I found the 1995 first edition Signet paperback copy of this book in my family garage on a workbench. I doubt my father read it. The only books I knew my father to have read from were the King James Bible and a worn paperback he had purchased at Goodwill about a man's experiences in Vietnam. So I don't know how the book wound up in the garage. Kismet, I guess.
Whenever I grabbed this book, I had yet to read a word of King. I would come to learn later how atypical this book is compared to King's other work. At this point in his career, he was thinking a lot about his magnum opus, still in development, The Dark Tower, a fantasy series about an otherworldly gunslinger who pursues a man trying to destroy the foundations that make the existence of the many worlds possible. Weird, huh? Not what casual readers tend to associate with the king of horror. But Insomnia is a of a piece with that lore. Call it the King Bibliographic Universe.
In Insomnia, we have an elderly man named Ralph Roberts who finds himself less and less able to sleep through the night. One dawn, he sits on his porch and looks out on his neighborhood. As the town come to life—the various people starting their days, the children coming out to play, and so on—he observes, surrounding, everyone these mystical, colored auras, and floating up from their heads is something like a balloon string—their lifeline.
At first, Ralph thinks he's going crazy. He consults a doctor. The doctor recommends an acupuncturist. A person in town who most people thinks is crazy warns him against going to the acupuncturist. Ralph's decision not to go diverts him from being involved in what would have been a fatal accident.
Not long after, a young woman whom Ralph knows named Helen appears in the town square, bloodied and carrying her child. She has been assaulted by her husband Ed. Ralph would have never thought that domestic abuse was possible with such an idyllic-seeming couple as Helen and Ed. Ralph calls the police. Ed goes to jail but is shortly after released. Ed makes Ralph his enemy. Helen, meanwhile, has sought refuge in a nearby town at a woman's shelter.
Ralph's insomnia has him feeling loopy. One evening, he believes he sees little bald doctors in white coats running around the neighborhood. One of these bald doctors is snipping people's auras with a gnarly pair of rusted scissors. In time, Ralph will learn that these three doctors are the Fates. Later, he will be informed by two good doctors (the one snipping auras turns out to be the bad guy) that life and death are governed by the Random and the Purpose. The two good doctors are agents of the Purpose, out to fulfill a cosmic plan they don't know all the details of. But also at work is the bad doctor who represents the Random, causing all kinds of bad things to occur. Ralph learns from these cosmic entities that there is going to be a talk at the town's civic center where an advocate speaking on behalf of women's reproductive rights is going to be attacked by Ed, Helen's husband. It is Ralph's cosmic mission to keep the civic center from being destroyed.
Obviously, there's a lot going on here, and of course in other hands, this same content would have been spun differently. At no point except during the setup are we to doubt Ralph's beliefs that his hallucinations represent some deeper reality that he's tapped into. To make sure there is no doubt in the reader's mind, King has Ralph's friend Lois also begin to experience the same kinds of powers of seeing.
It's possible that this work could have been written where the narrative plays with the possibility that elderly Ralph Roberts is becoming detached from reality. But the narrative has the two good doctors explain to Ralph that they were inducing in Ralph the insomnia so that he could be more attuned to everyone's background auras and so that he could see what's really real. The reader is supposed to take this explanation at face value.
Recently, I read Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, which allows the reader, if he'd like, to have it that the book's main character Billy Pilgrim is actually all the while suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder resulting from his experiences in the Dresden bombing during WWII. The reader can have it that way or can take Billy Pilgrim at face value and assume with him that he is in fact in contact with aliens called the Tralfamadorians who give him the ability to stand outside of time and to transport himself through time.
What's saddening about Vonnegut's book is that it offers the real-world alternative. It would have been a far better book than it already is had it not allowed for the possibility that its main character is suffering from PTSD. If the old man is suffering from delusions, then what he's offering to cope with problems is hogwash.
I wonder if in King's coming down so definitively on the side that Ralph is seeing what's really real doesn't lose something by way of exploration of insomnia. But I don't know, maybe there is enough to hint at the fact that insomnia does real psychic and bodily damage to a person. The wonderful, wonderfully surreal Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges suffered from insomnia. He said when he went through these bouts, it felt to him like someone—that is, some person—was trying to keep him awake In King's book Insomnia, it literally is like that. If Borges felt it like that. I wonder if Stephen King himself experiences his bouts of insomnia like that, like some person trying to keep him awake.
Anyway.
How's your sleep?
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