Sleeping Beauties: Chapters 6-12

[Sleeping Beauties Content Note: Trans Exclusion and Erasure, Misogyny, Violence Against Women]

Sleeping Beauties Recap: When this book first popped up on my radar, I expressed some concerns about the content on Twitter. This week, I purchased the book and read through it. As I read, I live-tweeted my thoughts on Twitter. This is a compilation and expansion of my tweets. The live-read will be spread out over multiple posts.

Sleeping Beauties, Part One: The Auld Triangle. Chapter 6-12

To answer a question from last time, the women re-cocoon after they kill. There's also apparently no agency in their murdery actions. [Note: I found this very disappointing, especially since the premise is building up to women having the agency to decide whether to rejoin the world of men or not.] They keep calling the phenomena "Aurora", by the way, when "Mothface Flu" is right there. Mad cow disease, swine flu, bird flu--we name diseases after vectors or we use a scientific name. We don't use Disney names!

It has been pointed out to me, further, how unlikely it is that a bunch of adult cis men would remember the Disney princess. Like, it's fine to name the novel "Sleeping Beauties", but I think it's a stretch to sell us a world where dudes agree to call them that. Imagine if books grew out of their noses and they read all day, god, they'd call it the Belle Flu. Which one of you is writing a mermaid plague where we all catch the Ariel? I want to go to there, dammit. Mother runs into a hospital clutching a be-finned fish-baby singing a solo. "Help, help, my baby can't seem to burp properly!"

Anyway. Good morning, WHO IS EXCITED FOR CHAPTER 6?

I actually am, because for all this book's flaws, I still like it a lot so far. Usually live reads get kinda grueling, but this one isn't. Chapter 2 was kinda a slog and obviously I could've done without the sexual assault part, but I think he's being lined up for a good murder, and frankly there's really no way a mothface flu wouldn't be intriguing to me, so hooray for fun times and deserved murders. Chapter 6 ahoy!

Chapter 6 pans out to show us a hefty number of women in the West Virginia area taking power naps while their children nap. I wrestled a bit with the believability of them not taking the news seriously, but I think it works? A plague that sweeps the globe in apparently 24-48 hours and hits 50% of the populace is unprecedented and extremely fast. "Whatever it is, it won't be important for another day or two, I'll catch the news when they know more" is probably reasonable of people. Mind you, that doesn't fit well with people and things like, say, terror attacks where we're glued to Twitter, but diseases aren't the same.

[TW: Children] Anyway, knowing that awoken women go kill-droid, we get this and I'm screaming oh no oh no oh no. BUT.

Having horrified me, the writers apply a nice touch of restraint and supernatural: the sleepers don't harm boy children! (Thank god.) Instead, they pick up their boys under one or both arms, carry them to the nearest male relative or neighbor, and go back to sleep. It's wonderful and hilarious: cocoon-faced women sulkily and silently being all "You take care of this for once dammit". We're going to call it the Foster Reflex (but of course now I want to know if they try to use boy kids to wake the women later). [Note: They do not. The whole plot is around trying to wake the women, but no one ever tries anything.]

Men are not so lucky; we're informed that "millions" of men were killed on Aurora day. I'm getting Left Behind flashbacks--and this perhaps isn't King's fault--at how orderly the news media is; there still should be reports of moth men. Just setting trans men aside for a moment, people would be panicky with all these dead and sleeping bodies to sort out. Mistakes happen. (Left Behind featured all the children disappearing, which should've been a bigger, messier deal than it was.)

I think, ultimately, it's hard to write a novel about a topic that would cause mass hysteria around the globe. At least here there's a "pan-out" sense where the narrative is like "later reports showed" so the facts are coming after a cool-down period. But considering this took every woman on earth in a single day, I expect (hope?) the men will be terrified to sleep now. Like, why would you assume men are immune and not just time delayed until the virus mutates and jumps? You wouldn't. (I think we may actually be going in that direction--a bunch of meth-taking men making bad decisions--so that could be fun.)

Nota bene: I keep slipping up and saying "every woman" because the book does, but we're NOT taking every woman and that's upsetting. Even if your plague doesn't affect trans women as victims, you still need to show the after effects on them in a global event.

