Insomnia
by Stephen King
Summary
Ralph Roberts, a retired widower in King's fictional Derry, Maine, develops severe insomnia that gradually opens his perception onto auras around people and objects and, eventually, onto three small bald figures Ralph calls the little doctors, Clotho and Lachesis and a hostile third figure named Atropos, who cut and rearrange the threads of human life. Ralph learns his sleeplessness is a side effect of being pulled into a contest between forces called the Purpose and the Random, and that a local man driven mad by the same forces, an extremist opposed to abortion rights named Ed Deepneau, is planning to fly a plane into a civic center where an activist is speaking. The real target hidden inside the crowd is a boy named Patrick Danville, prophesied to grow up and save a child crucial to the future of King's Dark Tower series. Ralph and his friend Lois Chasse, undergoing the same transformation, intervene at the civic center and save the boy; an epilogue years later finds Ralph's insomnia returning so that he can keep a promise made to the little doctors, trading his own life to push a girl clear of a speeding car and dying beside Lois.
It is long and slow to open, closer to a meditation on aging and death than to conventional horror for its first third, before tightening into King's usual momentum once the civic center plot takes over; readers already inside the Dark Tower mythology get more from Insomnia's cosmology than readers meeting Clotho and Lachesis cold, which has made it a more divisive entry than King's stand alone horror novels.
Historical Context & Significance
Viking published Insomnia in 1994, seven hundred eighty seven pages, longer than any King novel before it except It and the two editions of The Stand. The Horror Writers Association nominated it for the 1994 Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel, which went instead to Nancy Holder's Dead in the Water, one of the rare years a King novel lost a genre prize to a far less famous book.
The novel ties directly into King's Dark Tower series, sharing the town of Derry with It and Dreamcatcher, and its cosmology of Purpose and Random has been picked over by King scholars since as a bridge between his standalone horror fiction and the multiverse he was still assembling volume by volume; King completed The Dark Tower series a decade later, in 2004, giving Insomnia's prophecy about Patrick Danville a payoff that took nearly a decade to arrive.