Just Finished Rereading Insomnia by Stephen King

As I'm sitting here at home waiting for Hurricane Irma to make its unwelcome presence fully felt in northern Florida and relishing that so far we still have our electric power, I decided to write about something different: the 1994 Stephen King novel Insomnia, which is one of my favorites of his and which I just finished rereading...

As in the extremely scary novel It, Insomnia takes place of the setting of one of King's most sinister imaginary Maine towns: Derry.  It (Insomnia, not It) is about the life of a 70-year old man, Ralph Roberts, who has just lost his beloved, long-time wife from cancer and is just beginning to come out of his mourning, only to discover that, night-by-night, he finds himself waking up a few minutes earlier in the morning until, eventually, all of his sleep disappears.  Ralph is a likable man with his share of good friends like Bill McGovern, Ed Deepneau, Lois Chasse, and numerous fellow senior citizens.  But one day he discovers that Ed has inexplicably undergone a tumultuous personality change and is now a violent, vengeful soul who beats his wife and is on a campaign against local women's advocate groups and their leaders.  There is an underlying reason for his transformation, but maybe I'd better let you discover it for yourself...after all, Insomnia is full of mysteries that gradually reveal themselves over the course of the narrative.   Instead, I'll just discuss a couple of impressions I got from it...

Stephen King showed in Insomnia that he truly has a heart for the elderly and depicted people in this stage of life as complete and complex, full of their own vitality and struggling not only against sickness, increasing feebleness, and eventually death, but also against that element within society that would prefer to institutionalize them whether they wanted it or not.  To me, Ralph Roberts is the quintessential senior superhero, as worthy of his own cape and insignia as Superman or Batman.  And if you read on in the story, my analogy between him and characters endowed with superhuman powers isn't really off at all...

The other thing I got from this tale was the notion that each and every one of us, because of our physical nature in time and space, are incapable of sensing that there is much, much more to the reality that surrounds us that we cannot sense or understand.  Stephen King integrated this "hyper-reality", as he dubbed it, with other stories in his fictional universe and yes, there are references to characters in other novels...notably It, Pet Sematary, and that "dark" series that he used to tie everything together...

So I'm still all on board with Insomnia as being one of Stephen King's best novels; in addition to the horrors and scariness typifying his works, there is also a profound sweetness of spirit here...read it and see if you don't agree with this seeming paradox...