Cut to Eve being processed into the prison while Clint hovers around his wife Lila. Clint has worked out that Lila lied about where she was last night but unsure why (she was glimpsing his secret daughter for the first time) And can I say that I really like this part? If we hadn't been in Lila's head, we'd be as clueless as Clint and his growing sanctimony at being lied at might seem less hypocritical.

But we have been in Lila's head and she's sympathetic and well-rounded and we feel her pain at being lied at so Clint looks like a tool. And I'm pretty sure he's supposed to come off like a tool, so well done there, gold star. I actually find this bit realistic; Clint loves and worries about his wife but is also piqued at her unexpected lie and what it could mean. Meanwhile forgetting that he's got NO place to get huffy about tiny lies, what with his whopper. It's very human. And toolish.

[Note: All of this was a horrible lie by the book. It will turn out that Clint is entirely, completely, 100% innocent and Lila was just a terrible, silly, unfair person for doubting him.]

Eve asks to be called "Eve Black" when they solicit a last name during in-take.

Clint writes Lila a script for wakey drugs and urges her to consider taking contraband at the police station if it comes to that, and...? I realize I have no survival instinct--my zombie apocalypse plan is an orgy followed by an OD on pills--but I don't see this working? How long can a human safely stay awake before the human body shuts down? Clint's plan to keep Lila awake doesn't have a long-term strategy (which is also human, I guess) but I don't see this working. Even if they come up with a vaccine / cure in a day or two, this is a global phenomena and a rural community. They won't get any. Me, I'd be thinking about where I want to sleep and putting all my resources into getting there.

Now I'm a touch sad/upset that there hasn't been more agency granted to the women regarding the disease so far. That might be coming after we winnow the cast down, but I just. Imagine women dealing with this, you know? In a longer process, would we see groups of women retreating to secret hiding places for safety? Nesting in numbers?

We cut back to Lila and I'm delighted to see some resentment from her towards Clint's Chapter 1 career ego-crisis flashback. The tension is palpable. Lila is struggling to stay awake and I like being in Lila's head, so I'm selfishly worried she'll be taken away.

Oh gosh, the diners are giving free coffee to women and this is so sweet and helpless and poignant I teared up. Like, it's a futile meaningless press against the incoming reality, but that's what humans do. We help each other with our futile attempts.

We're ejected from Lila's head into men I don't like and I'm not going to summarize the rest of chapter 6. We'll keep going. Chapter 7 opens with a plane crash caused by Awakened Women, so now it really is Left Behind. I'm troubled by this, though. The sleep clearly isn't intended to protect women, if they're dying. God or Eve is fucking up.

My heart. Some of the women ARE falling asleep on purpose. (I would, tbh.)
People attempt to storm the White House (that was fast and I find it dubious) and we learn Sheila The Secret Daughter has Clint's surname?? I don't like secret baby plots, so I would like the Sheila thing explained now please, thank you, so I can move on with my closure.

[TW] Sigh, okay this part is hard to summarize. Jared (high school cinnamon bun) followed the bullies into the woods after school. His goal was to film them bullying the homeless lady (which he didn't work up the nerve to stop them, fucking hell, Jared), but before things got too violent, the bullies discovered him and chased him into the road where he's now been hit by a car. Given that I both liked Jared a lot and absolutely hated him, I have no idea how to feel about this as a reader. More later, I guess? [Note: Jared will spend the rest of the novel being perfectly fine.]

[TW] Oh for fucking hell. How do you write or research prison and think rape is a uniquely woman experience?? I'm genuinely angry at this sort of pablum. I'm a rape survivor and I'm not a woman. I'm not immune from rape because of my gender. You can write women confiding in other women without universalizing survivorship to a single gender! You can do X without Y! And, yes, the POV character could just be realistically flawed, but there's no reason to give her that flaw. The harm is unnecessary.

Okay. Big scene. Clint interviews Eve for the first time.

I really hope Eve is trolling him because a nap and earrings seem under-ambitious.

Mmmmmr. I called this: she went to see him simply because he's the protagonist. ....Or maybe her next victim, but. Clint has diagnosed her as "really, really disturbed" which is confusing to me because she's really really not?

