Reviews

How could I give this anything but five stars? Fully fleshed out characters, seems exactly like what it would be like to be a 12 year old in 1960! I could visualize everything in my mind as Dan laid it out! Great bad guys/monsters! A gang of kids banding together to solve it (I see why it gets compared to IT a lot and it's worthy of being compared). The ending was good! Wrapped up nicely, as I think a lot of Stephen King's don't do 😳. It was a beautiful book! I often think if I can picture a book as a movie in my mind then it was written well!

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5.0

I was in the mood for an epic story and I got it. It’s 1960 and Old Central School is closing in the town of Elm Haven, Illinois. The sudden disappearance of a schoolmate sends a group of friends on a mission to learn more about this and their suspicions around it. Right out of the gate the character work is great. Each character was well drawn in quite an efficient way and I was endeared to them within the first 50 pages. I was actively pulling for these characters and genuinely concerned for how their stories would play out as they encountered terrifying evil. There were plenty of tropes in this 1991 novel and they were so well executed they didn’t bother me one bit. I loved the way the kid’s exploits are set up and paid off through the story. The sense of place and time was wonderful as well. Mike, Dale, Lawrence (not Larry), Duane, Kev, Harlen, and Cordie are certified badasses! I particularly thought Duane was such an amazing character and Cordie was so weird and funny as an outlier who intersects with the group of boys. I fully intend to follow up with the other books in the Seasons of Horror series!