About halfway through The Talisman now. Loving it now. I feel it
mostly reads like a King novel, and it's totally full of his tropes (it is 1984 after all). It starts pretty slow and I didn't like Jack, or his mother, very much at all at first. And you get these little tidbits early on that you know will be fleshed out later, but some of that felt off...it wasn't really stringing me along like my favorite King books, more dumping mystery on top of mystery without explaining the last thing before moving onto the next. It's worth it though! 200 pages in I was enjoying the journey fully and by the time the character Wolf was introduced, it's feeling like another classic.
King has a habit of writing
super smart kids that are kinda hard to believe (harder for me to believe somehow, than interdimensional travel and werewolves lol). I felt the same way about Luke in The Institute. In both cases I had to spend more pages with the characters to understand and believe/imagine them fully. I feel like he LOVES doing this so he can say some shit 400 pages in like "He was a very smart child, but he was still only a child after all" lol. Every time.
I didn't really like In The Tall Grass movie. It felt long. I hear the
isn't in the short story? I'll have to read it.