via Daily Prompt: Forlorn
Word count = 336 / reading time = 1 minute, 15 seconds
by Stephen King & Owen King
For the Amazon.com book blurb, click here. This review also posted on my Goodreads page.
Sleeping Beauties knocked my socks off. I was not expecting to like it as much as I do so was very pleasantly surprised by how damn good it is.
Many commentators have complained about a reduction in quality of Stephen King’s writing in recent years. Some feel his work has declined since he was struck by a van while walking in 1999. I believe King himself has written that some of his books from the mid-1980s through the mid-1990s, specifically Tommyknockers and Insomnia, were subpar due to his heavy drug & alcohol usage at the time.
While I have yet to read a Stephen King book that I don’t like (except for Gwendy’s Button Box, the exception that proves my rule), I do agree that the quality of his writing has steadily improved since From a Buick 8 in 2002.
Hitherto, I’d also been one of those fans who irritates King in my belief that The Stand was his best book and would always be his best book. So when I found myself unable to put Sleeping Beauties down, and again when I spent the last 25 pages of the book crying about how beautiful it was, how nicely the Kings had handled the denouement, and begging the gods of fiction that they’d collaborate again soon, I had to revise my long-held opinion. I can’t wait to see what they do next. Please, Stephen and Owen King, don’t let this be your last collaboration.
The only bad thing about Sleeping Beauties is that I started 2018 with it. I’ll be measuring every other work of fiction I read the remainder of this year against it, and that’s a shame because it sets the bar very high, and I fear it’ll be a forlorn attempt to find anything else quite as good.
Have any of my other Bloggerfriends read Sleeping Beauties yet? What’d you think?
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