Interesting premise (a boy can see and talk to the dead/solves a crime) and the writing style idea (a novice writer tells/writes his story and improves his writing as he goes). I was hooked because the book is written in small segments and I was able to continue reading, though I might have put it down and never finished reading otherwise. I was bugged that the narrator used slang that set the novel in the 60s/70s, sometimes earlier than that, though it was supposed to be set in the late 90s/2000s. I kept hoping that at the end of the novel this would be explained, but it never was. I was hoping it was part of the plot.

For all that, it was a decent horror story, a fun read, and typical Stephen King in that there was plenty of supernatural and the relationships between the main characters showed a bonded mom and son (“me and you against the world”) that often reminded me of The Shining, but was nowhere near as well written. I did not think this was Stephen King’s best, but, naturally, I was drawn in and read the novel in a few hours-it’s by Stephen King, after all.