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I don't have a full review in me for this, but the book was miraculous for my reading momentum. It is definitely the scariest book I have ever read - so scary that I was losing sleep over it, so when I only had a couple dozen pages left, I resolved to only finish it in broad daylight. This ill-fitting atmosphere actually made the finale experience pretty deflated and underwhelming—but I enjoyed the book a lot.

This is a fun, book-length version of the horror stories I used to (and sometimes still) read on r/glitchinthematrix, r/nosleep and similar corners of the internet (SCPs and creepypastas). It is funny and embarrassing that I describe it in that direction rather than the other way around, which is no doubt more accurate—the Reddit stories are really like bite-sized versions of Stephen King's work and the like—but I grew up loving and always thinking about those stories, and never quite finding the same excitement in horror novels. Finding out if this one could deliver something similar, which felt likely given the premise, is what it took to break my reading draught of almost one year.

The Langoliers flirts with the idea of one person's neurosis materialising in the physical world, becoming sentient and sucking total bystanders into its orbit; the idea of a world that has dropped the act of being a world, reluctant to exist and to perform its usual functions; therefore the world's vitality being a concerted effort privileged to us, and subject to scheduling error, rather than an automatic condition.

Much of this really reminds me of the backrooms, and all backrooms-style internet horror about liminal spaces, which, evidenced by the (at the time of writing) new and very successful A24 movie, has become a rare narrative fixation of our generation. I have not seen the movie yet, but the original concept of the backrooms evokes a "waiting room" for reality—separate from the past, present and future, but still parallel, perhaps running underneath these like VHS tape. It is pretty amazing that a household-name author's work so coherently predates this idea by 30 years (!!!), but I never see anyone talking about it.

Given that the backrooms story is (and other internet stories like it are) authorless*, the ways that King's peripheral interests and agendas creep through his prototypical backrooms story should maybe be more interesting than I found them. Seemingly random geopolitical commentary rears its head at the end of the narrative; very worldly, or in fact (even more provincially) earthly concerns in the face of the world's self-abandonment. I already knew before this that what gives internet stories their intrigue and apparent cultural staying power is likely their anonymity and brevity; they randomly spawn out of yawning, enormous, backrooms-like wells devoid of paratext (online anon imageboards and forums) and disappear back into these before their authors can mark themselves inside of them. This is obviously not what we want of other kinds of literature, but it serves this microgenre by collapsing the distance between reader and text, or reader and idea. It would be a tall order for a writer of Stephen King's stature to achieve the same thing, even having had the same idea 30 years earlier, and that's not what I was expecting. Conversely, he was able to slowly build and give teeth to those ideas in the second paragraph in a way that a forum author would have struggled to without giving up proximity to the reader. But it was really fun to read into the parallels.