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.
Continue reading...via Science fiction | The Guardian http://ift.tt/2ypMICm
0 comments:
Post a Comment