Elevation (2018) by Stephen King: A novella set in Castle Rock -- much like King's low-key 2017 collaboration with Richard Chizmar, Gwendy's Button Box -- Elevation is a story about a kinder, gentler Castle Rock, though not one without its flaws and magical weirdnesses.
In this case, our middle-aged protagonist discovers that he's losing weight. Not mass, weight. Steadily and perhaps even increasingly rapidly, he's gone from 240 pounds to 210 pounds without looking as if he's lost any weight. And anything he carries or wears loses ALL its weight. A recognizable medical condition, this is not.
However, unlike the vaguely similar Thinner, Elevation is not a horror story. It's a quieter fable of smaller kindnesses and redemption spurred by that weight loss. I'd compare it to Ray Bradbury if King were a poetic writer like Bradbury. In this case, though, King's own dedication -- to genre great Richard Matheson -- seems apt, at least for Matheson in his quieter moments.
Rod Serling's Twilight Zone would also be an apt comparison, with one Changed Premise illuminating the good parts of the human condition as well as the bad. Think "A Passage for Trumpet" or "In Praise of Pip," two gentle, sad TZ episodes starring Jack Klugman. And a middle-aged Klugman would actually make a good fit for our protagonist!
It's a slight work but an enjoyable one, and it's not going to take you long to read. I'd almost swear that an embattled lesbian couple in Elevation may have appeared in the first draft of King and his son's Sleeping Beauties before being cut. They're embattled because small-town Maine isn't ready to patronize the restaurant of two openly gay women. Or is it? Recommended.
Sleeping Beauties (2017) by Stephen King and Owen King: Not the worst novel Stephen King has either written or co-written (that would be The Tommyknockers). But it shares some commonalities with that terrible work.
One is that it's less a novel than a screed -- in the case of Sleeping Beauties, a screed against the patriarchy. There's nothing wrong with that, and the two Kings score a number of points against our male-dominated world. But screeds need to be relatively short. At nearly 700 pages, Sleeping Beauties is not short, and one wearies of the same points being hammered again and again and again, with little variation. We get it. Men are assholes.
The novel was so wearying that I put it down with 50 pages to go and didn't pick it up again (except to move it) for eight months. And that in the middle of an action-packed climax that seemed to be written with all four eyes of the writers squarely on a movie or television version. Explosions, gunfire, dogs and cats living together.
King has also never been good when he moves too far into pure fantasy rather than dark fantasy. The wheel of the plot turns on a magical woman named Eve who has magical powers and talks like a Buffy villain. She's not a villain. Or is she? In any case, she's tied to a worldwide phenomenon in which all women, regardless of age, go into a coma and sprout a cocoon as soon as they fall asleep. Attempts to get them out of their cocoons result in homicidal action by the otherwise still-comatose women/girls/babies.
All this worldwide turmoil focuses on the small Appalachian town in which the novel is mostly set, where the fate of the world will be decided by what the women of that town decide, and what the increasingly desperate men do.
I think maybe this would have been a dandy, angry yawp of a novel at about 300 pages. But the characters are all so flawed and so often unsympathetic -- men and women -- that things get pretty dire, pretty fast, and then go on forever.
Sleeping Beauties has its moments. But I can't shake the feeling that the genesis of the novel came when King and son Owen were discussing Y: The Last Man, the comic-book series in which all men on Earth die in the first issue, all men but one. King called this entertaining, poppy series, written by TV guy Brian K. Vaughan, the greatest graphic novel in history. That comment tells you a lot about King's tastes, or at least that maybe he needs to read more graphic novels.
But Vaughan's anti-patriarchal comic was nuanced and subtle compared to Sleeping Beauties. Indeed, the scariest thing about Sleeping Beauties is a reference in the acknowledgements to a much longer first draft of the novel. Please, God, let that not be released! Not recommended.
