I honestly don’t get the appeal here.

Dude treks across the desert, climbs a mountain, let’s a kid die, and then chats with the bad guy for 20 pages. While all of that super exciting stuff is going on we also get several loooong flashbacks, and at one point a flashback within a flashback, to give us something to occupy our time while he takes the most boring walk ever.

I’m not a King fan but I’ve read a few of his books—why is there always some out-of-the-blue weird sex shit? All the women in this book were overly sex-crazed and even when they weren’t doing anything sexual, King still describes them in those terms. A woman literally is blown back after being shot (to death) and he describes how she lands as whorish, I assume because her legs are sprawled wide. Why? Also, the ending was excruciatingly anticlimactic. It was more of a slog than the rest of the book, which is saying something. With a first book like this, this series does not deserve to be on any “best fantasy” lists.