A spiritual successor to It, and a Dark Tower novel in all but name, this meditation on time, ageing, free will and predestination is one of King’s true masterpieces

In the 1990s, 29 novels into his career, King could do whatever he wanted. His most famous books had been turned into films, he’d had more bestsellers than anybody could hope to dream of, and he’d taken a short hiatus in which he overcame his addictions. He could have followed the publishing dictum “write what sells”, churned out sequels or revisited themes and ideas. The world was hankering (then, as now) for more Pennywise. Instead? In The Dark Half we got a book that bordered on the metafictional, followed by two novels, Gerald’s Game and Dolores Claiborne, that showcased King’s desire to represent female characters better.

Then, in 1994, he unleashed Insomnia on the world. I remember buying this one, as with so many King novels, at the airport right before a holiday. I cradled the thing for the whole journey: I didn’t have much choice, as it was so big it wouldn’t fit into my backpack. And I was excited! Even though Gerald’s Game and Dolores Claiborne had left me a little cold, this – according to the blurb on the back of the book – was a return to King’s more conventional horror writing.

But Ralph Roberts, a septuagenarian widower and Insomnia’s main character, shocked me a little. I’m not sure I’d read many books with older main characters. Through King, I had been introduced to adult protagonists, but my concept of their lives extended only to a faintly rock’n’roll version of middle age. They longed for their youth, tried to recapture it: it’s a theme in so many of King’s novels. But not in Insomnia. In Insomnia, they’re older and getting the hell on with it.

This makes me sound like an idiot, I’m sure, but I was 14. I was an idiot. I wasn’t interested in senior citizens any more than (shame on me) I was interested in the more intricate feminist notes that King was hitting. At first I didn’t care about Ralph, or Lois, his romantic interest and co-lead; but then, suddenly, I did. A large chunk of the book reads like a standalone novel appealing to the new fans King had picked up with his previous couple of novels: people who wanted less in the way of schlock monsters, and more of his insights into humanity.

And then, for me, the book got suddenly interesting. Ralph suffers from the insomnia of the title, and thanks to his lack of sleep, one day he starts to see things. He glimpses strange auras around people that trail off into the sky like strings (or, as he comes to think of them, as lifelines); then he starts to see strange, shrunken men dressed like doctors, creeping around at night wielding huge pairs of scissors. The “little bald doctors” – who are linked to the ancient Greek conception of the Fates – are killing people; cutting their strings. For 14-year-old me, this was the moment when the book suddenly became a horror story, which is what I thought I wanted from King.

Only, wait! The strange bald doctors aren’t stock horror villains. They’re actually serving to bridge the divide between the concepts of “purpose” and “random” – two key notions in King’s Dark Tower series, and a less high-profile constant throughout much of his later work. The theme of free will versus some form of higher predestination runs through a huge amount of King’s fiction, coming to a head in the Dark Tower series. In Insomnia it was laid bare, and when I first read it, King sort of lost me. There’s a lengthy and important subplot concerning abortions and the pro-choice camp, and the book wanders into total ka-is-a-wheel, heavy-referencing-for-the-fanbase territory. This is also where King introduces the Crimson King, who would later drive much of the action in the final Dark Tower novels. That’s when the truth of this book is revealed. It’s not a standalone. It’s a Dark Tower novel, almost more so than even The Gunslinger.

If you remember my reread of The Gunslinger, I didn’t read the Dark Tower series until I was 23. So when I first read Insomnia, all its references to King’s other works meant nothing to me. Insomnia worked fine by itself – once I started to accept it for what it is, rather than what I wanted it to be – but it works so, so much better when considered as part of King’s wider oeuvre. It’s crucial, frankly, to an understanding of some of the deeper themes of the Dark Tower books; and vice versa.

Over the years since I first read it, I’ve returned to Insomnia almost more than any other King book. (The only one I can say for certain that I’ve read more times is The Dark Half.) Something about its ruminations on time, higher powers, memories and the inevitability of life affected me. It continues to. It is potentially his single most influential work, for me.

And that must have coloured my feelings towards the text, because now I think it’s a masterpiece: an amazing, powerful meditation on free will. By the end of Ralph’s journey – and make no mistake, it is a journey, even though he technically doesn’t go anywhere; even though he’s a character I (wrongly) assumed had no more journeys left in him to make – you’re completely embroiled, and desperately hoping that the inevitability which the novel has pretty much guaranteed the whole way through won’t come to pass.

But it does. Ralph gets the ending that King promised him, almost on the very first page: he finally gets cured of his sleeping sickness.

Connections

Insomnia is a Dark Tower book, more so than perhaps any other non-main series text. We’ve got the Crimson King (known here as the Kingfisher); Patrick Danville, who would be hugely important in the final Dark Tower books; and there are massive thematic connections, particularly regarding Purpose and Random, the “grammar” of the Dark Tower. Insomnia is also hugely indebted to It, being set in the same town only eight years later, and refers to the events of that novel. There is a good argument to be made for Insomnia being something of a spiritual sequel: both books feature the same themes, and there are loud echoes of the earlier book. At the start of this reread, I said that the world wanted more Pennywise; in the Kingfisher, we have a creature strongly connected to that original evil, in ways that suggest the two are more than just acquaintances.

Next time: We’re taking the bull by the horns and rereading Rose Madder.