Stephen King, I love you and most of your books, but I'm not really sure what happened here. Or maybe we should blame your editor. Just because you are famous doesn't give you license to publish really terrible books. Well, actually, maybe it does. BUT YOU SHOULD BE ASHAMED! This is the first Stephen King novel that I have truly disliked. It had a promising beginning but fell into a mess of silly dialogue and hyperbolic characters with a plot that just never seemed to come together.

If you are new to Stephen King, don't read this one first. ( )

3/5

This book is somewhat notorious among King's work for being two things: weirder than normal and way too long. Even though I enjoyed it, both of these assumptions are almost completely correct.

It's a book about an alien invasion, an unusual group of friends and... disregard of human rights by the US military? Yeah, that's about it. The first two are the best parts of the book: King is good at writing the supernatural, even if we're talking about aliens, and the same goes for weird friend groups in shitty situations. The problem comes from... the rest.

More than half of the book is taken up by a chase that just goes on and on and on and on... It makes the book feel much much longer than it actually is. Not to mention the quite polemic portrayal of Down Syndrome being a major plot point in the book. Overall, these things combine to make a great example of the problems in King's works. Which is ironic, because the positive aspects of his writing are what hold this book together.

It's an interesting book, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone that isn't extremely familiar with King's other works, specially because there are a lot of other, better, books that could fit that space. ( )

Rated "Good" in our old book database. ( )

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 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. ( )

This is my second time reading this novel. I read this right after I read IT when I was a sophmore in highschool and I liked this so much more in my 30s..
This novel starts out slow, and at first is written in present tense making it difficult to read and follow. However, after the first chapter it really picks up and becomes an entertaining story that kept me reading to the very end. I love Stephen King I have made it my mission to read more of his books this year and I am really glad I decided to reread this again this year. I am always drawn to his stories that have that friendship connection, it makes it more readable and I tend to finish them much quicker.
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