Insomnia

5 comments on Insomnia

1. J. T. Nite says:

   August 10, 2010 at 5:47 am

   Review by J. T. Nite for Insomnia
   Rating:
   There are many people for whom the book “Insomnia” will serve as a cure for the titular condition. It’s an 800 page book that takes about 150 pages to start making sense — the first quarter of the book is all strange goings-on with no exposition.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.
2. Anonymous says:

   August 10, 2010 at 6:05 am

   Review by for Insomnia
   Rating:
   Ralph Roberts, now there’s a name I’ll remember. We’ve been through a lot, Robert and I (oh, around 787 pages, I’d say), and I don’t regret one moment. Sure, the first 200 pages aren’t your typical Stephen King book, but I don’t see this story NOT having those pages! Mr. King actually took a long time to set up his characters, and with good reason: you end up giving a damn about them, you feel their joy and echo their sorrow. But after around 200 pages, ahh, that’s where the adventure really begins, when Ralph Roberts, who has been sleeping less and less, starts to see auras around everything. Just when you think that you have it pretty much figuered out, Mr. King throws you a nice curve ball and surprises you again. Not really a horror book, but an amazing read. Oh, and if you’ve read King’s Dark Tower series, you are in for a special treat! Oh, and don’t listen to the one star reviews, they must not of had the patience to get through the first 200 pages. 4 and a half stars!!
3. Brian Seiler says:

   August 10, 2010 at 6:10 am

   Review by Brian Seiler for Insomnia
   Rating:
   Of all the many modern authors that write today, few are more frequently typified than Stephen King. To his critics, he is a windbag with a tendency to bloat who’s far too much in love with the sound of his own voice to keep his length under control. To his fans, he is a masterful storyteller with a talent for creating lively, organic characters. Both of those poles of King appear in this book, and both to almost as great an extreme as I can remember from any of his previous writing.Let’s start with the good. The characters in this book are wonderful. While I certainly don’t believe that he captures the essence of old age at all (these folks are almost as active as the ridiculous old people they have on television commercials these days), since I don’t see the age of the protagonist and his cohorts as being critical to the plot, I’m inclined to disregard that gaping oversight in light of the masterful treatment that he gives all of the characters who people this book. King’s typical narrative voice is also present here, lending the novel a familiar tone that most readers should be able to fall in with quickly and comfortably.The bad. This book is big. Very big. About two hundred pages too big, truth be told. The thing about the criticism of King’s inability to control his bloat is that it’s right, and in no other work outside of It is it more apparent than in this one. Not nearly enough happens in this book to mandate the amount of time you’re going to spend reading it. By allowing the length to spiral out of control, he only makes it that much less accessible to the action-oriented horror base of his audience. King also drops a lot of brand names here–another frequent criticism. I personally don’t care. You might.In one notable deviation from King’s excellent treatment of his characters, his shallow, somewhat misogynistic understanding of the female psyche rears its ugly head. I’m not a hundred percent on this, but I’m pretty sure that there’s no connection between battered women and lesbianism, as King implies.Most importantly, there’s a deep element of this book that is utterly and completely unaccessible to anybody who is not at least passingly familiar with King’s magnum opus–the Dark Tower. Indeed, I would wager that if you haven’t read at least the first three books in the series, you’re going to be completely lummoxed when it comes to understanding why some of the characters do what they do, or what’s going on at all. Insomnia was penned during a period of Steve’s career when he was unable to write a Dark Tower book, even though he wanted to, and that frustrated desire led him, in this case, to write a book that is so intensely mired in that world’s mythology that it’s nigh on incomprehensible to those not in the know. I am, so I didn’t have a problem. In fact, I’d say that any Dark Tower fan probably needs to read the book precisely for that reason. Other, less familiar readers WILL have problems, however.On the whole, while I personally have some affection for this book, I can’t give it my unconditional recommendation. Steven King has written many great pieces that anybody can read (Desperation, Hearts in Atlantis), but this is not one of them. While King fans will find a lot to like, anybody who’s not already fimrly entrenched as a King enthusiast should probably stick to one of his more accessible books.
4. Goodbye Cruel World says:

   August 10, 2010 at 6:11 am

   Review by Goodbye Cruel World for Insomnia
   Rating:
   This book takes me back. I read it after school for about a week straight following its release, and I remember thinking how it was one of the first times Stephen King really showed us the interconnectedness of his works, something he’d been hinting at for years. “I’m actually only writing one long story in dozens of volumes,” King had said on occasion, and Insomnia proved him right. With cross-over’s, tie-in’s, and references to so many previous King tales, from Pet Sematary and the Gunslinger on, Insomnia was like some massive transit station held between two manic looking red book covers.

   As for the tale it tells in its own right, Insomnia, King’s mid-90′s mega-novel, breaks the traditional storytelling mold by being set among a cast composed mostly of people in their seventies and beyond. As he is stricken with insomnia and begins to see some very strange things in the dead of night, Derry, Maine resident and man of advanced years, Ralph Roberts, is unwittingly a witness to creatures from an alternate dimension caught up in the midst of a terrible war. On one side are beings of good who serve order, and on the other are those who seek to bring about the chaotic reign of the dreaded Crimson King, a figure of inhuman evil and insanity who comes to be of great importance in King’s Dark Tower (and other) books. Alongside Ralph is another senior citizen and fellow insomniac, Lois Chasse, who has also seen the creatures who inhabit the night. Together these unlikely heroes quest to halt the plans of evil, which have been fed by and become focused on the growing dissention in Derry which surrounds the visit of a powerful and divisive figure in the “Pro-Choice” movement who is scheduled to speak at a crowded civic center. In due time Lois and Ralph learn the murderous intentions of the Crimson King, who has possessed the mind of a citizen of Derry. This man is being unwittingly employed by evil to carry out an act of mass murder, all with a goal of eliminating a single individual who stands in the way of the Crimson King and his minions.

   Insomnia has a likable tone and a denser than expected storyline that skips along at a rapid pace and is populated by familiar landmarks, references to other books, and characters so welcoming that it takes a devoted Stephen King reader a long time to notice there really isn’t a lot going on in this novel. Mostly if King’s career is studied as a whole Insomnia fits in more as a gathering point to re-direct the entire canon toward the conclusion of the “one long story” foreshadowed in the Dark Tower. Although it contains a beginning, middle, and end, and could be read alone without turning the page of any other Stephen King book, Insomnia really functions best when it is understood to be what it is at its core: a signpost passed by on a much longer literary journey.

   Three and a half stars.
   
5. J. K. Miller says:

   August 10, 2010 at 6:53 am

   Review by J. K. Miller for Insomnia
   Rating:
   When I was younger, I saw a big, inflated ad for IT. The green claw grasping through the sewer grating grabbed my curiosity and squeezed. I asked for, and received, it for Christmas (I was twelve, how’s that for a children’s story?). I loved the thing.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.