Ratings67
Average rating3.4
2½ stars slight spoilers
I wasn't impressed, sadly.
I mean, the premise is interesting and it starts out good enough with a couple of handfuls of interesting characters, but very soon a lot of them start to blend together, and after a while I had trouble remembering who was who, except for a handful of main characters.
There was a lot of filler and I usually like it when Stephen King writes long novels (I wanted 11/22/63 and IT to last forever), but there was just so many characters that were introduced and then killed off few pages later without having an impact on the overall story.
It drags on for a couple of hundred pages and around the middle, when one of the characters “passes over”, it picks up speed and has a lot of interesting stuff going on, but they are interspersed with the less interesting stuff. Had the novel been cut in half, or even just two-thirds, it would have been so much better.
Around 85 pages from the end it becomes really riveting and sadly just reminds you how much better the book could have been.
The writing was serviceable, I missed a lot of King's usual humour, musings on humanity, and shocking situations, all of which I think he usually excels in. I have never read anything by Owen King, so I don't know how much of his voice was coming through.
So, overall... it is not a book I would recommend to anyone right off the bat.
In a few months The Outsider comes out; I have high hopes for it, but will try to not expect too much.