After speed reading The Shining while visiting Mexico - it was the fastest I have ever read any book of that size - I was actually kind of excited to read the sequel to it that was written several decades after the original. The Shining wasn't King's first book, but it was close.
A lot can happen in 30 years or so between the books and it can't have been easy for Steve-O to come up with a story that already had a conclusion of sorts but he did it anyway.
I thought it was kind of surprisings because it doesn't seem like Stephen King to do anything that appears to be in the corporate interest so I actually had my doubts going into this about whether or not it was going to be any good.
As is the case with almost any King book, the prose flows well and the chapters are mostly the perfect length resulting in a book that is very easy to read.
However, in the end I was not very impressed with this one because a lot of seemed forced and also the story really drags in the middle almost like he didn't really have enough story but knew that this thing needed to be 500 pages long and therefore he made it so.
let's just say by the time the book met its obvious conclusion, I was extremely ready for it to be over with.
The book follows up on "the shine" which was introduced in the original book and the film but not really dug into a great deal. Danny (the boy on the big wheel in the original film/book) is all grown up for most of this book and he is a recovering alcoholic dealing with his drinking demons and they are mixed in by the ghosts of his past, both literally and metaphorical.
He just randomly ends up in a town in the North East as King's books tend to, and it is here, as he is starting a new life sans booze, that he starts getting messages from a little girl who has a heightened level of his psychic ability. Her name is Abra (corny, like abra-cadabra) and she communicates with Danny using her powers. Abra is a more powerful version of Danny and Abra is able to see vast distances in order to discover that there is a group of immortal creatures that are preying on people like her and Danny and mostly they go after children who have mild "Shine" to them. Abra can see how this group, who calls themselves "True Knot" hunts, kidnaps, tortures and consumes children who have shine abilities.
Of course these somehow all get tied back to the Colorado hotel where the Shining originally took place.
There is nothing inherently wrong with this story it's just that it takes so damn long for anything to actually happen. Abra becomes the main character rather rapidly, even though the book is meant to center on Danny. I don't have a problem with that either but what I do have a problem with is something that is a problem in a lot of King's later works and that is Stephen King, a 79 year old man, can't write about teenagers in a meaningful capacity and it is kind of embarrassing to read when he tries.
No one should expect a near 80 year old man to know what a teenager talks like or how they behave. That would be completely ridiculous. But you would think that someone with King's prowess would think it wise to at least consult actual young people in order to write them a little more accurately. I do not think that he bothered with this and therefore ended up taking little catch-phrases of the youth such as "awesome sauce," and then just threw that around all the dialogue that Abra makes in the story. It's stupid.
I am detached from teenage culture as well but I am 40 years closer to being a teenager than King is and I know cringe when I see it. Virtually all of King's attempts to sound like a hip teenager read exactly like you would expect an 80 year old to relate to such things: it just sounds awkward and forced. King is trying to be hip in a way that is 30 years too late and when I read Abra say "cool beans" I wanted to throw the book across the room but didn't because it was on a Kindle and those are expensive.
The stuff that seemed a bit more like King actually was aware of and gives great detail to, is the life of a recovering alcoholic who is Danny in the story. King has struggled with substance abuse and therefore all of this is on point and accurate. I think that King himself was aware of the fact that this was the more coherent parts of the story or at least that which he was more knowledgeable about because they focus on this a rather exhausting amount of time. His real knowledge of substance abuse and Alcoholics Anonymous shows up well but unfortunately for us the dear readers, this doesn't really have much relevance towards a magical kid and a bunch of immortal gypsy people wandering the country hunting kids.
What we end up with is sometimes a hundred pages in a row that doesn't really connect to the overall story very much. The real story here is the True Knot being a very powerful and rather untouchable group of people with vast resources and the ability to continue hunting without capture but what we end up with is these immortals being rather easily dispatched by Danny and a teenage girl. It's really anti-climactic that we are show the immense power of the leader, "Rose", and yet any time that Rose mounts some sort of offensive it is immediately and sometimes rather unceremoniously squashed by Danny and Abra, who have a combined zero level of experience actually combating something like them. It's kind of like if the rebels in Star Wars experienced almost zero resistance when overthrowing the Empire.
I haven't watched all of it yet, but from what I have read the film is actually one of those rare events where the movie is widely considered to be better than the book is.
I'll get around to it eventually.
Stephen King is one of those writers that you needn't really pay any attention to the fact that it says "New York Times Best Seller!" on the cover because literally everything he writes ends up being a best-seller. This is not really even an honor for him anymore. He can put whatever slop he wants on some pages and the book is going to fly off the shelves.
He is still a fantastic author and this book flowed well enough that I finished it anyway even though I was quite bored at many points in the book and started simply scanning the paragraphs rather than fully reading them. Such is the amount of what I consider to be completely unnecessary material that is going on inside these pages for most of the 531 pages.
Have we reached the point where King can't really relate to any of the characters he is writing about? well, if it is meant to take place in modern times and involves children at all I would say we reached that point a while ago. The last several books of his that I have read that involved anyone under the age of 25 or so has been written poorly as far as being anything like what people that age actually are like and that is fine! Stephen King is nearly 80 years old. How much do you think you are going to know about pop culture when you reach that age? Probably a lot less than one of the most wealthy authors the world has ever known, that is for sure.
My final opinion of this book is that it is not very good. Stephen King has a way of writing that can hold your attention for the most part, but I really struggled to do that with this one and when the True Knot was defeated in completely anti-climactic fashion I was still excited, because I knew the book was going to be over soon.
I'm going to take a break from Stephen King for a while now and when I do return I am going to focus on his earlier works. I just don't think he has that edge anymore.