Title: Later
Author: Stephen King
Category: Fiction
Page Count: 272
Rating: 4/5
I thought this book was pretty good I guess, and it would have been very impressive if it had been written by someone who wasn’t Stephen King. For King, though, it’s just okay, a nice little addition to his ouvre but nothing worth writing home about. It’s one where it was nice to pick up as a surprise because I didn’t know it was coming out. If I’d been looking forward to it, I would have been disappointed.
This is part of the Hard Case Crime series, but it’s not really that much of a hard case. In many ways it’s almost soft, in part because it’s told through the eyes of a character who starts the story out as a young kid. Considerably younger than me in fact, to the point that a few of the pop cultural references were from before my time. And apparently King is more down with the kids than I am, which I’m weirdly not surprised about.
All in all, it’s pretty good for what it is, but I can’t help feeling that if King had written this thirty years ago, it would have just been one of four short novels in a bigger collection. Still, I think it makes for a better overall reading experience than something like If It Bleeds, and I like how it brought something new to the whole “I see dead people” thing that’s been overdone in movies and literature. But it’s worth going out of your way for if you’re a big King fan.
