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I've been reading Dan Simmon's Summer of Night. It was a slow, frustrating starter, but grew on me. I'm only about half way through, but I keep thinking that this is the way I've always wished Stephen King wrote. (Stephen king is painfully disappointing to be. He only writes the one voice and the characters are so similar they are hard to tell apart. Also, I think he's usually playing to a psychology too different from mine for me to connect with most of his stuff. His best stuff, like his Bachmann books, touches on something interesting, but most of his stuff can't follow through on the promise of the ideas. I know this is a minority opinion, but I've held it since my teens despite various people convincing me every five years or so to give his stuff yet another chance). Anyway, it's that sort of Stephen King/Ray Bradbury small American town kind of horror story. I think I've moved to far away from this stuff over the decades for it to really move me, but the writing is excellent, I think I'd have loved this at sixteen, when I was less grumpy about boomer nostalgia, "real America," and the lack of inclusiveness of so much of this sort of writing. It's still an excellent example of it's type, much as Something Wicked This Way Comes is, only here, the realism is turned up higher than the average Bradbury novel. Childhood in the Simmons novel is more realistically red of tooth and claw. So, I'm getting why some people are so effusive, and I'm not sorry to be reading it, but at the same time, but interest is not unalloyed and I can't outright recommend it.