A child is horribly murdered by a man who was conclusively identified by multiple witnesses despite being irrefutably a hundred miles away at the time.
Stephen King's more recent output has been hit and miss and this starts off as a hit but descends into a miss. The early sections dealing with the identification and arrest of the clearly guilty party and then the discovery that however obviously guilty he is, he is just as obviously innocent, are very nicely handled and contain all of King's hallmark qualities of detail, character and atmosphere.
It is a shame, then, that after a significant event outside the courthouse, the whole genre of the book changes into a horror that has a very heavy sense of 'been there, done that'. His prose and writing style continue to impress, meaning that it is almost impossible for him to write a bad book (although some seem to be released on early drafts rather than finished polished articles (Joyland, Gwendy's Button Box, Elevation). That's not the case here, but the fact is that the second half is too reliant on characters explaining the plot to each other and the plot itself is too full of warmed over tropes from previous books (the dodgy detective is just Henry Bowers from IT under a different name in terms of how he is used).
Also the rules governing the creature in this feature seem to alter almost as much as the creature itself. The final showdown also fails to impress, which is ironic as I read it shortly after seeing the film IT:CHAPTER 2 in which there are several inside jokes about the author's problem with writing endings.
Stephen King's more recent output has been hit and miss and this starts off as a hit but descends into a miss. The early sections dealing with the identification and arrest of the clearly guilty party and then the discovery that however obviously guilty he is, he is just as obviously innocent, are very nicely handled and contain all of King's hallmark qualities of detail, character and atmosphere.
It is a shame, then, that after a significant event outside the courthouse, the whole genre of the book changes into a horror that has a very heavy sense of 'been there, done that'. His prose and writing style continue to impress, meaning that it is almost impossible for him to write a bad book (although some seem to be released on early drafts rather than finished polished articles (Joyland, Gwendy's Button Box, Elevation). That's not the case here, but the fact is that the second half is too reliant on characters explaining the plot to each other and the plot itself is too full of warmed over tropes from previous books (the dodgy detective is just Henry Bowers from IT under a different name in terms of how he is used).
Also the rules governing the creature in this feature seem to alter almost as much as the creature itself. The final showdown also fails to impress, which is ironic as I read it shortly after seeing the film IT:CHAPTER 2 in which there are several inside jokes about the author's problem with writing endings.
It's well worth a read, but ultimately does not satisfy.
