Loved it. Both the inner and the outer stories took me right back.

I liked returning to Roland quite a lot, and while you can read the story without any knowledge of the larger series, there are SERIOUS SPOILERS CONTAINED wtf Mr King. Otherwise creepy in a nice way.

A really, really good end to the series. Wow.

Oh man, story time! Looking back into Roland's youth made this a tremendous book.

4.5 – This one was a bit slow, I thought, but it stil pushd the story on briliantly. I loved the play between worlds, and man was Charlie the Choo-Choo creepy.

Not quite as brilliant as the first volume in my mind, but still extremely good. Expanding the universe, introducing Susannah and Eddie (boy is he annoying though), and pushing ever onwards.

I found 11/22/63 a pretty good time travel story (Would you give five years of your life to stop the JFK assassination, given the chance?). Stephen King, as always, excells at the depiction of real, gritty human life with all its ups and downs. I really think he can write about anything, natural or supernatural, as long as it has at least a tenuous connection to Maine. The story had internal consistency, a bit of character development (with a not all that clever protagonist, which I appreciated – not all protagonists need to be the cleverererest), and a pretty satisfying conclusion. Readers of It will appreciate the tie-ins, and I caught whiffs of the Dark Tower aesthetic and resonating themes. The quality of writing is, as always with King, good: believable characters, mostly even with more than one dimension, tight writing, the usual brilliant use of foreshadowing and -telling.

Carrie was a good book, and I think its biggest failing was that it felt like a great book that followed a blueprint to greatness. But you can't say that the blueprint doesn't work – because it does. Carrie is one of those horror books that make very clear that the supernatural is not the stuff horrors are made of. That's reserved for regular humans and their actions and decisions. Stephen King is really good at painting humans in their day-to-day lives, with both their kindness and their cruelty. His pacing is also awesome and reminded me a bit of a tuned-down Vonnegut.

So, thriller is most definitely not my genre, but I can't deny that Stephen King is a master - both in his genre and with words in general. He paints incredibly vivid people, murdering for reasons they think right, and dealing with the consequences.