It's just another normal summer's day on Poplar Street in Wentworth, Ohio.  Two kids are getting a soda and some candy in the local shop, barbecues are being prepared, someone enjoys the sun, someone enjoys washing the car, someone enjoys a drink, teenagers are playing with a frisbee.  Another teenager is delivering the local newspaper, and none of them are aware of the van that slowly rolls down the hill.  Soon the paperboy will be aware of nothing anymore, as he is the first one to get shot by whoever is inside the van, the frisbeeing teenager's dog is next.  And then the van disappears, leaving a handful of witnesses behind, bewildered, shocked, angry, scared.

This is only the beginning of a nightmare in which several people are killed with things that only resemble bullets, coming from huge guns shot by what looks like people disguised as cartoon-figures.  Not only that, but the whole environment seems to change, turning average homes into adobe haciendas or log cabins.  The survivors group together in a few homes, trying to come to terms with the violent deaths of their friends and relatives, trying to keep their own minds from flipping, and trying to find a way to get away and look for help.  But how can you get away if you don't understand what the danger is, where it comes from, and if that danger has altered what you thought was your escape-route?

One woman and her autistic nephew know where all this came from: Tak, a demon that got into the body of the boy.  Tak has been feeding for a long time, gathering strength to do what it is doing now.  Tak is in control, it uses parts of the boy's imagination to create this situation, and it has only just started.  And what can one woman and an autistic boy do against all this power?

This is as far as I can remember the only novel in which King doesn't succeed at what he is best at: create living credible people, that end up in extraordinary yet credible situations.  The reason is that the book starts with a cast as large as an entire street, and none of the inhabitants receive the attention that is needed to turn them into credible beings.  Many die in the first chapters, but still it's hard to believe in the thinned out group.

445 pages were in my copy, and some 70-80 of those consist of letters, movie-scripts, diary quotes and so on.  One the one hand this all freshens up the read a little, and it shows the same story from different angles, it offers sidenotes and explanations.  But at the same time all these angles keep coming back on the same issues, as if I wouldn't have understood it the first time.  A pity, rather than welcoming the extra information after a while I started dreading yet another repetition of how Tak used Seth.

Still, the story is well told.  The opening scene, the entire opening chapter, is great, hovering over a few characters, letting the reader almost smell summer, delivering the opening shots.  The plot itself was okay as well, it just could use some editing.  If you had this book in mind to get through a long flight, you won't be sorry.