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Ralph Roberts has a
problem: he isn't sleeping so well these
days. In fact, he's hardly sleeping at all.
Each morning, the news conveyed by the
bedside clock is a little worse:
3:15...3:02...2:45...2:15. The books call it
"premature waking"; Ralph, who is still
learning to be a widower, calls it a season
in hell. He's begun to notice a strangeness
in his familiar surroundings, to experience
visual phenomena that he can't quite believe
are hallucinations. Soon, Ralph thinks, he
won't be sleeping at all, and what then? A
problem, yes - though perhaps not so
uncommon, you might say. But Ralph has lived
his entire life in Derry, Maine, and Derry
isn't like other places, as millions of
Stephen King readers will gladly testify.
They remember It, also set in Derry, and
know there's a mean streak running through
this small New England city; underneath its
ordinary surface awesome and terrifying
forces are at work. The dying, natural and
otherwise, has been going on in Derry for a
long, long time. Now Ralph is part of it. So
are his friends. And so are the strangers
they encounter.
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Publisher's Weekly
Forget the lean, mean King of Misery, Gerald's Game and
Dolores Claiborne. This is the other King—the Grand Vizier
of Verbosity who gave us It, The Tommyknockers and Needful
Things. There's much of everything in these 800 pages,
including the worthy. Notable is a rare septuagenarian hero,
recently widowed Ralph Roberts, whose broodings on old age
immerse readers into the aging psyche almost as clearly as
other King heroes have revealed the minds of children. Then
there's the slam-bang final 300 pages, in themselves a
novel's worth of excitement as Ralph battles demonic
entities to prevent a holocaust in his small town of Derry,
Maine (site of It). The problem is that the finale is
preceded by more than a novel's worth of casual, even
tedious buildup: Ralph's growing insomnia; his new ability
to see auras around all living things; his dismay as Derry's
citizens divide violently over the impending visit of a
radical pro-lifer; his slow realization that celestial
forces have marked Derry as a battleground between good and
evil. King remains popular fiction's most reliable mirror of
cultural trends, in particular our continuing love affair
with horror (Barker and Koontz are palpable influences
here). If this novel were liposuctioned, it would rank among
King's best; as is, it's another roly-poly volume from a
skilled writer who presumes his readers' appetite for words
is more gourmand than gourmet. 1,500,000 first printing; $1
million ad/promo; paperback rights to Signet; simultaneous
audio release from Penguin Highbridge; BOMC selection.
(Oct.)
Library Journal
The publisher plans to promote King's latest bit of
horror with an advertising campaign-aimed at everything from
TV to online services-that says, ``Insomnia. It looms.'' A
BOMC main selection.
School Library Journal
YA-Ralph Roberts has been waking earlier and earlier
every night for weeks, and the forgetfulness and weariness
caused by sleep deprivation are starting to affect him. When
he begins to see brilliant auras around people and objects,
his concern grows. As his nights become shorter, his visions
become more terrifying, and yet more real. Strange forces
are maneuvering for power in Derry, Maine, and somehow Ralph
is a part of the conflict. Well-read students will note
references to Greek mythology, the Bible, and to Tolkien's
Lord of the Rings (Houghton, 1967) interspersed with modern
cultural allusions. King's forte, however, is
characterization, and there is no shortage of it here. Good
guys and evil are well developed, with a depth that makes
them believable. Although Ralph is clearly identified as a
septuagenarian, he is never stodgy or prudish, and will
appeal to teens. Some of King's more recent novels, such as
Gerald's Game (1992), have been disappointing, but Insomnia
is closer to It (1987) and Needful Things (1992, all Viking)
in its suspense and entertainment potential. A good return
trip to Derry, Maine.-Robin Deffendall, Bull Run Regional
Library, Manassas, VA
BookList - Ray Olson
King's last few novels have been, by his standard, slim
and economical. With this dark fantasy based on the
conception of a multilevel ultimate reality, he returns to
the massiveness of The Stand and It and The Tommyknockers.
On one of the long, exhausting walks old Ralph Roberts
starts taking as a brain tumor slowly kills his wife, he
witnesses a friendly young neighbor, Ed Deepneau, behaving
totally out of character--indeed, like someone possessed.
About a year later and after his wife's death, Ralph begins
waking early and then earlier and earlier. He also starts
seeing things--intense colors streaming off people and
animals. Meanwhile, Ed has turned into an antiabortion
fanatic and wife-beater. Ralph intervenes to help Helen
Deepneau escape from Ed, for which Ed threatens him. Or is
it Ed? Ralph senses that someone or something else is in
control of the troubled man. Ralph's right, of course. Ed
has been involuntarily recruited on one side, and, it
develops, Ralph and his also-widowed neighbor, Lois Chasse,
on the other, of a supercosmic struggle the import of which
King reveals with deliciously tantalizing gradualness. This
is a yarn so packed with suspense, romance, literary
reference, fascinating miscellaneous knowledge, and heart
that only Stephen King could have written it.
Marvelous--that is, full of marvels.
The New York Times Book Review - Chris Bohjalian
There are some truly haunting scenes in the book about
wife abuse and fanaticism, as well as touching observations
about growing up and growing old, but they're quickly
consumed by more predictable sensationalism: the smell of
rotting guts, a decapitation, giant deadly catfish,
cockroaches streaming from ahuman skull. It's clear that Mr.
King had ambitious (perhaps epic) hopes for his new book.
Sadly, what might have been a diamond of a novel is instead
a Stephen King bauble: at moments frightening, at moments
funny, but in the end undermined by the same feasts of gore
that have become the Maine writer's trademark. |
