Stephen King: That's how good his novel is as a comic book

Created: 12/19/2021, 3:05 pm

From: Michael Schleicher

Stephen King: "Sleeping Beauties" was created with his son Owen.

© Oliver Bodmer

Stephen King and his son Owen wrote the horror novel "Sleeping Beauties" together.

Now Alison Sampson has turned the bestseller into a comic.

Hamlet already suspected something: “Dying.

Sleep.

Sleep! ”Shakespeare lets his Danish prince ponder at the beginning of the third act.

And further: “Maybe dream too!

Yes, there it lies: whatever dreams may come in sleep, when we shake off the urge of the earthly, that forces us to stand still. "

Stephen King presented the thriller "Billy Summers" in 2021

What power do our dreams have? Those women who fall into an (apparently?) Eternal sleep in "Sleeping Beauties", the novel by Stephen and Owen King, dream themselves very real into a kind of paradise, a Garden of Eden - meanwhile on earth the horror around them engages. The book was published in 2017 (in German by Heyne-Verlag), the now 73-year-old US writer, whom some people - completely incomprehensible - still count as trivial literature, wrote it together with his youngest son Owen, who was born in 1977 . A few months ago Stephen King presented his exciting novel "Billy Summers" about a hit man.

In “Sleeping Beauties” the two kings tell of a mysterious sleeping sickness that is spreading pandemically around the globe;

the script was created long before the current corona pandemic.

Anyone who becomes infected in the Book of Kings falls asleep and can no longer wake up; their bodies pupate with sticky cobwebs.

Anyone who tries to free the sick from their cocoons, however, experiences a bloody inferno.

Clinics, police and politics are faced with more than one riddle, especially since the disease actually only seems to torment women.

Father and son King skillfully play with medical questions, health madness, mass hysteria, the supernatural and the normal human madness.

Stephen King wrote Sleeping Beauties with his son Owen

How it ends is not revealed here. British artist Alison Sampson was also fascinated by the story, which was written in a picture-perfect way: Last year she adapted “Sleeping Beauties” as a graphic novel - the first of two volumes has just been published in German

. Author Rio Youers, who specializes in pretty much everything that is exciting to read, has courageously shortened the Kings novel and prepared it for the medium of comics. So the narrative gets a faster pace. It is attracted again by Sampson's graphic implementation. On most of the pages, the Briton follows the classic structure for the medium: she places panel after panel. But these individual images are regularly cropped here, refuse - sometimes just barely - to the right angle or are arranged as a picture-in-picture. The slant that stretches across all sides fits in wonderfully with the dramaturgy of the madness that has slumbered under the thin varnish of civilization.

Triona Farrell has developed a coherent color concept for the Sampson drawings: the Irish artist keeps the scenes that play in reality in muted brown and green tones.

The more women fall asleep, the dreamer the coloring becomes.

The dreamland, on the other hand, is vibrant and diverse.

Or is that just an optical illusion?