Without his intervention, the final Dark Tower book would have been a lot different! T he insomnia leads to some strange happenings that coincide with other unusual events in the spooky town of Derry (home of Pennywise the Clown from It), and the hero of the day is the elderly gent unable to sleep. As an insomnia myself, I was entertained by the many remedies to combat insomnia offered to the main character by well-meaning but mostly clueless friends and acquaintences. Here King touches on the unique problems of the elderly, and how they try to cope with all the unpleasant and unpleasant aspects of this time of life. This is another of King's novels which involves the Crimson King, for all you constant readers, and is worth slogging past the beginning to settle in for a lively story. However, the story certainly was worth the effort. The beginning is a bit slow, which is unusual for King, and it took a determined effort to get me going again. It was months before I started on it again. I think if anything, it just ran out of steam, and when you consider that it was written across a three year period, perhaps that’s understandable.This is the first King novel I've ever started and lost interest in the beginning. Then it was followed up by what felt like a rushed epilogue with a pretty cliché ending, but then I suppose King isn’t really known for having the best endings anyway. He sees colored ribbons streaming from people’s heads, two strange little men wandering around town after dark, and more. During his late night walks, he observes some strange things going on in Derry, Maine. Then, when the plot did go places, it quite often took off like a rocket, hooking me in for fifty pages or so before it went back to not much happening. Each night he wakes up a bit earlier, until he’s barely sleeping at all. It stopped me caring too much about whether the plot was going anywhere because I was just happy to be there. The only saving grace there was that it was set in Derry, Maine, one of King’s most iconic settings, and so it was good to get a little extra background information. It also felt as though the pacing was off, with a little too much worldbuilding for my taste. That was all fine, but as an actual insomniac, I was kind of hoping to see more from that. It was more as though it was the inciting incident and then the rest of the story just went off on a tangent with almost Donnie Darko vibes when it comes to how the protagonists could see auras and influence people and the events that were happening. I was also kind of disappointed with the fact that insomnia itself didn’t really play a major part in the story line. It was also confusing at times, but there were at least these little periods here and there where it sort of managed to reabsorb me again. Other than that, it was pretty dull, although it wasn’t as tedious of a read as Bag of Bones. If not, maybe leave it for a while, especially because it was the lore and the tie-ins with the multiverse which made this worth reading, at least in my opinion. If all of that means something to you, you’re probably ready to read this book. If the life of a certain child isn’t saved, the Tower will fall down. It has some heavy tie-ins with the Dark Tower series, including a cameo from Roland and references to ka-tets and a whole section named after the Crimson King.

This is definitely not one that you should read if you’re new to King, and there’s a very specific reason for that. There were also some unusual formatting elements being used to convey psychic conversations that made it a little harder/ more involved to read it, as well as tiny print and super thin pages that sometimes made the actual book difficult to hold.

I have pretty mixed feelings about this book, because there were elements and themes to it which I liked but it was also pretty boring in places.

It insomnia stephen king