I have been wanting to reread this book for years, ever since I read that it was written as an allegory for King's own addiction. And that is certainly apparent when you read it with that mind set.

And it is easily still one of his most unsettling novels. I will always maintain that Annie is one of King's most terrifying villains because she's human. There is nothing to her that makes her special, unique, or supernatural. She is a human and what she does to him is beyond brutal. What she does to him in the book makes the scene from the movie look like a papercut and I mean that, even knowing how brutal *that* scene is. And I think it really does a good job of showing how an addict's mind might work both in the acknowledgement of the addiction as well as the justification for it.

That said, it is still very much early King not much much in the word or page count, since it's one of his shorter ones, but in the language that is used. Even bearing in mind the time it was written in, there is still very much problematic language and words used here. So, if you're reading it for the first time, be mindful of that.

Still I would recommend it because of the reasons mentioned above because it is Classic King and there is no boogeyman that can be blamed for the horror find within its pages; it's just a regular albeit slightly unhinged human being.