Insomnia

Insomnia is a 1994 horror and fantasy novel by Stephen King. It follows Ralph Roberts, a retired widower whose worsening insomnia allows him to see auras and other hidden things, and who is pulled into a struggle between the Purpose and the Random as a result.

The story is set in the fictional town of Derry, Maine, as It and Dreamcatcher are. The early chapters establish the ordinary causes of Ralph's condition before the extraordinary ones: he meets an acquaintance named Ed Deepneau at the local airfield behaving aggressively, and months later, now a widower, he encounters Ed's wife Helen after she has been badly beaten.

Helen leaves her husband and hides in a women's shelter, and Ralph's insomnia begins to wake him earlier and earlier, which is how the book moves from a domestic situation about a violent man into the wider conflict. The supernatural material arrives through ordinary ageing: Ralph cannot sleep, he begins to see what everyone else cannot, and the book treats the change as something that happens to a man in his seventies rather than to a chosen hero. The two forces he is drawn into, the Purpose and the Random, are the novel's own vocabulary for the argument about whether events have a design, and the Derry setting ties his small-town life to the wider map of King's fiction.