Trolling men over their virility only perpetuates rape culture but on the other hand Clint may need to hear this? He's been mentally lamenting the loss of his youth while assuming his 45yo wife could bang hot pool boys for a living if she wanted. Since most male protagonists assume the same and aren't corrected, it's nice to see Eve call him on that shit. "Snookums worries about his lost youth? Yeah, women have NO IDEA what that is like."

Eve immediately goes back on their deal which puts her into Trickster God category and I like her again? Excellent. [Note: Everything she says here is later wrong when Clint is revealed to be perfectly innocent. My theory is that the authors originally intended for Clint to have cheated but then chickened out and made him innocent instead, forgetting to fix this part.]

Clint diagnoses her as schizophrenic after ten minutes (fuck yooooou) but he's also clearly being emotional and unobjective and wrong. That's....kinda refreshing? If I must have an unlikable protagonist, it's nice for the book to heckle him with me and help throw popcorn.

We're back in Lila's head and she's found a massive supernatural moth tree! There's... There's a snake here. ...and a white tiger, the cutest and least practical of all cats. OH NO SHE CLOSED HER EYES. Fuck fuck fuck don't take Lila away from me. At least bring her back reborn as Lilith, Mother of Demons.

Wait, that's how she found out about Sheila? I have an unusual last name, I get it, but I don't think I'd immediately assume another Mardoll in the next town over was my husband's kid.

We're.... We're just going there, I see.

How the fuck do you do this in 2017, how do you position two genders: "men" and "XX"? How the fuck do you do that? You could argue that it might, might, make sense to talk chromosomes in a medical context, but no we're just damn the torpedoes. I'm just??? So annoyed??? Like, I'd gotten past the medical stuff, I didn't like it, but I'd deal, and then this gets flung at my face. And apparently the book clubs I participated in back in the day were a chromosomal impulse I guess.

He has to know about trans people! I refuse to believe King has never heard of trans people! Or didn't watch Orange Is The New Black or something! And! And! And! There were editors for this and beta readers and god knows how many people touched this book! Apparently every single one of them was okay with sentences that positioned "men" and "XX" as the two genders.

....it's almost like a surreal attempt to include nonbinary people, if you wrongly assume all enbys are XX and that trans man don't exist??? Like "men didn't show up, but women did" would be LESS bad than "men didn't show up, but XXs did." So here is your writing tip: make sure your trans inclusive attempts work for trans women, trans men, AND trans enbys!

You see this a lot with people who are trying but say things like "women and enbys welcome!" Wait, what do you mean exactly? I'm an assigned female at birth demiGIRL. Are you going to welcome an assigned male at birth masculine demiBOY? Or people will say "no cis men!" like that welcomes everyone else. Um. How are you planning to deal with people who look like men? And what are you saying about trans men that they are welcome when cis men aren't? Think really carefully about that. If you're saying "trans men are welcome because they're basically women!" that's not welcoming. Okay?

Being an enby is weird because we're invisible to many, but well-meaning cis people tend to try to include us more than other trans folk. So we get these tortured "women and enbys!" frameworks that, when used carelessly, hurt trans women, trans men, and trans enbys. I am going to be nice and say that I think that's why we have "men and XXs" here: a botched nod to trans people. If so, that's... well, it's bad, but it means King was trying which means he can be taught. Better than an TERF who doesn't wanna be. [Note: The book gets worse.] So in the interests of teaching everyone following along, here are some of the many problems with "men and XX".

One: There are XX men. Trans men are men. Setting these up as separate categories hurts trans men and contributes to their invisibility.

Two: You cannot tell someone's chromosomes without a DNA test. Lila does not know mostly XX people showed up. You might as well say mostly AB negative people attended the book club. YOU CANNOT TELL WITHOUT A BLOOD TEST. The continued myth that you can tell someone is AB negative at a glance, oops I mean XX, gets us killed. Kinda a big deal.

Three: "XX" isn't a bucket term for "women and enbys". Lots of women and enbys aren't XX. Yeah, you didn't call XY women and enbys "men" here, but you positioned "men" as opposite to "XX" so... ya kinda did? It's heavily implied? "Though a man or two showed up, it was primarily an XX affair" positions the two categories of Men and XX as non-intersecting. So if someone isn't XX, they're either Men or a third non-XX non-man category that didn't show up or warrant a mention.

