Reviews

This novel is just a hot freaking mess. It's hot garbage. It's a dumpster fire.

The first time I read this, I remember being not overly impressed, but I didn't actually hate the thing.

This time around, I was ready to just stop at least five times...in five days. Through the entire miserable experience, I kept wondering if this was a trunk novel he'd had kicking around during his drug-addled days. After I finished I found out he wrote it longhand while recovering from the accident.

My problems are many with this novel, but there's a couple of overriding elements that just ruined this experience for me.

The first is, King can't really write SF. He obviously loves the genre, and it's obvious that he tries to bring a human element into it. He tried it with TOMMYKNOCKERS and he'll give passing nods to it down the road in UNDER THE DOME and a little less in THE INSTITUTE. But, at least for me, while it always starts out really promising, it never works out.

The second reason—again, just for me—that it doesn't work out, and why this book is so much of a dumpster fire is because of all the "in the head" stuff that King slathers into this novel. We're in Henry's head. We're in Jonesy's head. We're in Mr. Gray's head. There's rooms in there. And boxes. And fax machines.

And it, to me, comes across as really amateurish and boring.

There's other stuff. The chase scene that runs about a third of the novel. Even the set up that runs a third of the novel before the military shows up. Kurtz is easily one of the worst characters King's ever dreamed up.

And yet...

There's smaller, far less important (and often completely unneeded) scenes, mostly centred around the four guys and Duddits when they were young that hinted at the incredible writer King can be.

This, at times, felt like a twisted IT pastiche, and I also (once again, personal opinion) feel that, had King done alternating young group/older group chapters, it would have been a better paced novel.

It's absolutely not the worst book that has Stephen King's name on it (that is, and always will be the toilet paper replacement GWENDY'S FINAL ~~SHIT~~ TASK) however, I'd always considered King's other SF travesty TOMMYKNOCKERS as his worst solo novel. I've reconsidered that. It's now only second worst.

This one now sits comfortably in that spot.