Stephen King managed to turn out two new books in calendar 2021, keeping up his incredibly fast pace. This book went to the small Hard Case Crime publishing label and I like that King has done this a few times in the past few years. It’s a cool idea to send some of his pulpier works to a small press like this that kind of specializes in pulpier books. But while this does have some pulpier elements in terms of its crime related plot, this is definitely a horror novel and, I’m gonna say it, one of the best things King’s done in a while.
The book is told from the perspective of Jamie Conklin, a young teen who can see dead people. Briefly right after they die; they typically hang around for a couple of days in a kind of daze near the place where they died and then they just kind of fade away. While they’re around though, Jamie can talk to them and it turns out that the dead are unable to lie. The story takes some very interesting twists and turns that I don’t want to spoil, but let’s just say that Jamie gets in over his head when Liz Dutton, a troubled NYPD officer figures out Jamie’s abilities and brings him in on a case. The spirit Jamie encounters on that particular job is a little . . . different and things go wrong from there.
At just over 250 pages and a lot of plot, this book has a lot of energy and moves really quickly. The story is engaging and compelling. The central trio of characters is Jamie, his mom Tia and Liz, the cop, and I found them all to be very well-written and interesting. The book took Liz in particular in some directions I wasn’t anticipating and I ended up thinking she was a genuinely great character. The book is darn scary too; the central spectral villain is a really great creation and the book ends up having a really good living villain as well. I found the book to be a real page-turner from the first chapter and then it really kicks up to the next level for the last forty pages or so. King’s prose is really excellent here, not overly stylized, but really nailing the voices. About the only thing I didn’t like here was the incredibly generic title, which didn’t really connect with the story at all, and one very late twist that involves some icky sexual stuff that feels out of place and kind of triggering almost. Like there’s no reason for it to be here. But, on the whole, I absolutely loved this fast-paced, entertaining, nasty little horror-thriller. 4 stars.
tl;dr – stripped down, genuinely scary, well-written horror-thriller is some of King’s best work in years; a surprising, character-based page-turner. 4 stars.