I am only about 100 pages in, so please box spoilers everyone! Enjoying it so far.
Finished yesterday, reading outside on another fine late Summer afternoon. A good tale. 600+ pages, but it felt a lot shorter than that (I could have finished it days ago, but saved it for reading the last third or so of it this weekend). I kind of felt like the ending was sort of abrupt, actually. But maybe because I was enjoying it and didn’t want it to end.
Very much in the mold of Joseph Campbell’s “The Hero’s Journey”, but with Stephen King’s particular spin on it. for those of you who are unfamiliar with that, it’s basically (very vague, generalized spoiler here for those who haven’t yet read the book) a similar journey as that taken by Luke Skywalker in the original Star Wars (no, I’m not going to call it “Episode 4: A New Hope”): seemingly ordinary person is thrust into extraordinary and dangerous circumstances, is forced to become a reluctant hero, rises to the challenge and succeeds, and is forever changed by the experience.
Did the illustration on page 431 look familiar to anyone? 
I see where you’re going with that…it didn’t occur to me while reading the book, but I can see that Mr. King, and perhaps also the illustrator, may very well have had a real-life inspiration in creating the character of Elden / Flight Killer. Oddly small tentacles for such a large, corpulent creature 
Coincidentally, his novel The Dark Half is 431 pages long.
I finished already but found that I was reading with a lot of simmering apprehension because I have an old dog too and those parts of the story hit a little too close to home. I was very worried that Radar was going to get an Oy moment.
That’s what has been keeping me from reading it. Dogs don’t fare well in the SK-verse.
Well, I can tell you whether or not it is safe to read it: No harm comes to the dog during the story, although presumably it does not live forever.
Thanks! In that case, I’ll give it a go.
It’s an astonshingly wholesome story overall, I can’t really think of any content warnings I’d give out–not to anyone who’s read Stephen King especially.
There are illustrations? I got the book on Audible and didn’t know there were pictures. Now I’ll have to go to the bookstore and look at them.
If you like your books read to you, the narrator Audible used is really good. I listened to the book while working on a crochet project and he really brought the story to life.
Listening was a bit hard for me as I lost my 15-year-old Lab, Banjo, three weeks ago. I’d go through a lot to get him back, but not what Charlie went through.