The Territories are the best invention in the book and the reason it has stayed in print. What King and Straub do is build a second world that is not a metaphor but a neighbourhood: it has farms, a monarch, a political crisis and a smell of its own, and the reflections of ordinary people have their own grievances rather than existing to flatter the protagonist. The device of flipping gives the novel its structure and, more importantly, its sense of consequence, because what Jack does in one world keeps arriving in the other. That is a smarter engine than most portal fantasies manage.

Jack himself is the other reason it works. He is twelve, he is being asked to do something absurd, and the authors let him be frightened and stubborn and occasionally cruel in the way that a child under pressure is cruel. Wolf, his companion for part of the journey, is the emotional centre of the novel and the source of its best humour as well as its worst grief, and he is the character listeners remember. If you have read the later Dark Tower books, his fingerprints are all over them, which is part of the pleasure for anyone arriving here after that series.

My reservation is the length, and it is not mine alone: the middle of the novel is where patience goes to die. Two separate Audible listeners make the same case in different registers, one describing the story as jumping all over the place and another arguing that the book would be improved by cutting fourteen to sixteen hours of writing he calls banal, self-indulgent and redundant. I would not cut sixteen hours, but I would cut several: the stretch where Jack and Wolf cross the Midwest sags badly, the episodic encounters in the third quarter repeat the same shape as each other, and the late attempt to widen the theme from two worlds to infinite parallel realities feels like an idea that arrived after the book was finished. Twenty-eight hours is a long commitment for a novel that could have been twenty-two without losing anything.

On the narration, which is its own conversation: Muller is a major reason to choose audio here, and he is also the reason some listeners bail. His habit of stretching the final word of a sentence until it thins out drives a minority of reviewers up the wall; another listener says he is not at his best on this particular book and that his style put them off the text altogether. I am in the other camp. The performative excess is inseparable from what he does best, and the characterisations, Wolf above all, are worth the mannerisms. If you have heard him before and disliked it, you already know which camp you are in.

Content notes: this is a novel in which a child is repeatedly in physical danger, there is real violence and a genuinely upsetting death, and the book deals with illness in a family in a way that will land hard for some listeners. Nothing is gratuitous, and it is not a horror novel of the gore-and-jump type.

For listeners who want a long American fantasy with a real world underneath it, and for anyone working backwards from the Dark Tower. If you want the series continued, the site's Other Worlds Than These is the third book of the same collaboration, and this one should be taken first.