bookheaven | Sleeping Beauties, Vol. 1

Sleeping Beauties, Vol. 1 by Rio Youers
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I picked this up on a whim in the library and boy is it ever the wrong time to read about a pandemic that is singling out women. I know I passed on this father/son duo novel because it was over 700 pages and I noped right out of that. I thought maybe in condensed form...

I've been reading a lot of horror lately. I love King. I'm sure this is not the time and I'm not the person for this one. I know it's set where I am in Appalachia but this is a book populated with pretty much the worst people. While it seems to have started in Australia, the pandemic Aurora has arrived in the States. As soon as women fall asleep they are covered with a cocoon of webs. If anyone removes these webs the women wake up insanely violent tearing apart anyone in their path.

Naturally many women are taking whatever drugs they can to stay awake. Into this comes Eve. We meet her destroying a meth kitchen and killing all the men involved. She ends up in a women's prison which is the focal point of the story. Unlike the sheriff and warden (both women) Eve can go to sleep and wake back up.

The women are going to 'the mother tree' from whence Eve came. What is happening to them we don't know in this volume. The sheriff's husband, the psychiatrist for the prison, has been appointed by Eve to be the man to protect her from those looking to hurt her (namely a rapist prison guard and a few others).

As for the men within a few days they have become their worst primal selves. I'd like to think they'd last a little longer (or is this part of the virus) but after Covid I'm no longer as certain was I might have been.

It's really a rather ugly story and I'm not sure I need to read more of it. One thing that did interest me : if you identify as a woman Aurora claims you so transwomen are going to sleep and getting webbed up but transmen are not.

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