Writing science fiction novels with a distinctly feminist point is becoming common and very fruitful. Very recent cases like The Power by Naomi Alderman, they attest. Stephen King he wanted to join the current to contribute a lot and good to the idea.
A parent-child project should be extremely challenging. Pretending to write a four-handed book under this premise must have a magical point where parent and offspring share imaginary and narrative proposal. Although of course the typical skirmishes will always emerge at critical moments. Without a doubt, a brainstorming that would be worth seeing.
And as male members of a family, Stephen King and Owen King pose an original situation, a most singular dystopia. Something or someone is getting every woman, once overcome by sleep, is trapped by a kind of spell, a spell equipped by beings out of this world and who seem determined to end our civilization in a sinister way, without such conquest can be faced with nothing that the human being knows until now.
There are no possible weapons that can stop indirect extermination. Women dream and completely evade this world, externally protected by a cocoon or chrysalis.
But as the story progresses, so many disturbing questions arise.
Is it an extermination or is it a woman's flight to other worlds?
Evie is the only woman known who does not participate in this transformation. She can hold the answers and everyone wants to make her spit out her truth, be it an unconscious capacity or because she is precisely the conductor of that macabre mutation of women ...
Without women, the world, our world, our civilization begins to transform into an unhinged space where violence is rampant.
And behind the fantasy there is a lot of existentialist reflection, the necessary counterweight for current dilemmas around feminism and even our social system to emerge within the science fiction approach.
One of the great virtues of Stephen King it is their ability to present absolutely opposite situations and emotions. In a world that is decomposing, scenes of tenderness shine like giant stars in a black sky.
A new world can be seen on both sides of the cocoons. Women find in these dreams a new paradise while men navigate between confusion and despair. The ultimate reason for the plan is something that slides into each scene and that finally explodes on the reader with the weight of the darkest and most beautiful images, with the same weight on the consciousness of who we are.
When Stephen King (Let's forget about the collaboration of his son Owen King in this novel, which I don't know in what nuances it can be discovered) he begins to write a choral novel, each character ends up taking a leading role based on the dizzying but miraculously developed description of your psyche and your circumstances.
Thus, as we enter flour, surrendering to a new chapter has that pleasure of recovering the absolute protagonists of the plot. Because in coral, King makes a structured hive in all cells like basic pillars, an essential mosaic from each of its parts.
Regarding the feminist dystopia aspect that links this story with aspects of "The Handmaid's Tale" by Margaret Atwood, we return to that aftertaste of hyperbolic consequence of the historical offense against women. And in the exaggeration we look at harsh realities, aspects not yet defeated machismo.
Without ever knowing who Evie Black is, we discover how everything happens around her, at her appearance. From the strange world of her arrival, Evie manifests herself with her violence done justice, with her language that connects us with a double existence of this «woman» in this plane and in some other that still eludes us, but that has to see a natural universe beyond a giant tree only visible to them.
As always, in the full fantasy inserted in a reflection of our real world we discover that distortion that confronts us half the plot dilemma itself half any other background, in this case that dichotomy between female - male universes, perhaps exaggerated by Stephen King to justify the grievance that caused this awakening of Evie and the new world as a righteous offer for all.
Because in the end it's about that. In the dream that reaches almost all the women in our world, their awakening leads them to a new place, to their place free from male aggression. The new world is a paradise where mothers may be able to raise their children with new concepts of equality, but the bonds still pull.
While they sleep (watch out, don't touch them or try to wake them up!) And reach that new space beyond the giant tree, the men will prepare their particular war. The world looms into chaos and the small town of Dooling seizes the only chance to fix everything. Because there is Evie, locked in a cell and erected as the only "person" capable of managing the situation.
Sleeping beauties coexist on either side. In the ancient world, surrendered to their sleep under their chrysalis, threatened by man, unhinged to see her under that cocoon that keeps her waiting to turn her into a nocturnal butterfly, if necessary.
Maybe they should never have returned or maybe not all of them, at least. Maybe Evie's nature is too lightly brushed but perhaps it is necessary because Evie herself does not want to reveal the essence of her journey to this side.
In the meantime, the man unleashes conflict and war. With an essential role of Clint (who is not the protagonist), the psychiatrist converted to Evie's defender for the sake of the recovery of normality, we are approaching an end of which we do not know everything.
And as we finish the book, satisfactorily, we discover that we have not known as much about the nitty-gritty of the matter. Stephen King it sprinkles the end as so many other times, with scattered spotlights, passing from one protagonist to another, deconstructing the consequences, splitting the end into portions that are enjoyed with delight.
Perhaps the grace lies in that, as an acquaintance always tells me "you don't want to know everything." The point is that Evie is gone and no one knows if she will return again at some future time. Because despite the scare and the looming war as all the women in the world fell asleep, it may be that the man has not learned the lesson so much.
You can now buy the novel Sleeping Beauties, the new book of Stephen King, here:
