an apocalyptic gang war in the streets of Chicago. Meanwhile, in Dooling, West Virginia, the battle of the sexes boils down to a joust between Clinton Norcross, a harried prison psychiatrist, and Evie Black, a supernatural girl drifter, incarcerated for the murder of a pair of crystal meth cookers. The clock is ticking, the end is nigh, and yet these two remain locked in their Mars-versus-Venus dispute. "We could go on like this for ever," Evie sighs in her cell. "He said, she said. The oldest story in the universe." While the entertaining Sleeping Beauties -- written by Stephen King in tandem with his novelist son, Owen -- doesn't quite last for ever, its allegorical drama extends across 736 pages. It's a bulging, colourful epic; a super-sized happy meal, liberally salted with supporting characters and garnished with splashes of arterial ketchup. These women are sleeping but they must not be disturbed. Tear off the cocoon and the females awaken as zombies, or possibly as angels of vengeance, and immediately start murdering their husbands and sons. Evie -- whom the Kings refer to as "the black angel" -- clearly regards this response as a kind of cosmic payback. It may even be that she is pulling the strings from afar. In framing small-town America as the microcosm of a single-sex planet, Sleeping Beauties could be the Y-chromosome sibling to Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland, in which three explorers gatecrash a feminist utopia. But devotees of King Sr will find more familiar echoes here, too. The undervalued Insomnia, for instance, tackled the queer counter-life of the unconscious. Under the Dome showed how an isolated community could overheat and turn ugly. Most obviously, the account of a global pandemic harks back to The Stand, arguably the author's greatest work, right down to its teeming cast of casualties and survivors. Recalling his struggle to write that novel, King would later lament that his story became overcrowded, infested -- "a veritable Calcutta" of crisscrossing characters. Sleeping Beauties has similar issues and even goes so far as to provide an extended glossary of Dooling's inhabitants. This includes various spouses and cousins, bakers and mechanics, along with "a common fox, between four and six years of age". Eventually -- thankfully -- several of these characters detach themselves from the herd. Clinton is our flawed new-man hero, struggling to salvage his marriage and watching as his sheriff wife, Lila, doses herself with caffeine and cocaine in a vain attempt to stay awake. Then, when Lila goes under, her post is filled by unreconstructed Frank Geary, a former pest-control officer with a hair-trigger temper. Geary is determined to save his daughter and rightly believes Evie Black is the key. And yet Evie, for all her prominence, remains the vaguest, least fleshed-out member of Dooling's cast of hundreds. She is a plot device in the guise of an "enchanted being"; part succubus, part virago; brought in to frame an argument and dispense the clues. Even the fox has more emotional range. Sleeping Beauties is at its most satisfying during its breakneck opening half, as the crisis takes hold, before the allegorical baggage piles up. One of King Sr's great strengths as a writer is his mastery of the milieu of small-town USA, his uncanny ability to ventriloquise its inhabitants and keep his myriad pieces in play. His tale only falters when it doubles down on its premise, belatedly introducing a parallel Dooling, a shadow world for the sleeping women that is "so much better than the old man-driven one" -- although even here it manages to redeem itself. The denouement is ambiguous, elegantly open-ended. Assuming the two tribes can be reconciled, one is left with the sense that they are destined to remain at a distance. Was the writing of this book dependent on a similar creative friction? Did Stephen call the shots and have his son play apprentice? Or was this truly a joint effort; a collaboration between two writers blessed with the same DNA? It's hard to tell -- and this is surely for the best. But perhaps it's no accident that this epic feels so vital and fresh. Sleeping Beauties comes fuelled by a youthful vigour that King Sr hasn't shown us in years -- probably not since 2008's Duma Key. He appeared to have lost interest, dozed off, when maybe all he required was his son's intervention. I like the image of Owen peeling back the cocoon, jolting his insensible father back into murderous bloody life. - Xan Brooks.