I like when people wake up threads like this to remind me to post.I wanted a paperback for bed (hardcover books are too heavy when your arms get tired), and this grabbed my eye. I enjoy Stephen King, but this is decidedly blah. Maybe it's Peter Straub's (his co-author) fault; I don't know. But I'm about 100 pages in, and it has yet to grab me at all. The main character, a twelve-year-old boy named Jack Sawyer, is completely unreal... he acts and is treated too much like an adult. It seems like a similar story to The Dark Tower, which I couldn't get into either. I don't know if I'm going to get much further in this one.