Overlong, particularly the opening act. Lazy stock King characters - The Grumpy Old Man, The Good Boy etc etc - truly awful prose on occasion. I mentioned this in a previous post on this book but when you commit a sentence like 'they darkened the darkening sky' to paper and think its good, you're in trouble.

He's showing his age too. Nothing wrong with that, he's older now, but why try and write a teenage character when you clearly can't write a teenager? It had 'how do you do fellow kids' energy running all through it.