Patrick Danville

Insomnia

First edition cover
Author	Stephen King
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre	Horror, fantasy
Publisher	Viking
Publication date	September 15, 1994
Media type	Print (Hardcover)
Pages	787
ISBN

Insomnia is a horror/fantasy novel by American writer Stephen King, first published in 1994. Like It and Dreamcatcher, its setting is the fictional town of Derry, Maine. The original hardcover edition was issued with dust jackets in two complementary designs. The first is pictured on the right; the second has the white and red colors reversed. In his memoir, On Writing, King states that Insomnia and Rose Madder are "stiff, trying-too-hard novels."

The story is set in Stephen King's multiverse in the fictional town of Derry, Maine. Ralph Roberts, who is retired, encounters his good-natured acquaintance Ed Deepneau at the local airfield, behaving aggressively and swearing obscenely at a driver he accuses of involvement in transporting fetal tissue from abortions. Some months later, and now a widower, Ralph encounters Ed's wife Helen who has been badly beaten by her husband after having signed a pro-choice related petition. In the months after these events, Helen leaves Ed and hides at a women's shelter while Ralph begins to suffer from sleep maintenance insomnia, waking earlier each night until he is barely able to sleep an hour each night. As his insomnia develops, Ralph begins to see things that are invisible and intangible to others: colorful manifestations of life-force surrounding people (auras), and diminutive white-coated beings he calls "little bald doctors", based on their appearance, and gradually comes to believe these are genuinely present on a different level of reality. He realizes that Ed Deepneau had also been seeing these things. Lois Chasse, a friend, teams up with Ralph after admitting she too has recently begun seeing auras which she can interpret.