Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This is a painful review to write. I have read just about all Stephen King that has been published. I've also reviewed most of what I've read, giving an occasional 3 stars to an anthology or a short story, but the vast majority of my scores for novels have been 4's and 5's, mosly the latter. I can recognize King's writing style anywhere. I knew (very strongly suspected) that THINNER was written by SK long before it became public knowledge that Richard Bachman was just a pseudonym that King used to prevent the market from being saturated by too many Stephen King novels in too short a time. SLEEPING BEAUTIES does not *feel* like a Stephen King novel. Not even close. The vocabulary is different, and characters, although similar in feel, are not quite right and there is far less development of the inner voices of each than is typical. The pacing is sluggish. And although I have never, ever thought this about any other SK novel, SLEEPING BEAUTIES was just too damn long. Instead of reading the whole thing in 2 or 3 days as per usual for a long SK novel, this one took forever. Something like 8 or 9 days. I never got into the "just one more page, just one more page" mode that has happened with everything else I've read. It was a struggle to get through it and I finally made up my mind to get it over and read the last 250 pages in one go until early in the morning today. So what's the deal? Pretty obviously (and again, just like with THINNER, only a guess on my part) most of the prose was written by Owen King, not Stephen King, regardless of the order of the authors. There are little hints and flashes of SK here (the character of Don Peters being one, the overall dual world scenario and a few others) but by and large this just didn't feel much or sound like SK. The characters were mostly flat. The interpersonal relationships, usually a great strength of SK, were blurry. In fact, Joe Hill's writing is much more like SK’s than this writing was. I never understood what Evie was or where she came from or why. She just didn't make any sense. Yes, we're talking fantasy here but even with fantasy stuff has to make sense and/or be explicable in some manner. There have to bee some rules. Nor was the nature or rationale of the deal she worked out with Clint, (who by the way was one of the least likable protagonists in a novel that I have read in quite a while) clear. It was more akin to something reminiscent of Abraham and God in the Old Testament viz the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah than modern fantasy. And for those of you constantly complain about King's penchant for letting his political views color his fiction (As it happens, I am often bemused by this comment, usually failing to notice explicit political messages in novels where people complain about it the most), most of the entire novel is a giant screed against our "modern male dominated society". Some of the female inmates were sort of interesting and/or had a legitimate beef, but the whole women versus man conflict that was the backbone of the story was way, way overcooked, and has been handled better by others in many other novels. Many or most of the men here were gun-toting, violent, hard-drinking drinking sexually predatory charicatures of real people, and I was turned off by the suggestion that men are basically bad and women are basically good. Bah Humbug. So now I see where many of the really bad reviews came from. In this case, the Stephen King bashing that is au courant seems justified. Of course I'll be around for the the next SK novel. I just hope it's the pure unadulterated stuff. Owen needs some seasoning before he’s ready for prime time. Not recommended. J.M Tepper