Now is probably a good time to point out that Stephen King is out of control. There is no way an editor even glanced at this book before it was published. It took 350 pages for the seven main characters (too many!) to individually meet the central monster and then collectively acknowledge its existence, and we frequently took extended breaks to talk about architecture. There are divider pages denoting every jump between the 1958 and the 1985 timelines, and each has a melodramatic epigraph from William Carlos Williams, Virgil, a classic rock song, or the 1973 Scorsese film Mean Streets. They are deeply unnecessary, and a little embarrassing. At this point, I’ve also been reading an old copy of Stephen King’s On Writing that I stole from a high school English class, and laughing out loud on almost every page. Here is a piece of advice Stephen King gave to others, in apparent seriousness: “In many cases when a reader puts a story aside because it ‘got boring,’ the boredom arose because the writer grew enchanted with his powers of description and lost sight of his priority, which is to keep the ball rolling.” Hmm.