Stop me if you think that you’ve heard this one before. In this story from Stephen King, a psychic child with a bullying father is drawn to a sprawling old building, built by the rich and thrumming with undying evil. The building needs the child’s psychic energy to fully unleash its horrors, but a kindly adult psychic stands in the way. No, it’s not The Shining — it’s Rose Red, the 2002 ABC miniseries currently burning up the Hulu charts. But hey, if it ain’t broke, am I right?

Fans of Uncle Stevie (I’m certainly raising my hand) will recognize many of the beloved horror maestro’s signature touches in this story of a professor determined to prove the existence of psychic phenomena by leading a gaggle of seers and mediums to an infamous haunted house. The recurring power of evil, the idea that some places are just bad, the psychic child, the psychic guardian, the sins of America’s robber-baron past, Cliff Clavin-esque factoids about the paranormal, and of course the promise of seeing something scary when you see the words “Stephen King’s” before the title of a movie or show — it’s all there. But is the whole greater than the sum of its nostalgically familiar parts? Let’s head inside that haunted house and find out!

I took a look at the first episode of Rose Red, the currently improbably popular 2002 Stephen King/ABC miniseries, for Decider.

Maybe that’s the single biggest problem with this version of The Stand: It pulled all its punches. There was really no internal struggle going on among any of the characters other than Harold and Nadine—Larry didn’t repeatedly second-guess his own habitual shittiness, for example, nor did Lloyd Henreid realize he’d sold his soul to the devil, nor did the Trashcan Man struggle to reconcile his pyromania with his desire to fit into Vegas society and do right by Flagg, the man who elevated him from captivity to the height of power. Vegas itself is pure fantasy and spectacle; it never makes the vital point that people willing to serve a sadistic authoritarian look and sound like normal people more often than not. The demands of Mother Abigail’s very Old Testament God are never properly struggled with either; the idea that the forces of Good can be cold and uncompromising in their Goodness never gets communicated. The freaking plague itself was an afterthought!

I reviewed the series finale of The Stand for Decider. What a disappointment.

Now consider the Trashcan Man. Arguably the series’ single biggest misfire from a character standpoint, he has no arc or growth or interesting personal journey to speak of. When he first appears in the series, he’s a gibbering crazy man with a penchant for firestarting. When he next appears, he’s retrieving a nuclear warhead, at the express orders of Randall Flagg. And for his final appearance, he delivers the bomb, as requested; the only hiccup is that he brings it to the wrong place, and considering his overall level of sanity it would have been a minor miracle if he hadn’t brought it to the wrong place.

If you’ll permit one last contrast with the novel, this is a case in which nearly every choice made by the show was the wrong one. In the book, Trash is crazy, yes, but he’s capable of coherent speech, coherent thought, and actual attachment to other human beings. He feels friendship with the people he gets to know under Flagg’s command in addition to puppylike devotion to the Dark Man. But his compulsive pyromania gets the better of him after someone unthinkingly ribs him about his fiery habits, and he winds up killing several men and destroying much of Flagg’s nascent air force before fleeing. Desperate to make amends, he does the only thing he feels is big enough to make up for his crime: He retrieves a nuke all on his own, without Flagg’s orders to do so, and delivers it to the Dark Man’s doorstep as an offering of penance. It’s a whole lot more complex, interesting, and ultimately human than just hooting and hollering his way from Point A to Point B to Point C the way he does in the show.

(In a way, Trashcan Man is as underdeveloped as Mother Abigail. In her case, we’re never really made to understand what’s so magnetic about her, or how close a relationship with God she really has. She’s just kind of…there, and it’s like the good-guy characters coalesce around a random old woman, not the Voice of the Almighty on Earth. Similarly, Trash is just a firebug, not the complicated individual with a near-supernatural expertise in weapons, incendiaries, and explosives that he is in the novel.)

I reviewed the penultimate episode of The Stand, in which many of its overall weaknesses are made manifest, for Decider.

The smartest thing this adaptation of The Stand has done yet is to stand aside. The convoluted, shifting timeframes, the need to balance the apocalypse with its aftermath—that’s all gone now. In its place is a very, very straightforward story: The man in black lives in the desert, and four people (and one dog) are walking to meet him.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Stand, which I pretty much liked, for Decider.

I hate to do this, but I hope you’ll permit a book-to-TV comparison just this once. In Stephen King’s novel, this traumatized pyromaniac, née Donald Merwin Elbert, is a central figure, one of the core characters we follow across the country in the aftermath of the plague. If Lloyd Henried is the Stu Redman of Las Vegas, the main man in the new society Randall Flagg has founded just as Stu is the head honcho of Mother Abigail’s, Trashcan Man is roughly equivalent to Nick Andros, an outcast from society allegedly destined for a key role in the new world, or Tom Cullen, a man whose mental disabilities allow him more unfettered contact with forces beyond our understanding. (That element of Tom’s personality appears to have been dropped by the show.)

Yet for some reason, instead of following Trash from the outset, The Stand‘s 2020-2021 iteration just sort of plops him down at the start of the sixth episode out of nine episodes total. We’ve barely gotten a glimpse of him blowing up oil tanks somewhere and receiving a psychic communiqué from Flagg when bam, the next thing you know he’s already in Vegas, getting the lay of the land from Lloyd and receiving the blessing of the Dark Man himself. Why didn’t the show sprinkle Trashcan Man scenes throughout the season, starting no later than episode two or three? I legitimately have no idea. Was it simply to shield us from Ezra Miller’s performance in the role—a high-pitched, gibbering caricature of a neurodivergent person? Again, I got nothing, man. I enjoyed the creepy Willy-Wonka-tunnel evil psychedelic montage he envisions when Flagg psychically contacts him, and I appreciate that he alone out of everyone in Vegas seems to recognize that Flagg is effectively a demigod worthy of worship, but otherwise nearly every decision involving this character is baffling to me right now.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Stand for Decider.

