I've heard many times that this is King's best book and while I definitely don't agree with that, it is a great novel. 
 I am one of the ones who felt that this book would have been better served by being a bit shorter, because it seems to me that there were a number of places where the book dragged on and was bogged down by unnecessary details. 
 The characters are strong and I found myself becoming really attached to several of them as the story progressed. In fact, I feel like the well-developed characters were what really carried the book through. I felt like the plot was fairly weak, even though I suppose that it's supposed to be a straight-forward good vs. evil story. 
 To me the book sort of loses its momentum in the last 25%, but that happens with a number of King's novels. The ending is decent, but considerably weaker than the first 75% of the book.