The writing is both very precise and wildly overwrought, particularly the dialogue, which…my God, even a Lassie episode is closer to how kids really  talk, and the father’s lengthy pontificating in the library was just lazy.   I know how difficult it is to get this kind of thing done in natural dialogue, and I’m not saying I’m good at it, but at least the attempt is made, and as much shit as I give Stephen King for his EW columns, he really knew how to do this.   He could get inside kids’ heads and turn it out in a natural way, and he could put the supernatural in a context with the ordinary, so as to point up what makes it frightening.   This is very evocative writing, in its way, but it’s so interested in what’s “off” — and the prose is so breathless in places — that it’s sometimes hard to “fix” what’s happening within a perspective.   It’s a page-turner, but sometimes that’s less because it’s exciting and more because you’re trying to get past the bloviation of the characters on the nature of evil and hit some actual action.   It needed to be shorter, and I liked the execution of these concepts a lot better in It and A Wrinkle In Time.   (6/6/06 [which is fitting])

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