3.5 Star

Release Date: 09/26/17 | 25 hours 22 minutes | Simon & Schuster Audio

When a mysterious virus causes sleeping to grow impenetrable cocoons, the entire world goes up in chaos and the final battlefield for humanity will involve a whole cast of characters in the small Appalachia town of Dooling, Maine...oh wait, West Virginia. This one takes place in West Virginia.

I’d been eyeing this book for a while because the premise sounded intriguing and let me tell you, the King men know how to weave together a tale with a vast cast of characters. One of my complaints with the few King books I’ve read is how poorly many of the female characters were written and I was curious about how female characters would fare in a book about women. I mean look, do I think a story about toxic masculinity told through the lens of horror tropes should be written by a middle-aged white dude and his Dad? Maybe not, but they do an okay job. I would in no way call this a feminist book because despite all the feminist epigraphs this book opens with, most of the book comes down to a schlubby middle-aged white dude savin’ the day. I mean, you could actually take most of the women’s POV out of this and still leave the story intact.

Also, yes this book is problematic for the way it leans hard into the gender binary.

Now let me talk about the audiobook narrator, Marin Ireland. She absolutely brings this 25-hour audiobook to life. Yes, I said 25 hours and I’m glad I’ve started moving into 1.5 speed on audiobooks or I ever would have never finished this behemoth. This is one of those thick King (…and King) novels that has a cast list at the beginning and she managed to create a unique voice for each one of the Dooling townsfolk. I feel like this book could have easily gone array because of the West Virginia accents but she does it well. Although I kind of side-eye how only the lower class characters get the accents.

Also bonus, the audiobook has an interview with the King men at the end that was fun to listen to!

-mild spoilers-

 

This book is dedicated to Sandra Bland which feels a little tone deaf after reading this book because it has a scene at the very end where an innocent black female character is killed by a cop by mistake and we’re supposed to sympathize with the cop.