Nick

Obviously, this book has been out for some years and been adapted several times, so I won't bore anyone with details you already know. I mainly wanted to touch on two points:
1) As good as the story was, I could have been longer. Details were iffy at times. The movies try to expand the back story a bit, but not always effectively. Can't blame them for trying. I liked the ending, but I'm not entirely sure that the novel really gave the reader enough of a reason why everything turned out the way it did.
2) No one I've seen really talks about this, but this book is freakin' hilarious. I found myself laughing out loud quite a few times.

This was a pretty long book, but I feel like it kept up the pace pretty well. However, the first and second halves kind of felt like an exquisite corpse exercise, let's say pre/post Duane's death as a good dividing point. The first half is more a town mystery with kids banding together to face it head on. The second half becomes more of a supernatural/demonic battle and that's why so many have compared it to King's IT.

I did thoroughly enjoy this book. Simmons is a great writer. However, I did have some issues with it that keep me from giving it 5 stars. If I could do halves, I'd give this a 3.5. The first issue I had was one character's gratuitous use of the n word. Now, I know that this type of language was probably pretty common in the time and place, but it does nothing for the plot or exposition. The story the character tells essentially goes nowhere and isn't brought up again until one of the kids 200 pages later mistakes another character for being black. That leads into my next issue with the book which is that the conspiracy plot essentially goes nowhere. It builds up and then immediately goes in another direction. We're led to believe that there's this deep-seated secret society and then find out there's like a mold that can bring people back from the dead and...worms? And the worms go from like small and ingestible to 20' long for some reason?

My other huge issue came in the second half and it involved a sexual encounter with one of the main characters. Keep in mind, these kids are like 10-11 years old. Now, a lot of the theme of this novel is growing up, but this particular scene just felt unnecessary and creepy. Kids are at a birthday party, they get a bit touchy-feely. Way too much description of the kids' body parts. The female involved is barely mentioned before or after this. The entire birthday party could've been erased from the story and wouldn't have had the slightest impact.

So yeah, having said all of that, I get why people compare it to SK's writings in that he loves gratuitous racial slurs and sex scenes involving children. Both of those things are my biggest criticisms of King's works. But I will say this: Simmons was a lot better at delivering dialogue and sticking the ending.

This was a very fun romp overall. I definitely enjoyed the first half more. I wish Simmons would've went more one way or the other when fleshing out the story of the “Bell.” Its mystery just kind of went away but it wasn't even really that necessary to begin with. The kids were all great and had their own distinct personalities. The adults were all dumb and useless. Sandlot meets Night of the Comet meets IT yadda yadda yadda. Thanks for reading all of that (or skipping to the end).

I thoroughly enjoyed this. It was short and sweet without a bunch of unnecessary BS in between.

This book was essentially a game where a bunch of teen boys have to kill the guy from AFI’s All Hallows EP cover art while he has to do whatever necessary to make it to the town church before the bells ring.

One thing that really threw me was that it had a big twist about 1/3 of the way through instead of some obvious shoehorned-in crap at the end.

What a great premise with a horrendous finish :(

it was ok