Yup. Another SK book. Thoughts (as always, spoilers abound) *:
- I have a love of fairy tales, and not only that, but the very primal thoughts of where fairy tales come from. My book I was writing back in 2011, was basically set on the premise of “what if all the myths and legends we told each other actually came from another place, and had just become distorted and bastardized over the ages.” I’ll never finish my book, but I love finding other novels occasionally that touch upon the same subject matter.
- Stephen King bingo players would win this one pretty easily. Alcoholic primary character? Check. Weird, gruesome violence? Check. Primary villains farting and popping pimples all over the place? Check. Dog POV chapters? Check. King foreshadowing the exact manner in which a character will bite it, and still surprising you with the details? Check. It’s all there (other than aliens).
- It’s sappy, it’s saccharine, it’s overly melodramatic, but I can say this with certainty. Anyone who has ever loved a dog like a family member, and had to watch that beautiful, vibrant, unwaveringly-loving creature grow feeble and old, knows what lengths one will go to save that life, or spare them pain, or bring them a bit more happiness.
- Despite King thanking HPL in the beginning, I find very little Lovecraft in this book. Even though the characters say that Gogmagog is like a Lovecraftian entity, the actual description of and confrontation with it is not Lovecraftian. One reference to angles and lines that didn’t lineup (Lovecraft would say “non-Euclidean”) but otherwise, not seeing it.
- I have a hard time believing the main character’s adolescence. He’s just a bit too good (in the moral sense) to be true. Especially since I’m currently re-reading Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn by Tad Williams, and the main character is written so well as a believable teenager. The character reads to me like a perfect teenager as filtered through the eyes of a 70+ year old author.
- I like the weirdness of the alternate fairy tale dimension, but I really wish the world felt bigger. It took almost half the book to get to the other world, and then once there, the entire story takes place in just a couple locations. Those locations are very cool (and the weird fairy tale city reminds me of another of SK’s city’s, Lud from The Dark Tower), but because the entire story gets locked down into just a few locations, it’s hard to believe it’s a full world.
- Speaking of, the big sporting event (and all the build-up to it) that takes up almost a quarter of the book is something I would change. I would either shorten it, or I would use it as an opportunity to try to show more of the world. Instead, we’re essentially locked in a dungeon for 150+ pages.
- Oomph, that climax was actually kinda cool. Definitely a first with the whole “cutting one’s mouth open to be able to scream one’s love of one’s brother” thing.
- Saying that, the Big Bad (both of them) are just not big enough. The brother was actually pretty cool and I wish we had seen a ton more of him. The demon was a let down, especially after the main character comparing the whole thing to Lovecraft – I expected a seriously other type of entity/demon.
Overall, I really like the book. While it’s not in the top-10 SK of all time, it’s very easily in the top few of the second half of his career (everything since about 1995-ish), and is one of his best fantasy novels (behind only books 2 and 3 of The Dark Tower). I give it 7-out-of-10 exploding electric skeletons.