3 Stars

I read ‘Carrie’ when I was in 11th grade. My first Stephen King novel, and I was blown away. I am twice the age now – and I have read numerous King novels and short stories. I haven’t added all his books that I have read, on Goodreads, because at that point in time – I could hardly cope with Yahoo messenger and Orkut. 

And one thing I have to say about Stephen King, with all due respect, that he is a garrulous windbag. And his pacing is inconsistent. Don’t get me wrong, he has one heck of an imagination and his characters are usually memorable – but he goes on and on – dropping American pop cultural references and quotes and phrases that I had great difficulty in wrapping my head around. The thicker the book, the more plodding is the plot. You have to pass through the sticky bogs and treacherous mountains to reach the beach. 

At the local library in Baroda, there was a whole fat bunch of Stephen King books – and I really experimented with the lot. Some of them – the short stories, novellas and slim novels – I blazed through. They cut to the chase. At one point in time, I picked up a Stephen King book by how thin its length was – the shorter, the better (that’s not always true – ‘The Girl who loved Tom Gordon’ really tested my patience). The fatter ones troubled me and because I was a kid who was easily bored, I skimmed through – ‘Needful Things’, ‘Under the Dome’, ‘The Tommyknockers’, ‘The Stand’ – but never quite finished them.

Now that I am older and hopefully wiser, I am trying to be patient with Mr. King. I finished reading ‘Duma Key’ during Covid, which I couldn’t do earlier and loved it. I reread ‘The Shining’ and came to appreciate it more the second time around and now I read ‘Doctor Sleep’. The reason for giving such a long-winded context before jumping into the review of this book was to tell you that this isn’t my first rodeo with King.

I didn’t like it. Not much. Because hardly anything happened in this book. It had its moments, and had nifty imagination at places. It was a good trip down the memory lane because we got to meet Danny boy again, fresh out of ‘The Shining’. Life is a full-circle moment for dear old Dan because he ends up in the same position where his father started – down in the dumps with a drink or two. AA is the real hero – had been for quite a few King novels, and a very sober Dan teams up with a very ‘shiny’ kid Abra Stone to take on the army of feeble, geriatric vampires. 

The stakes are never high and the villains aren’t truly memorable. At one point in the story, Doc himself mentions, “What kind of clowns are these guys?” Because they were indeed fumbling idiots. They couldn’t kidnap Abra for 20 pages in a book 482 pages long. Dan & Abra are always ten steps ahead of these clowns, and the way they Baba Yaga these doddering steam-suckers, they should be arrested for elderly abuse, along with first-degree murder.

These clowns have all the money and political connections in the world – yet they never seem to be able to use it. Never. Rose the Hat was supposed to be a very dangerous, scary antagonist but all she had done in the book is be haughty and overconfident, getting her ass-whupped numerous times by a kid. She is out-witted and overpowered at each step, yet somehow she had supreme confidence in her own (non-existent) abilities.

Good book to while away your time, and go from point A to point B. This one came in handy when I was nervous and jittery, and was waiting for my daughter to enter this world. Midway, it started slackening, and I kept losing interest, had to really hold myself. The last 150 pages picked up in pace. But it was ‘meh’ overall.