I have never been much of a Stephen King enthusiast, although I have read a fair amount of his work for professional reasons over the years. There was always a new novel to review, a movie made from one of the books, a television adaptation, some occasion that required going back to the source. I have never disliked his work and admire his work ethic and what I perceive as his baseline decency, but his subject matter — vampires, haunted houses and hotels, possessed machinery, supernatural children, ancient evils waiting under small towns — is not generally what I would choose to read about on my own dime. This might amount to a failure of imagination on my part, though I don’t think so. Readers have affinities. King’s obsessions have simply not usually been mine.