Sleepless In The Secret City (Insomnia - Stephen King)

Member Name: assethound

Product:	Insomnia - Stephen King
Date:	18/08/00 (40 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Good read, excellent characters

Disadvantages: None

Ralph Roberts feels old. His wife has died after a long and painful illness, he blames her doctor, and he wakes earlier and earlier every morning. Soon he is limping through life, looking through drooping eyelids as slowly Derry begins to change around him. His neighbour, Ed Deepneau starts to change from an apparently loving family man with a wife and small child to a foul mouthed wife-beater. Things around Derry are starting to look very different to Ralph, especially once he starts to see the auras and the little bald doctors, and the nightmare really begins...

The best thing for me about this book, apart from the strong story and Stephen King's vivid, almost cinematic prose, is that Ralph Roberts, the main character, is an old man.

It is refreshing to see the sort of characters that have always been marginalised in fiction coming to the fore in this novel. Many of King's books have characters who would normally be placed right on the periphery taking centre stage.

Just think about It (a bunch of outcast kids, the Losers, and Mike Hanlon, the black librarian), Rose Madder, (battered woman on the run from her husband), Carrie (isolated teenage girl ostracised in high school), The Green Mile (a black convict on death row), Bag of Bones (a black woman raped and killed by racists), Cujo (a dog). Well maybe not the last one, but there are plenty of examples if you think back through the many books that King has written.

I hadn't actually thought about this aspect of some of King's work until I read Insomnia, but it is intriguing that a mainstream horror writer is placoing the focus of many of his books on characters that are often disenfranchised and given marginal roles to play in fiction, instead of going for the strong male lead and helpless woman character as so many male (and female) horror writers do. If you look at King's books over his career as a writer, there is definitely a trend towards
more and more normally peripheral characters becoming the focus of the story. As King wrote in It, of eleven year old Ben Hanscom:

"He understood instinctively, as most kids did, that they lived below the sight-lines, and hence the thought-lines, of most adults."

If you have enjoyed other books by Stephen King, you will find Insomnia like a welcome home. The streets of Derry are familiar to many King fans, and this book explores another side to King's imaginary Maine, the secret city of the old, lived under the sight-line of most of of the population, just as the kids were in It, also set in Derry. Instead of hanging out in the lush undergrowth of the Barrens, the Old Crocks hang out at the picnic area near the airport. Ralph Roberts himself realises that there are three Derry's, the Derry of the children, the Derry of the adults - the "real life", and the Derry of the Old Crocks.

Insomnia for me is a rumination on the way all of our lives are tied together, and at the end this is hinted at with an overlapping of images and story with the Dark Tower books.

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