I'm an acknowledged Stephen King superfan ... and for the first time, I'm actually kind of ambivalent about one of his books. For the first 3/4's of the book, I wasn't very into it. I foresaw a 2-star review in my future. Then, the ending happened, and I LOVED it. As soon as I finished last night, I jumped onto GR and gave it four stars in a rush of ending-fueled adrenaline. Today, while discussing the book with a friend and fellow King fan, I realized that with the initial flush of the finale gone, I didn't like the book as much as I thought I did. 
 Basically, all that rambling to say that I'm giving this book three stars, but not because it's middle-of-the-road. It gets three stars as the average of my two strong feelings about it. 
 Did I mention I love SK? Because I do. And so I can lovingly say that, for a lot of this book, we're being told a story that we've sort of been told before. This book feels a lot like several prior King books ... Duma Key, Doctor Sleep, Joyland, even 11/22/63 in a way, come immediately to mind. We get a single, male, wounded/damaged/often addicted-to-something protagonist, a story told mostly in retrospective, some kind of Important Childhood Event leading up to an Important Adulthood Event, and since this is SK, it's naturally wrapped up in some kind of supernatural/otherworldly thing. 
 If Jamie Morton (Revival's protagonist) is familiar to us as an SK archetype (stereotype?), I just couldn't get a grasp on Charles Jacobs. (view spoiler)[He appears and reappears several times, and each time it's like a brand new character. The decent, kind minister, followed by the grieving carny (and what is it with SK and carnies lately? Carnies are the new vampires, I guess?), followed by the malevolent revival preacher, followed by an obsessed madman on the brink of physical and mental collapse ... but since his evolution into these different personas occurs "offscreen", it kept me from ever being able to really engage with the character. I wanted to dread him, be scared of him, be interested in him ... but I just didn't know him well enough to do so. (hide spoiler)] 
 But if the first 3/4 of the book felt oddly detached and familiar, the last quarter was amazing. I did very little research into the book before I read it, so its hard left turn into (view spoiler)[HP Lovecraft-ville (hide spoiler)] was an unexpected and very welcome surprise. Like I told my husband after I finished, (view spoiler)["It was so great! There were 'colors unknowable by human comprehension', and things being described as 'loathsome', and howling stars that were really holes in the Null with the screaming entities behind them, and it even quoted the Necronomicon!" (hide spoiler)] 
 Also, while the rest of the book was fairly light on horror, the ending more than made up for it. I can see why SK himself said this was a dark and scary book that he doesn't like to think about ... part of me kind of wishes I didn't have that final vision of (view spoiler)[what life after death is really like (hide spoiler)] to haunt my dreams. The rest of me, though, is very happy to add another crack to my delicate sensibilities!