Sleeping Beauties A Novel

In this spectacular New York Times bestselling father/son collaboration that “barrels along like a freight train” (Publishers Weekly), Stephen King and Owen King tell the highest of high-stakes stories: what might happen if women disappeared from the world of men?

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 wanted 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 woman’s prison, Sleeping Beauties is a wildly provocative, gloriously dramatic father-son collaboration that feels particularly urgent and relevant today.

Stephen King is the author of more than sixty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers.?His recent work includes Billy Summers, the novella collection?If It Bleeds,?The Institute,?Elevation,?The Outsider (now an HBO television series),?Sleeping Beauties?(cowritten with his son Owen King), and the Bill Hodges trilogy:?End of Watch,?the short story collection The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, Finders?Keepers,?Mr. Mercedes?(an Edgar Award winner?for Best Novel and a television series streaming on Peacock), and Under the Dome. His novel?11/22/63—a Hulu original television series event—was named a?top ten book of 2011 by?The?New York Times?Book Review?and won the?Los Angeles Times?Book Prize for Mystery/Thriller, as well as the Best Hardcover Book Award from the International Thriller Writers. His epic works?The Dark Tower series,?It,?Pet Sematary, and?Doctor Sleep?are the basis for?major motion pictures, with?It?now the highest-grossing horror film of all time. He is the recipient?of the 2020 Audio Publishers Association Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2018 PEN America Literary Service Award, the?2014 National Medal of Arts, and the?2003 National Book Foundation Medal for?Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.?He lives in Bangor, Maine, with his wife,?novelist Tabitha King. 

Owen King is the author of the novel Double Feature and We’re All in This Together: A Novella and Stories. He is the coauthor of Intro to Alien Invasion and the coeditor of Who Can Save Us Now? Brand-New Superheroes and Their Amazing (Short) Stories. He lives in Upstate New York with his wife, the writer Kelly Braffet, and their daughter.