2.5 stars & spoilers ahead!

Hallelujah. This took me a certain amount of time to slog my way through this book, but I'm finally here. And I am eager to post my review of it.

First, let me say that I don't want to dis-recommend this book so much. Unfortunately, I don't have enough reading experience with the "fantasy" genre to make my judgment on it. You may have noticed too, but this was my very first fantasy book I have ever read. As I might have expected before picking up this book, I didn't really like the fantasy genre. I found myself much less able to empathise with the characters and environmental details that did not seem realistic to me. Normally when I read a book, I get a kind of movie recording in my head. With this book, I had to use a huge amount of energy to get this result and because of that was reading the book very tiring. As a result, for me, this book was therefore just 'a book' and so I did not derive any pleasure from it....

Now then, if I have to talk about the full story, it also disappointed me a bit. It was my first Stephen King book (and according to reviews from other fans, I had better not have started with fairy tail, but it is what it is) and I had high expectations. I am not going to completely discount King's books, as I am aware that I started with a genre he is not known for, but I expected more originality. To me, this story was no more or no less than a fairy tale where a promised, ordinary young man had to save the discovered kingdom from a horrific curse ruling the city. There were also a lot of parts that were literally copied from other fairy tales, like from Rapunzel, but slightly distorted.

Another thing that struck me was that Stephen King is very strong in describing the environment excellently, almost tangible as it were. So unfortunately for me because of the whole fantasy thing, I just couldn't engage with it enough to make it give me a wow feeling. Having found that the magnified environmental details were a big plus for me in this story, I also found that the story lost itself in this. King gave more attention to these details than really fleshing out his plots in the book properly. In fact, these were very briefly outlined. An example of this is when he kills Gogmagog simply by uttering his name, when Elden is knocked out by a single stab of a dagger in his eye, how Charlie makes his way to the sundial like a piece of cake and sets up Radar here with ease, and so on. (I'll spare you the further details in case you still want to read it).
In conclusion, what I want to say briefly: 1/4 of the story was fantastic. The whole part where he meets Mr Bowditch I found very enjoyable to read. After this, it weakened... in which I want to say conclusively that the end of the story did satisfy me, as it was blissfully finished.

Furthermore, for anyone who can give me tips to read another Stephen King book (that is not up and coming horror), hit me up!