Start with the set pieces, because King has not lost a step at the big, ugly scene. There is a pair of small-town cops winding down a shift to Yacht Rock when two thrill-killing teenagers turn a Nebraska main street into a furnace, and the gap between their boredom and the violence is funny right up until it is unbearable. There is a woman stranded on top of a water tower that is quietly collapsing into the ashes below. There is, later, a downpour of grape-sized spiders that I listened to on a walk and would not recommend listening to on a walk. Oswalt never oversells a moment. He keeps the register flat and almost amused, which makes the horror land harder, not softer.

Under the fireworks this is a book about what a long life costs the person living it, and it is more moving than a King adventure is usually willing to be. Jack is fifty-seven and has outlived most of the people who mattered to him, and the novel keeps circling back to them, the mentor, the friend, the mother, and to the younger self who could still cross over without flinching. Oswalt understands that this, and not the fights, is the emotional centre, and he plays the nostalgia clean, without a wobble of sentimentality. I kept noticing how much of the story arrives as memory, and how much better it works for that.

My one niggle is the middle. Roughly ten hours in, once the cult and the infected kids are both established, the journey settles into a loop of travel, ambush and regrouping that starts to feel like it is circling rather than advancing, and a couple of the newer supporting figures never fully step clear of their plot function. It does not sink the finale, and the action sequences kept hauling me back, but there were evenings when I wanted the tale to want something more urgently. At those points it reads like a book written by a man taking his time to say goodbye, which is touching and also, now and then, a little slow.

What stays with me is the strangest thing about it: a novel about a friendship that outlasted one of the friends. Peter Straub died in 2022, years before this existed, and King finished the ending from an idea his old collaborator had pitched him long before. You can feel that absence, and you can feel King deciding not to paper over it. Hearing the author's own voice somewhere on the recording turns the last stretch into something considerably more personal than a performance. It is the rare late sequel that knows exactly what it is burying.

If all this sends you looking for more King once the final hour is done, The Life of Chuck takes the same idea, a life told in pieces, and makes it quieter and stranger; Sleeping Beauties, the one he wrote with his son, shares the small-town pressure cooker and the sense of a community coming apart at the seams; and It is the obvious doorway into the long, generous, frightening King who writes about a gang of kids and the thing under their town. Any of the three works as a first step into his work, though the trilogy itself is best met where Jack is twelve.