Matt's Reviews > Insomnia

“[Ralph] fell asleep in his chair a little after midnight, and when he woke the next morning the air was cooler than it had been in weeks and [his wife] Carolyn was wide awake, coherent, and bright-eyed. She seemed, in fact, hardly to be sick at all. Ralph took her home and began the not-inconsiderable job of making her last months as comfortable as possible…As that summer became fall, and as that fall darkened down toward Carolyn’s final winter, Ralph’s thoughts were occupied more and more by the deathwatch, which seemed to tick louder and louder even as it slowed down. But he had no trouble sleeping. That came later…”
- Stephen King, Insomnia

The thing about Stephen King – a veritable literary treasure – is that even when he’s bad, he’s usually still pretty good, and even at his worst, he is still interesting.

That’s sort of where I found myself with Insomnia. This is not a book in the upper tier of King’s works, the masterpieces like It, Pet Semetary, and The Shining. I don’t even think it’s second tier material. At times, in fact, I found myself rolling my eyes, or wondering when something was going to happen. Nevertheless, despite all my reservations, I got through 787 pages with relative ease. And that’s not nothing, especially with a novel that’s roughly the size of an amply-nourished pug.

King has a tendency towards deliberateness when it comes to setting his plots in motion. Many of his novels have a long leadup, as he introduces characters, fills in backstory, and carefully prepares his chess board (usually just to flip it over). Insomnia is no exception.

The main character here is Ralph Roberts, a man in his seventies who – when the book opens – is on the verge of losing his beloved wife to cancer. By the time the prologue ends, he is a widower. More than that, he has lost his ability to sleep through the night. He can fall asleep just fine, but staying that way till dawn has grown impossible. This begins to wear away at him.

For a time, King is content to mostly accompany Ralph as he goes about his business, desperately searching for a remedy as his symptoms worsen. Ralph does not really stand out as one of King’s memorable characters. Honestly, if you give me a couple more weeks, I’ll probably forget his name. He is mostly defined by his age: lonely and wistful; always eating soup from single-serving packets; and sometimes watching other elderly people play chess. In other words, “old age” as described by King resembles a grab bag of cliches that you’d get from a movie. (King was in his mid-forties when he wrote this, and is close to Ralph’s age now). Despite lacking any real charisma or magnetism, you can’t help but like Ralph, however, if only because King places us in such close proximity, and forces us to follow him all over town.

That town, it should be noted, is Derry, Maine, one of the prominent locations in King’s sprawling multiverse. In Derry, normal is a qualified state of being, and it is not surprising that Ralph’s sleeping issues gradually morph into something more sinister. He begins to see things that others can’t see, and it is hinted that he is getting a glimpse into an alternate world. Beyond that, Ralph’s younger neighbor Ed begins to act strange, even violent.

(view spoiler)[For those interested in The Dark Tower, it is worth mentioning that Insomnia provides some connective tissue to that series. (hide spoiler)]

I won’t say much more about the plot, other than to note that it involves supernatural horror. Of course, to say that a Stephen King novel involves supernatural horror is a lot like saying a book contains words. The one thing I will add to my necessarily vague summation is that Insomnia is convoluted. In my opinion – having only read a fraction of King’s oeuvre – King does his best when he’s high concept. That is, his best novels can be boiled down to an easy-to-describe-yet-killer idea. Think cemetery that brings the dead back to life, or family stuck in a snowbound-and-haunted hotel. Here, King builds a really elaborate mechanism, one that requires a ton of explanation, and page after page of exposition. The more you explain a thing, the less scary this gets. Not only did Insomnia lack any chills, it kind of tired me out. Unfortunately, this is often more tedious than spine tingling.

To further complicate an uneven work, King makes the national debate about abortion a centerpiece of his storytelling. Specifically, much of Insomnia’s action swirls around a Planned Parenthood-like women’s health clinic, and the wild-eyed Christian zealots who oppose it.

Let’s first dispense with the question as to whether or not introducing such a fraught, real-life controversy into popular fiction is appropriate. Yes, it is. Fiction in general, and horror in particular, is a wonderful vehicle for exploring thorny social issues. This has been proven time and again. Furthermore, you don’t read Stephen King for appropriate; you read King because for him, the line between good and bad taste does not exist.

The problem is that King’s handling of this hot potato is pretty ham-fisted. Rather than nuance and insight, King attacks this issue with all the subtlety of a blowtorch-wielding madman in a gunpowder factory. This leads to caricatured villains – effective monsters can be one-dimensional, effective human characters cannot – pedantic speechifying, and ultimately, a somewhat disturbing climax that left me trying to psychoanalyze King’s motives.

As I indicated above, propriety has no place in the writings of Stephen King. After all, he once wrote a short story about a college killing spree that’s only purpose was describing what it would be like to engage in a college killing spree. Beyond propriety, though, is the reality that King’s choices are distracting. There is an extended scene of graphic violence toward the end of Insomnia that closely mirrors any number of domestic terrorism incidents you see on the news. To have this show up in the midst of a story that is otherwise occupied by quasi-mystical concerns, and beings that are not of this earth, is jarring. It’s also unnecessary, as King could easily have told this exact tale without this element.

(Sidenote: King has always shown himself willing to jump into political debates, and I respect his willingness to forgo potential book sales in order to speak his mind. It is also interesting that King wrote Insomnia between 1990 and 1993, at a time when Roe v. Wade seemed certain to be overturned. I’m assuming that this legal argument – which resulted in Planned Parenthood v. Casey being decided in 1992 – had some influence on King’s choices).

By this point, butting up against my word count, I’ve mostly either criticized or damned with faint praise. With the dwindling space I have remaining, I should say that I’m still glad I read Insomnia. For all its problems, it showed commitment to its bit. King can seldom be accused of phoning anything in, and his ambitions here are on display. He went big with Insomnia, and I appreciated that. There are clear themes – aging, grief – and spiritual meditations and an ending that works better than many of King’s more famous titles.

Insomnia also has merit simply for its place in the King canon. Having been a latecomer to King, the breadth of his genius has been slow to dawn on me. Yet genius he is. Not a great horror writer, but a great writer, full stop. If you draw your finger down a list of his books, you find yourself repeating: That’s a classic. That’s a classic. That’s a classic. When dealing with an author of such talent, prodigiousness, and impact, the failures can be as fascinating as the successes. Even though I don’t think Insomnia is very good, it is inferior in the very unique, very special way that only Stephen King can manage.