“I’m not rating this one, and I’ll tell ya why.
I didn’t love it. It’s the King book I’ve enjoyed the least so far after getting started on him a couple years ago.
But, and this is why I don’t want to do the stars thing, I think the problem is that I mostly knew the story going in. I’d seen the old movie. It’d been awhile, but I had enough memory of it that I knew where the book was going WAY before the characters did.
This is somewhat true with other King books, but with this one I knew what happened SO MUCH FURTHER into the book. The events I knew led up to the last 10%, whereas with IT, the stuff I knew was very much an outline and so different from the half-remembered movie that it didn’t wreck the reading experience at all. If I had to tagline that one, it’d be “Clown in the sewer.” Pet Sematary, that one I could tagline right up to the end. So, instead of spoiling some stuff up top, I’d wrecked this one for myself pretty deep.
I had the same problem with Misery. I tried the audiobook on that one, and I got bored, but I think it’s because I knew the overall outline in way too much detail, so the first half of the book was fairly worthless for me.
There is a difference with this one though. I have to say it meanders a lot more than some of the other King I’ve read. Not that he’s usually brief, but this one seemed to go off into weird places. The main character would be imagining the family that would move into his house in the future, and he’d imagine them down to the details of what they would drink, what sorts of jobs they’d have. It was a fictional character creating a fictional character in his mind in too great a detail, and at times it felt like we lost the thread of the story. Or this would happen in moments where I felt like there was some intense shit happening, and I couldn’t imagine going off into the mystic, mentally, while so much was happening.
So, overall? Whatever. I’ll give King another shot. Or 7. It was a bit of a letdown, but so are about 60% of the meals I cook. Life is a letdown. Get over it? “