I can't say I've read a lot of Stephen King books - after all his output can match about three or four authors combined - but I've read enough of his books to know how he writes and that his editors over the years have let him get away with way too many words and pages. It appears they are afraid of something about him (which is kind of fitting considering the kinds of books he writes) and seem to just edit spelling and sentence structure, nothing more. All of that being said, this is by far the best book King has ever written and, I seriously doubt, he will ever top this book. If for some reason he does write a better book than this one, then that will be some sort of a miracle for sure. This is justifiable long and all the better for it.
I don't know what I was expecting when I started reading this book. This being a Stephen King story, as you know, his stories are full of horror, supernatural, the macabre, extreme violence, and blood, lots of blood. Don't get me wrong all of that stuff is in here, and in some instances very present in this book, but this is by far his most focused book with some great characters and never once does this story feel overwritten. I even read the new unabridged "director's cut" version that had about 500 pages added and too be honest I wouldn't have minded a few more hundred page, so engaging was the story and characters.
This is by fast the best post apocalyptic story I've ever read as King tells a truly epic tale up there with Tolkien. In fact I would consider this a horror version of Lord of the Rings, such is the massiveness of what King is doing with this post apocalyptic tale. He engages in the timely cause of world building or in this case re-world building. I would put what he has done here on the same level as Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series, Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, Tolstoy's War and Peace, and Simmons Hyperion series, such is the massiveness of the world and the number of characters and themes on display. Bur never once does the story get away from King or does he seem overwhelmed by the story he is telling. He is in complete control the whole time.
He does the one thing a writer is supposed to do when writing a story, any story, start by building the characters, make them interesting, make the reader care about them, and then he can go anywhere with them he wants to, because he has connected the reader to them. Characters can move mountains, figuratively and literally, if the writer can make reader care about them. King builds all sorts of characters from a broken down musician, a deaf drifter, an essentially red neck who totally goes against the normal cliche of a red neck, an old - old - woman who's a prophetess, a teenager who grows up and finds the fork in the road to evil or good, a woman who has to stand up on her own two feet for the first time, a retired political science teacher, an elementary teacher struggling with her own demons, and so on and so on. He builds them and makes the reader care about them.
The one thing I didn't expect from this book was the focused plot of re-world building in a world where a virus has killed about 80-90% of the world population. It is in this scenario that King's writing takes off to a completely different level of description and vividness than ever before. His description of ravaged cities, miles of abandoned cars on highways and throughout cities, massive amounts of dead bodies littered everywhere, stores emptied of people, but full of all kinds of free products, are written with such energy and detail that this post apocalyptic world comes fully to life with each line read and each turn of the page. King writes with a realism I don't normally find in these sorts of scenarios, where it seems over-the-top actions and scenes seem to rule. King by passes all this and instead shifts the viewpoint to the realism, which only helps to draw the reader in as the characters travel on highways and roads anyone can find on map, and travel to towns, states, and places known to everyone. By doing this he easily connects these literary characters to the reader and gives their journey and urgency not normally associated with these quest type of stories. Even as I wrote that I realized that this book is essentially a quest story and I don't normally like quest stories, but this quest story is one of the best quest stories I've ever read, hands down.
The main reason this quest story is vividly engaging is King's ability to fully flesh out characters in a way that makes them emotionally intriguing as well as earn sympathy without gimmicks. King gives his characters such detailed backgrounds and quirks that they come alive with little effort from each line read. King has always had a talent for writing easily identifiable characters, but with this story even he excels himself in ways I don't think he even knew. One of the bold moves he makes is letting a mute person be one of the main characters, normally a person with this sort of disability isn't found in main character status. I also liked how these characters changed as the story moved on and the situation around them forced them to change or die in the life they lived before the plague. The people in this story just seemed to be real and their responses to things happening around them had a ring of truth. It is this sort of writing that I think connected with readers on some sort of psychological level, at least I know it did with me, and helped to make this story the classic and success it has become over the years.
This is a great book to get lost in, One worth the time it takes to read.
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