"Though a man or two showed up, it was primarily women who attended" would've been fine? This is another cis thing that allies do: they panic a little, like, oh god, if I can't tell gender by looking, ANYONE COULD BE ANY GENDER. That's true! But you don't need to overcorrect and be like "everyone here seems to have breasts but I do not know if they are women". Inclusivity is acknowledging some of the "women" here might not be women and that's okay. It is NOT a total abdication of all assumptions.

"Every person who turned up tonight is a woman." <-- No, probably not.

"Lotta women here tonight!"" <-- Sure! Fine!"

"I see a veritable ocean of breasts, but as for their genders or chromosomal makeups, I cannot speculate." <-- NO ONE IS ASKING FOR THIS.

I really do know that the people who do this are trying. I went through a similar phase. Like, I wrote a deconstruction on Claymore, which is an anime about an all-women warrior group, and then panicked because I don't know they're women. The Claymores are acquired by the organization as babies, so lots of them could be men and enbys and and and and and But I learned to chill and so can you! Inclusivity is understanding that gender is complicated, not "avoid all gender words forever".

So that is a long way around saying do NOT try to find-and-replace the concept of "woman" with "XX" in your novel. That's not inclusive! Anyway, back to the plot.

Someone mentioned Lila's up-and-coming basketball star niece and she googled her. Sheila Norcross' mother, Shannon Parks, had been mentioned in passing by Clint Norcross as a person from his past. Lila does some digging and Clint is on the birth record as the father + Sheila is a year younger than Lila's son Jared. I feel bad for Lila but I feel even worse for Sheila.

Oh, ouch. Yes. This rings true. Poor Lila. I do like that the narrative seems to understand the biggest pain here isn't the sex but the betrayal. Keeping his child a secret for years. A lot of "betrayed woman" stories by men seem to think the crime is putting your dick in someone else, when the lies were what hurt me. I'm worried we might be building up to Clint not knowing about his daughter, but Eve seemed to imply he did.

OH THANK JESUS, LILA IS STILL AWAKE AND WE'RE NOT TRAPPED WITH THE MEN YET. (This is a notable step up from Chapter 2, where I wanted the women to fall asleep so they could stop being badly written. Well done.)

Update: Teenager Jared is alive, conscious, and limping home. I'm upset that Jared won't seek treatment for being hit by a car; he should've seen TV shows about internal bleeding. Dammit, Jared. I mean, I understand why he doesn't--he's ashamed and humans make bad choices--but if he dies of internal bleeding or something I'll be mad. [Note: Jared is fine. He's never not fine.]

We go to the hospital, which seems well written? Everyone is a reasonable level of panicked and trying to cope. The premise itself is panicky mixed with fatalism, really. The illness is terrifying but also apparently unstoppable. I feel like once I realized that, once it was clear that there was no escape, I'd just quietly hurry up and wait. Which is its own horror.

I do think it's very surreal that all the men have just... accepted they're not in danger so far? Like, maybe this is the natural progression of years of books/movies/etc. like this one presenting women as a separate species to men. But I would NOT be assuming that my male immunity had any duration or staying power. Why would you?

They shouldn't be immune. A virus that affects the X chromosome would affect men--men have an X chromosome. "XX" isn't a single chrome! A virus that only affects XY people is surface-plausible because some people don't have a Y chromosome, but everyone has an X! And again: You can only affect women if you make the plague magic, but then you got to snag trans women as well or you make god look foolish.

[TW: Rape] Okay, I'm really angry again. I've been trying to stay chill about how nice and professional most of the cops and prison staff are (minus that one rapist), because I mean. *gestures at reality* But also I understanding wanting to write cops/guards who aren't horrible human beings, etc. But the lady warden, who we are supposed to like, is elated that the rapist raped someone because now she can fire his skeevy ass. *record scratch* waitwhatthefuck?

[TW] That's it? An officer rapes an inmate, in front of a witness, with semen evidence left behind, and you're going to fire him? I mean, yes, officers get away with horrific shit [realism!] but you can't have it both ways! You can't sell me alternate-universe Good Honest Cops/Officers Who Care About Prisoners and then deploy Realism out of the blue.

