Sleeping Beauties

Sleeping Beauties is a standalone novel and does not feature characters or settings from Stephen King's other established universes. It explores themes of societal breakdown and the supernatural, which are common in his bibliography, but within a unique narrative.

This novel is a true collaboration between Stephen King and his son, Owen King. They developed the concept and wrote the story together, with both contributing significantly to the narrative and character development.

Co-written with Owen King and published in 2017, Sleeping Beauties imagines a world in which all women fall into a mysterious sleep whenever they close their eyes—cocooned in a white fibrous growth and transported to a parallel, women-only world. If the cocoon is disturbed, the woman wakes in a feral, violent state. The novel follows the small town of Dooling, West Virginia, as its men struggle to maintain order with half the population asleep.

The novel provides a complete and resolved narrative arc for its central conflict. While it explores profound societal changes, the main storyline reaches a clear conclusion by the end of the book.

Women who fall asleep find themselves in a peaceful, verdant version of Dooling unpopulated by men. Over the course of the novel, they build a functioning community—making decisions about whether to return to the world of men when given the choice. The parallel world raises the novel's central question: if women could leave entirely, would they?

Evie Black is the novel's central enigma—a woman who appears in Dooling at the moment the sleeping sickness begins and, mysteriously, is the only woman immune to it. She is arrested and held in the county jail, where the town's men come to see her as either the cause of the plague or the key to ending it. She is supernatural in ways the novel leaves deliberately ambiguous.

King has said the collaboration grew from a conversation with his son about what the world might look like if women disappeared. They exchanged drafts electronically, each writing sections independently and then revising the other's work. He has noted that the collaboration was more seamless than expected and that it was often difficult to remember who had written which passages in the final draft.