That being said, I don't know if this needed to be as thick as it was. I know, there's an eldritch abomination and God plays a role, so the length implies a sense of "epic!" But this probably could have been scaled back a bit. It isn't like "Insomnia" where there was one specific and obvious albatross that you could cut from the plot, but it seems like some nickel and dime cuts could have condensed this one significantly.
Still, the plot does move along quite well. It never dragged and I wouldn't go so far as to say that the book is bloated, but it doesn't seem like it needed as much space as it had.
Really, the best part of the book is the early portion when it was a group of characters dealing with an unstable cop. It's one of the reasons why I would be OK with the book scaling back a bit. Now, part of this is due to Entragian, he's both a fun and unsettling villain. There's a sort of bi-polar element to him, where he'd go from cheerful and friendly to violent and enraged on the turn of a dime.
His initial encounter with John Marinville strongly suggests that the friendly disposition is an act, and given his actions, it makes perfect sense; but I think it's scarier if you read it as completely genuine.
Not knowing what he was going to do added a good deal of suspense to his portions of the book. Of course, the reading also helps when you have the mental image of Ron Perlman in your head for the character and read all of his lines in Perlman's distinctive voice.
Once Tak, the aforementioned eldritch abomination, jumps bodies and finds different hosts, the villain loses a lot of its luster. It serves its purpose of being a great evil that has to be stopped before it's too late, but it's probably going to get buried among King's more memorable antagonists. I suppose that's fitting in its own way.
The protagonist characters are solid. The book struck the right balance in terms of number of characters to follow. There's about a dozen, so there's room to move around, but it doesn't get to the point where you start losing track of who is who. Much like Tak, I don't know how well they'll stand the test of time over the long term, but you definitely root for them and want to see them make it as you're making your way through the book. They "did their job" on that front.
As always, I got a kick out of the nods to King's earlier works. The Tommyknockers get mentioned, but alas they are talking about the original nursery rhyme imps and not the aliens. Admittedly, that makes sense, as no one outside of Haven knew what happened on that front, but still. The reference was still a nice touch in either case. "Pet Sematary" gets a more subtle nod when the narration suggests that dead is better. John also alludes to twinning at one point. This last one is especially amusing given the "mirror" aspect this book has to the subsequent book, "The Regulators". I'll probably talk more about that in the second review. Having just read the first of the set, all I can really say is the fact that there is a link.
The book invokes a lot of common King tropes. If you're a fan, you'll either like this or think that it was just being phoned in. I do think that the book loses something when you've read a lot of King's other books, but I'd still recommend giving it a read. It's thick, but you can still finish it in a week with no real trouble.
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