On a television set elsewhere, a doctor posits "female hysteria" and a lady producer beats the shit out of him for being so crass. It's an odd scene and feels a bit too on the nose. I can see why upset manbabies are review-bombing the book, lolsob. There's an old premise here of, like, if all the women on earth got fed up with men's shit, what chaos would we see? But it's almost like Tier 2 of Feminism, but on the higher tiers you learn about intersection of power and privilege and it's more complicated. We won't solve inequality by beating up all the men, satisfying as the idea might be at times.

NO! NO NO NO NO NO. *hits the story with a rolled-up newspaper* This is not how the Ambitious Journalist Archetype does! Goddamn it, I want to acquire the rights to this movie just so I can do Michaela's character justice. Why isn't someone live-streaming their attempt to stay awake and narrating any "symptoms" (real or imagined) they feel? YouTube would be all over this. News media would surely follow. Gotta fill that air time and you won't have many more chances at this.

unnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnng, this is fucking frustrating?????!!

[TW] We're supposed to be leading up to dealing with the rapist, and instead we're going to talk about Clint's feelings and his childhood. We've only just barely checked in with the actual victim, Jeanette. Jeanette is serene and untroubled, while Clint is raging furious and having fantasies of murder and violence because he Hates Rapists So Much. This is Realism, I suppose--most cis men do manage to make my rape about their feelings--but I don't like it! Yanking me away from any conclusion to this so we can talk about Clint's childhood (which I don't care about) is annoying.

[TW] All I have so far is the rapist was left alone in the Warden's office and found her prescription bottle of Xanax. It's been heavily implied that he'll use that bottle to hurt her somehow, but I'm not worried about her career at the moment. Partly because a plague is about to kill her anyway, and partly there's a victim I care about more than the warden who wants to fire a rapist. I mean, I understand getting a conviction might be hard/impossible, but she doesn't even consider trying!

[TW] Oh, and no one has asked the victim how she is or how she feels about this. They're happily avoiding her on purpose, in fact. It was a witness who came forward. NO ONE has talked to the victim. At all.

[TW: Children] Wow, this book is doubling down on the insistence that rape is uniquely a female experience. This hurts. You can talk about rape being a thing disproportionately experienced by girls/women without erasing non-female victims!

Flashback time: Clint remembers a chance meeting with Shannon (that we know happened a month or two before she must've conceived Sheila, the baby she gave Clint's last name and listed as the father). [Note: In some/all states, listing a father on the birth certificate of a child born out of wedlock requires the consent of that father--and it is a crime to impersonate someone in order to do so.]

I am trying so hard not to snark, BUT. This is slightly more palatable because Clint is an unreliable narrator, [Note: He is not.] but. Dudes. You can write more than Troubled Helpful Hot Chicks. (I think one reason I like Lila so much is that I'm rooting for her to be so done with Clint's shit.)

In the flashback, Clint runs into Shannon by chance (she's a waitress, he's out of town at a seminar) and his wife tells him no affairs. We cut away.

[TW] Okay, the warden has remembered that rape is a crime and has adjusted her sights up from "fire" to "arrest". Except this is like a weird retcon detail added in at a late stage because... why haven't they called cops? Clint is the sheriff's husband! They earlier had a judge come down to impound Eve in a pinch, so it should be easy enough to cuff the rapist with what they have.

[TW] What the fucking fuck, she's actually encouraging him to flee town. Which would be VERY EASY during the global apocalypse at the moment! How can you possibly pretend to take rape seriously as a crime while suggesting someone scoot out of town and take his raping elsewhere? I mean, this is actually how rape culture sustains itself? Even when we do catch rapists, we let them go to do it again!

Dr. Clint loses his temper and punches the rapist because HE takes rape seriously (eyes roll away) then they let him go to flee the state. Since the rapist's victim, the witness, and his boss will soon be in a coma from mothface flu, he ought to be fine. I'm so fucking not. I mean, I'm sure the narrative will make him pay, but none of this is okay. This is NOT taking rape seriously; it's the actual opposite.

oh. my. god.

*deep breath* Um. Okay. Remember when Peters the Rapist found the Warden's Xanax pills? He dumped them all in her coffee, apparently. Oh, and now she wants to throw him in a cell and wait for the police to arrive.

IF ONLY YOUR WIFE WAS THE SHERIFF AND YOU COULD CALL HER, CLINT.

IF ONLY THAT WERE A THING. IF ONLY. OH WELL.