Just finished it, thoughts follow below. Warning for mention of violent death of children, though fictional.
There is no fucking way, even for a minute, that someone familiar with Steven King could read this and not recognize it as his work. It's all there. Psychic kid, repeating some little phrase a hundred times through the book, townies going crazy and revealing their ugliest side under trying circumstances, and a supernatural threat which becomes less and less mysterious and more simply disgusting and contemptible as you go. Like it's so clearly King. It could only be more King-y if it were set in some fucking suburb in Maine instead of Ohio.
God damn though this book features more children being brutally, fatally shot than anything I've read. They'd have a devil of a time making one of those stupid TV miniseries outta THIS. And these kids die UGLY. Every person who dies in this dies ugly. Right from the start. A bullet doesn't just leave someone bleeding on the pavement, they fucking blow people's heads apart like melons, rip off limbs. It's like a verhoeven film on the page.
An autistic kid with latent psychic powers gets infested by some ancient entity that uses him to attempt to rewrite reality. It takes strength from the energy that leaves people as they die, so it creates psychic ghosts from the cartoons and movies the boy loves to commit murder and grow in power. Also because Stephen King can't fucking help himself there's some weird sexual shit going on with it too. It doesn't go there but I bet you there was a fucking draft where it did and thank heaven for whatever editor or better judgement stopped that.
Oh, also, of course one of our main characters is a writer. Dealing with creative burnout left in the wake of healing from addiction and alcoholism. Write what you know, huh.
Phew
This isn't a review, I'm just... Brain dumping all this out.
It was a lot more polished than Road Work or The Running Man or The Long Walk. More fully possessed of his powers and particular voice than when he hammered those out. I never read Rage, but if memory serves that was a Bachman too. I wonder how that compares. I know it's been removed from print along with Apt Pupil.
Maybe I should read Desperation now just to see why it's presented as the companion book to this
Man not one mention of Regulators by Warren G featuring Nate Dogg
REGULATORS
MOUNT UP