It's taken me most of the year to read this. That, unfortunately, is a literal statement. I think I started in April? It was during lockdown, anyway, isolated in my Arts Centre flat so that a pandemic didn't go raging through my own country. It was not, perhaps, an inspired reading decision at the time. I bogged down less than halfway through, and as I've moved around the country I've borrowed this enormous damn book from three different libraries, just so I could finish the thing. It's the complete, uncut version, some 1300 pages long, and it's the length that's dropped this down from four stars.

Look, there's a lot to like here. Some of the character work is great. I very much enjoy Tom Cullen, for instance. But I've never been that interested in King's ultimate villain, no matter how many of his books RF oozes his way through, and I wish there were more women characters. But the main problem, as I said, is the length. This is about twice as long as it needed to be, and I know King can waffle on entertainingly for hundreds of pages, I've read enough of his books for that to be no surprise. I just generally prefer concision in my reading, and while I'm glad I read this, and I mostly enjoyed it (the last 200 pages especially) I think it's safe to say I won't be slogging through the thing again.

Read it, liked it, glad it's over.