After reading: I understand now why people say this book gives you insomnia. It is because you stay up all through the night reading it because you can't stop and then when you do stop, you can't stop thinking about it. Then if you're me, you start piecing things together, then you have to google it to see if you're right, but then you can't find it on google so consider going downstairs in the middle of the night to get your paper copies of the Dark Tower series to manually look through them to see if you can find the answers there...what?? I blame this book and most importantly, I blame Stephen King. In all seriousness, not only am I now in the just-finished-a-good-book slump but I also have conspiracy theories and questions running through my mind nonstop. I'm very much like the Charlie Day meme with the red yarn at the moment. This book was so. freakin. good. Honestly, like how? How does Stephen King write so many good books and why am I just now reading them? I've said it before... but I'm not a critical reader. That definitely could be why I think so many books are good, but I really truly do think this one was good you guys. I've noticed a lot of people saying this one was a slow burn or hard to get into, I completely disagree with that. I found it very easy to read and quite entertaining from the beginning. I read slow and this book was long but it only took me two weeks to read. Funny that it was set in Derry because it was similar to how I felt reading IT. Even though both of those books were very long and that's typically something that I struggle with, they were also entertaining and easy to breeze through. Alright, I'll try to stop rambling and put actual thought and substance into what I'm saying.
Bottom line, this book was very good and very King. If you are a King reader, you definitely should read this book. More importantly, if you are a Dark Tower reader, you should read this book. Personally, I'm a big fan of world building and fantasy and this book aligns with that within the Kingdom. It is hard for me to gauge, because I've been reading all these books in order, but I feel like you might not like this one as much if you hadn't read other King works. I could be wrong but I definitely would not recommend this as anyone's first King read. I'm fairly certain that all of my notes revolve around references and connections so before I get to that I want to just talk about my overall thoughts, briefly. I thought this book was very well written and had some really great and fun characters, it had scary moments as well as heartfelt moments, and it was super creative and entertaining. I don't think I've ever read anything similar to this before and that is what really stuck out to me. However, my absolute favorite part was all of the connections it had to other King books.
Coming right off of Dolores Claiborne this immediately felt more like King, from the format and language, and of course the setting and characters. I mentioned earlier, too, that on the Stephen King tour we saw a lot of the spots from this specific book since it is set in Derry. That made reading this a lot of fun and I'm really glad I got to experience that before reading. This is really our only second story (I believe) fully set in Derry so we got a lot of familiar settings and places that we have visited before. A new place was the airport which was called the Derry County Airport...if you know you know, I won't spend a paragraph complaining about that this time. We also got some references to characters in IT and got to spend time with some of them, like Mike Hanlon. That was extra special for me because I really love the Losers Club characters. We get several cheeky inklings of Pennywise and some Derry lore, which we also got some of that in The Wastelands so it is fun coming full circle. We also got a sad little Pet Sematary reference. Then, of course, we have to talk about The Dark Tower.
As far as I'm concerned, this book is part of the DT series. What I find interesting is that I rarely see people mentioning that this book should be read when people ask what order to read the series in. It definitely isn't a core piece of the actual series but it is supplemental at the least. We are introduced to the Crimson King in this story and he comes into play later on in the DT books. We also get more actual information about the Tower than we have so far in any DT books. Ka and Ka-tet are mentioned and we even get a quick little peek into Roland. Also, events in this book directly connect and tie into later DT books. Personally, I am obsessed with all of the connections. When I started reading these books back in 2020, I had no idea how intertwined they all were. It's actually quite a lot of fun reading these all together.
My final little note is that if I ever get to meet the Duffer Brothers, I'm going to ask them if they got the name for Hawkins from this book because I'm fairly certain they did. If I haven't made it clear, this was a great book and I enjoyed it thoroughly.
Next up is Rose Madder.
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