Hello everyone and welcome to the Stephen King cast, One Man's Musings on the Works of Stephen King.

Each week I will review one entry in the bibliography of Stephen King in the chronological order of publication.

And this one, uh, this one is a big one for me, guys.

This week I review a novel that is often ridiculed and pointed to as his worst story, one that I happen to love,

in fact, would rank it as one of my favorites.

It's a novel full of rich imagery, with King's imagination bearing down upon the reader like

a runaway train, perhaps an insane sentient train from another world.

That's a deep SK reference, everybody, that goes to very cosmic places, but like any of Stephen King's best,

it's always rooted in the mundane and the everyday.

In short, many people will joke that this novel is the antidote for the title itself,

which is unfair, because, like I said, this novel is in an incredible glimpse

into a mind of an author who opens to us his toy chest-like imagination and lets his ideas run wild.

The novel, of course, is 1994's Insomnia.

Look, when it comes to the criticism against this novel, I just don't get it. I don't get it at all.

It's a novel that includes people seeing oras due to the very real and relatable condition of

insomnia, something that we've all experienced at least as a one-off, if not a chronic problem.

So he grounds it with something so relatable.

And with our feet on the ground,

he lets his story float to the sky like the oras from his characters themselves.

Because in this novel, he isn't just content with having his main characters see oras,

but he also repurposes Greek mythology to fit his own mythology.

The mythology he had begun to establish when he was 19 years old when he began writing the gunslinger. Whereas the three fates from Greek mythology have always been represented as three women on different ages,

...