I'm sorry. I don't want to say it, but I'm not being fair to anyone if I start lying in my reviews. I found this lackluster and anticlimactic. It's not as bad as The Colorado Kid or Cell in those respective categories, and in fact it's not a bad book at all, but it's certainly misclassified. And please stay tuned. I discuss the good stuff at the end of this review, but I've got to get the bad out of the way first. 
 I think my expectations were too high, but that was due to all the hype surrounding this. It was marketed as horror, and many said it was a return to horror, but it just didn't live up to that claim. And I know when I start looking for reasons why something should fit its mold, then the writer has missed the mark. 
 I suppose horror is in the eye of the beholder. King himself said this was "scary as hell," and to a 67 year old man who knows he probably has less than a quarter of his life left, I can see that. What lies beyond death in this book is terrifying enough. I guess it's like a trypanophobe going to the doctor for a shot. You know you need one sometimes, but you're not worried about it as you go through normal life. Then you see that physical, or booster, or whatever time is approaching, and you sigh discontentedly knowing what that means. Then you make the appointment, and your worry ramps up just a tad because you start to think about it. Then it's the day of the appointment, and you're not thrilled with the prospect at all. Then you're there, and you get nervous to the point that it affects your demeanor during the whole visit. Then it's shot time, and you're trying to calm yourself down, and the most terrifying part of the ordeal is the second just before the needle is inserted under your skin. Then you scream with pain, or fear, or whatever it is. (I have no problems with needles myself, but I've seen this reaction in others while holding their hands, so I'm just guessing that's how it plays out). Anyway, SK is on his way to the doctor's office, and I, at 36, see an appointment needing to be made at some ambiguous point in the future. It stands to reason he'd find the prospects in this tale scarier than I would, so I'm not going to accuse him of laying it on thick. He never has before; he's pretty forthright about how he sees things, and you can see that through the years in his writing. Kids fear monsters ('Salem's Lot). Thirty-somethings fear bad things happening to their loved ones as they're making their families (Pet Sematary). You get the idea. Some of King's books reflect what scares him at the time he's writing it. And though I have no psychological degrees, have never taken a psychology course in college, and have never met Stephen personally, I'm still 100% qualified to make this assertion because I have internet access, and I can type. 
 Regardless, it's not a return to his horror roots. I put Mr. King in three sections due to writing style differences. Carrie to It, The Eyes of the Dragon to From a Buick 8, and Wolves of the Calla onward. The first section has the most books that I consider to be solid horror and don't really cross into other genres. There are still a few in the second section that I haven't read yet, so I don't know how many are in there, but I do know it's not as many as in the first. Duma Key is the only one in the third section that I consider straight-up horror, though Lisey's Story comes close. However, both of those blow this one out of the water. 
 Chapter 13 (pages 371-385 in a 403 page book) is the only section that has what I call horror in it, not counting maybe two pages in chapter eight, and both of those are rather muted next to stuff in his other works. 
 As for the impact the monster at the end had on me... 
 Yeah, it was kind of like that. (It's not crab people, by the way, so don't be worried about that. It was just kind of lame). 
 Chapter 14 contains tragic elements in the aftermath. That gives us 370 pages of build-up which I didn't find all that suspenseful in spite of the constant foreshadowing. I was curious (curiosity is a theme in here as well), but not waiting with bated breath. We have a character who can use science to do healing that hitherto had never been accomplished before, and he probably ought to be medicated because he was a tad weird. He was obsessed with getting his results, which is the hallmark of any good researcher, and while he's apathetic about the effect some of the results had on other people when bad things happen, and certainly cold and calloused, I didn't consider him to be evil except in one instance when he used someone's pain to get something he needed by refusing to cure that pain. Very low key in the Kingiverse. Evil is a horror staple, and this just didn't have it in sufficient quantities. 
 "The Terrible Sermon" a few pages on each side of 70: I need to point out that it probably works very well in its setting (mid 1960s). In that day and age, what was spouted from the pulpit would probably rock the socks off the congregation, but in today's world we're desensitized to such ideas because we've heard them before. Or maybe that's just me and the crowd I hang out with. Regardless, the agnostic narrator writing in 2015 keeps describing it as this awful thing as he leads up to it, but it just fell short of my expectations. 
 This also lacked a lot of the humorous gems peppered throughout to which I've grown accustomed in King's works. They were fewer and farther between than usual. In fact, I'm having trouble coming up with any right now, but I do remember chuckling in a couple of places. 
 OK, enough of the trashing. What was good about it? Stephen King can still write. As usual, I enjoyed the journey. The characters are also complex, and that's where Stevie still shines. Suspension of disbelief isn't strained with anyone in this book, and so he makes up for Holly in Mr. Mercedes and parts of Big Jim in Under the Dome. Jamie, our hero, is about as normal a Joe as you'd want to know given his circumstances, and reacts believably to everything. In fact, I really liked this guy. My soft spot is normally for baddies, but... I really liked him. He's just cool from start to finish even though he doesn't really do anything spectacular compared with other Stephen King protagonists. In spite of that, I'll still lump him in with some of my favorite SK good guys. I loved reading about this cat, and seeing things through his eyes. 
 There are links to other SK works such as Joyland. De Vermis Mysteriis from "Jerusalem's Lot" is mentioned. I like to think the bad guy got his hands on that very copy, but it didn't say. I always love finding these little Easter Eggs. Also, Castle Rock is mentioned, though he once again doesn't give any clue as to what's happened there since the events of Needful Things. Harlow is part of this story too, and I like to think it connects to the Back Harlow Road in "The Body." 
 Also, the villain is tied with electricity, and that's always been a thing for me ever since I was four years old and saw this in the theater: 
 You can never go wrong with me by giving a bad guy some kind of control over electricity. Our baddie here can't do anything like Sith lightning, but I still like it anyway. 
 I know that's not a lot for the good column, but the first point covers the whole 400 pages whereas the nit-picks in the bad column cover sporadic sections. 
 Final analysis: This book is hard to classify. Keep moving on if you're looking for horror, or even the weirdness you expect from Sai King. Thriller? Pass it by. Suspense? Pass it by. Tragedy? eh... iffy. The last chapter kind of delivers on that score, but only kind of. There are elements of all of these, but some of his other works do them much better. If you enjoy a good, albeit drawn out, story, and good prose, then you'd like this. Die hard Stephen King fans are the only people I would suggest this to emphatically, but they've probably already read it. 
 How strange. I can't suggest reading this, and I can't suggest not reading it. Make of all that what you will.