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Ralph
Roberts experiences the real and supernatural world as his wife dies of
cancer.
Synopsis
"When they are asleep," observed
Aristotle, "you cannot tell a good man from a bad one." But what about a
man who can't fall asleep? Is he good or bad? In Stephen King's latest
novel of horror, "Insomnia," the 70-year-old Ralph Roberts has been waking
up earlier and earlier each morning -- 3:15 . . . 3:02 . . . 2:45 . . .
2:15 -- and staring up at the shadowy ceiling "with eyes that felt as big
as doorknobs." He's afraid that soon he won't be sleeping at all, a
prospect made all the more unpleasant by Ralph's recent loss of his wife
to brain cancer.
Ralph has tried every remedy from music to booze
to staying up all night in the hope of exhausting himself. Nothing has
worked. Ralph's short-term memory has begun to fail. His vision is playing
tricks on him. Then one day, while Ralph is stocking up on Lipton
Cup-a-Soup at the local Red Apple, his neighbor Helen Deepneau staggers
in, badly bruised and cut. Ralph questions her and she reluctantly admits
that her husband, Ed, has beaten her.
When Ralph goes to the
Deepneaus' house to question Ed, who was once Ralph's mild-mannered
friend, Ed openly confesses that he beat up Helen because she signed a
petition in support of inviting the feminist and abortion rights advocate
Susan Edwina Day to speak at Womencare, a local clinic. Then Ed begins to
rave: "The thing is, I go down to the supermarket to buy baby-food, how's
that for irony, and find out she's signed on with the baby-killers! The
Centurions! With the Crimson King himself! And do you know what? I . . .
just . . . saw . . . red!"
The
Crimson King? What the heck is going on? Ralph wonders. He will begin to
find out shortly, and his world will never be the same. -- Christopher
Lehmann-Haupt, New York
Times |
