An enjoyable book but certainly not one of his best. King's love-in with the gypsy community got a little tedious after a while. ( )

Mr. King has done a lot better. Pass. ( )

It's a painfully simple concept for a story: overweight man runs down gypsy, man's judge friend gets him off, gypsy's father curses man, man begins to lose weight at a horrifying rate, man hunts down gypsy's father to get curse removed. Considering all the stuff up to and including the man getting cursed happens before the book even begins, there is definitely not enough story here to fill 300 pages. It all feels like padding - the altercation with the doctor, the stories of the judge and police chief, even the lengthy bit of tracking down the gypsy caravan. It would have been much better as a short story. I hear the movie is good, which makes sense - this is something that could easily be condensed into a 90-minute film without losing anything. (Though I hear the ending is different, which is a shame since that was one of the few parts of the book that didn't drag on endlessly.) ( )

I think this is the only Stephen King book I have read that I did not like. ( )

This is the book that exposed Richard Bachman as Stephen King's pseudonym, and it's easy to see why, as the style is much closer to King than to the more speculative Bachman. It's a pretty weak book, which is why I suspected King published it under the Bachman name. ( )