Oh yeah! Stephen King is back. Well, it's not like he went anywhere, but I think you know what I mean. For a bit there he started getting awfully precious with his plots and musings and the book would ramble on and on and on without really advancing in any satisfactory manner, just getting lost in the love of language and verbosity and words and stuff, much like this sentence you're currently suffering though right now, and then he'd realize this thing is getting pretty long and it's getting awfully late and it's time to put this story to bed.

Not The Outsider, though. This one has the right amount of words to tell the story, no more and no less. There's still a love of the sound of words and the way we use them, but it never overwhelms the storytelling. Well-paced, plausible long after the more fantastic elements of the story should have lost us, and an awfully delicious creepy good time.