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Our hero, an old man with a dying wife, begins loosing sleep and (he thinks) hallucinating. He can see auras around people, fields of light that change according to their mood and health and terminate in a long "balloon-string," their soul. And if that's not strange enough, he starts seeing three little bald men dressed as surgeons, who go around snipping people's strings.
It's all very psychedelic and intriguing, but I can see someone giving up on the book before it really gets rolling. Which would be a shame, because the plot kicks in around page 150 and it's a heck of a ride, all the more enjoyable if you don't know what's coming.
Suffice to say that this is the multiverse-hopping, cosmic guru King of The Stand and It, not the bare-bones King of The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon and Running Man (I like 'em both, if you were wondering). Insomnia is actually a better read than both The Stand and It, because it is more closely tied into the world as we know it. Most importantly, the characters are complex and believable, truly people worth knowing.
So if you've got the attention span and the physical strength to lift this book, definitely pick it up. It's a stone trip.
In my opinion this has to rank among the best King has done. Do not be fooled into thinking there is a lengthy diatribe about the abortion issue. King populates both sides of the argument with good and bad people. If anything, King's message is probably "leave it alone" which I guess can be interpreted that he supports women's choice, but he really doesn't browbeat his opinions through his book (unlike say Dan Brown in The Da Vinci Code).
I do think you have to be of a certain age to connect with the characters. Younger readers may not appreciate all the nuances regarding growing old that King conveys in this book.
More importantly, though, my second reading has made me realize how connected this book is with The Dark Tower series King is finishing this year. This might well be considered an ancillary Dark Tower book, as The Talisman, Black House, The Stand and now 'Salem's Lot (for Father Callahan) are.
Give this book a read. It isn't horror per se, as most of King's books aren't in the strictest definition of the horror genre. It is a well written book populated with characters you will care about for the duration of the book (and after!).
The next Christmas, I got everything Stephen King had ever published. Half of it was great. Half of it could have lured flies from a three-day-old corpse. Every time he wrote something, I got it for Christmas. After the astonishingly bad Tommyknockers I stopped reading them. Eventually, my family noticed, and stopped buying them for me. A few years later, he published Desperation and The Regulators at the same time. They both sounded interesting, but I couldn't bring myself to buy them. I mean, after all, TOMMYKNOCKERS!! A few weeks ago, I saw hardback copies of Desperation and The Regulators in the overstock bin at Waldenbooks for under $5.00 each. Well, I bought 'em, read 'em, and loved 'em. So I went ahead and read Insomnia.
This book is not for everyone. There is character development out the wazoo, and some people cannot handle quite that much. After all, some people thought Michael Mann's film Heat was too long. About 200 - 250 pages goes by before the main plot kicks in. I know what you're thinking, "Michael Moorcock could tell the history of the multiverse in 250 pages." Well, Michael Moorcock never had characters that felt this real.
Face it, Stephen King is not successful because of his fast-paced, plot-driven narratives. Stephen King is successful, because of the details, and characters so thought out, you forget they're not real.
I liked it a lot.
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