I could never sit here and pretend that I'm not a big Stephen King fan--have been since I was a kid--and that I didn't want to love this a lot. And I did, in a sense! There's a lot of that classic King feeling at work here. Unfortunately, I'm also older now, and Stephen King is older now, and it's hard not to look at his politics and how they shine through in his work and feel exhausted. And I mean this in a leftist sense--I am far from the type to be angry about the mention of a gay character or a little Trump dig. It's just... Well, he's such a lib about it. 

In a surface sense, it comes out in the character actions. A cop gesturing to another cop with a derisive thought about voting for Trump, like we're not in the POV of a cop. Gesturing heavily to a Trump sign in a rural area as a sort of brush to tell you what type of place this is. Little things from a man whose heart is in the right place but who doesn't quite Get It. 

But it's also in the politics of the book, of its creature. I don't want to spoil too heavily, but

the creature itself being An Outsider, a being of evil that comes in and infects a town with paranoia and hate and fear,

is first of all my kind of obvious in its metaphor, but it's also just... Not how things work in a way I find to be a nasty sticking point for me.

The bad things that happen to children and others aren't just some evil shape in the dark, they're the people we trust, the people we think we know, and to make the Big Bad some wicked creatures from the dark rather than the terrible, terrible truth. And it's very much the message people like Trump try to spill, this racist idea of invaders from other lands, but there's clearly an idea here that it's Trump and the rhetoric he brings without any deeper thinking about where these monsters are built from

. It's just a little too baseball and apple pie for me, I guess (if you've read the ending, you get what I mean, I hope). 

Still... Well, he's still Stephen King. It's still gripping and interesting and tense. The guy's still got it, I just wish he spent a little more time thinking about this little community he's created on the page and where the darkness really lurks because, while it's a fiction novel and not a depiction of the real world, it still matters. It still solidifies certain ideas. It still means something.