AMC is staying in the Stephen King family business. While NOS4A2–based on the novel by Joe Hill–isn’t premiering until June, Deadline reports that the network has ordered a pilot for another series based on a novel by King and his other son, Owen. AMC has committed to a pilot for Sleeping Beauties, an adaptation of Stephen and Owen King’s bestselling horror novel, which is set in a world where women abruptly fall into a deep slumber, shrouded in cocoons–leaving men all alone (the horror!). One woman, however, appears immune to this development. Here’s the official synopsis for the book:
In a future so real and near it might be now, something happens when women go to sleep: they become shrouded in a cocoon-like gauze. If they are awakened, if the gauze wrapping their bodies is disturbed or violated, the women become feral and spectacularly violent. And while they sleep they go to another place, a better place, where harmony prevails and conflict is rare.
One woman, the mysterious “Eve Black,” is immune to the blessing or curse of the sleeping disease. Is Eve a medical anomaly to be studied? Or is she a demon who must be slain? Abandoned, left to their increasingly primal urges, the men divide into warring factions, some wanting to kill Eve, some to save her. Others exploit the chaos to wreak their own vengeance on new enemies. All turn to violence in a suddenly all-male world.
Set in a small Appalachian town whose primary employer is a women’s prison, Sleeping Beauties is a wildly provocative, gloriously dramatic father-son collaboration that feels particularly urgent and relevant today.
The idea that women become “feral and spectacularly violent” when awakened from their very chill coma-cocoons sounds more like a utopia than a dystopia, to be honest. AMC is hoping to turn Sleeping Beauties into an “open-ended” series, like a feminist Walking Dead or something.