Insomnia

Insomnia

Stephen King has established himself as one of the most popular authors of the last twenty years. He has taken the horror genre and molded it to serve his own purposes. In addition to being a master at scaring his reading public, King has the remarkable ability of presenting popular American culture with all of its crassness and sentimentality. Some of his most successful works include CARRIE (1974), THE SHINING (1977), IT (1986), NEEDFUL THINGS (1991), and GERALD'S GAME (1992). INSOMNIA is set in the town of Derry, Maine. King used Derry as the setting for his thrilling novel IT. A recent widower, seventy-year-old Ralph Roberts finds himself waking up earlier and earlier each day. Struggling to recover from the death of his wife, Roberts is at a loss to find a cure for his insomnia. He is also a witness to the bizarre behavior of someone he knows. Ed Deepneau, a chemist, is involved in a car accident where his car crashes into a fertilizer truck, but then Deepneau makes wild accusations toward the driver involving the transport of dead fetuses. Deepneau's wife, Helen, is also discovered to have been beaten by him. Unable to understand his own insomnia, Roberts is equally baffled over what has happened to Deepneau (Arnold, 218).

The novel deals with Ralph Roberts, a retired widower who begins to suffer from insomnia. As the condition worsens, he begins to see things that are invisible and intangible to others: colorful manifestations of life-force surrounding people (auras), and diminutive white-coated beings he calls "little bald doctors", based on their appearance. Roberts perceives other planes of reality and their influence upon the "real" world. He finds that his longtime friend, Lois Chasse, is also a sufferer. They eventually discover that their insomnia has in fact been induced by the two little bald doctors to enable them to defeat the agents of the Crimson King.

Lois and Ralph name the doctors Clotho and Lachesis (the good guys) and Atropos (the rogue doctor), after the Moirae of mythology. Ralph overcomes Atropos and forces him to promise to stay out of their business, the doctors all being bound by their word, but Atropos has his revenge by showing Ralph a glimpse of the not too distant future in which he claims the life of the innocent Natalie Deepneau. Ralph is able to counterbalance this however, by striking a deal with Clotho and Lachesis whereby he trades his own life for Natalie's (Douglas, 9).

“Each thing I do, I rush through, so I can do something else” - Stephen Dobyns, Cemetery Nights That line is used frequently in Stephen King's "Insomnia." It feels like it sets the tone for the entire book, about how the main character's life is ticking away along with the time he has to fulfill his purpose. I find myself thinking of that line alot lately. I do that way too much as well, and it's one of the reasons why this review is so late. I finished Stephen King's "Insomnia" last ...