It’s as if on the Vegas Strip did Randall Flagg a stately pleasure dome decree. People in fetish gear fuck freely in public. Everyone’s drunk, and some are doing blow right out the open. It’s a bacchanalia—and it’s being staged around a gladiatorial pit where slaves are made to fight each other with chainsaws.

In other words, it’s the nightmare scenario of people who used to want parental advisory stickers on Marilyn Manson records. Is it a plausible setup for a dystopian society run by a demon in denim? I’m not so sure. Where did he find all the hardbodied models, male and female, who are gyrating and pole-dancing and having sex out there? Does no one find the blend of hedonism and ultraviolence a little much? Could a new society really coalesce around that particular kernel?

The funny thing, and I use funny very loosely here, is that we’ve scene what an American dystopia would look like just last week. And while there is a certain cathartic venting of violent desires, it’s against perceived enemies to the desired order of things, not randos dumped into a thunderdome scenario while onlookers hump each other. It seems to me that the pitch Randall Flagg made to Lloyd Henried in prison—don’t you want the chance to get even with the kind of people who did this to you?—is a much more compelling and plausible way to structure New Vegas. Everyone there is attracted to the darkness Flagg embodies, so promise them the chance to extinguish the light (specifically in Boulder)! Turning the place into a sex club with a death-match arena in the middle just rings hollow. It’s a Hollywood idea of what fascism looks like.

I reviewed this week’s less-than-promising episode of The Stand for Decider.

I get the feeling that this iteration of The Stand is meant to focus on the whole life-in-the-aftermath aspect of the story, to the near-exclusion of the pandemic, and relegating the dark vs. light conflict—the titular stand!—to second place, at least for now. But it’s running out of road for this approach. Sooner or later, and probably sooner than later, it’s going to come down to Mother Abigail and her crew against Randall Flagg and his own. (A crew we simply have not seen at all yet, aside from that one episode when he rescued Lloyd Henried from prison.) I think the tone it’s struck for the material on which it’s concentrating its efforts is appropriately elegiac and surprisingly gentle. But if you’re gonna knock the house down again, it pays to have sturdily built it, and that I’m not sure the show has done at all.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Stand for Decider.

It is kind of a feat, when you think about it: an audience in 2020 not knowing what’s going to happen in The Stand. This unusual, mix-and-match adaptation of one of the best-known horror novels in the English language continues to unfold in non-linear fashion, making familiar characters and plot points seem strange and unexpected. Sometimes this is very effective, like how it allows Nick-the-outsider and Nick-the-high-priest-of-Mother-Abigail to be directly contrasted with one another in the episode where we get to know him in the first place. Sometimes it doesn’t work as well, like how it races through the creation of the “committee” established by the survivors to govern Boulder; here it’s all the work of Mother Abigail, who picks them to be her emissaries first and a governing body second (if at all).

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Stand for Decider.

Overall, this episode functions less as a successor to the premiere and more as a part two. Showrunners Josh Boone and Benjamin Cavell are still introducing characters, weaving their pasts and presents together in that same dreamy way—a million miles from Stephen King’s relentless forward pace at this same stage in the story in the book version. In effect, we’re just seeing pieces of the puzzle at this point, and waiting for the final picture to take shape. Until then, it’s hard to judge the show as a success or failure, though the game cast, impactful score, and occasional flash of post-apocalyptic imagery (like the George Washington Bridge covered from one end to the other by stalled cars filled with dead passengers) are keeping my interest. It’s kind of like we’re in the early stages of the superflu, before it’s had a chance to really take off. We’ll see what kind of world we’re inhabiting when we reach the other side.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Stand for Decider.

So that’s what The Stand 2020 is. I can tell you what it isn’t, though: It isn’t anything like Stephen King. I mean, the characters are all there, sure, and the story beats too, albeit shuffled; what I’m talking about is (paraphrasing Barton Fink here) That Stephen King Feeling. King, as he himself has written about extensively in his treatise on horror Danse Macabre, nearly always establishes a situation-normal status quo, then introduces some world-ending catastrophe or soul-eating demon-thing that overturns the whole Apollonian apple cart. You have to see little George Denbrough make his toy boat, kiss his big brother goodbye, and head out into the rain in his yellow slicker before you can meet Pennywise the Dancing Clown, you know? It’s the most King-feeling thing in all his work: You set up the house of cards, and then you knock it down.

In the book version of The Stand, the house of cards was the entirety of human society—specifically the American subsection thereof—and the knocking down was performed by Captain Trips. And boy, was it ever! For my money there’s no more thrilling section in all the King books I’ve read than the opening quarter or so of The Stand, where we meet all our main characters as civilization stumbles, crumbles, and completely collapses around them. Hell, they don’t even need to be main characters at all: There’s a chapter that simply follows the virus across the country from one random person to the next, establishing the virus as history’s most lethal chain letter, that’s just gleefully dark and frightening. It’s as good as King gets.

And The Stand’s 2020 TV adaptation will not be going there at all, it seems. It is, to put it mildly, a bold choice. And you know what? I like bold choices where adapting Stephen King is concerned! The most slavish recreations of his work tend to be the most boring; even in a case like the recent Hulu series Castle Rock, which was not a straight adaptation at all but an attempt to do for King’s oeuvre what Noah Hawley’s Fargo did with the Coen Brothers’ filmography, the effort to nail all those little King-isms came at the cost of doing anything actually memorable, let alone frightening. (I’m old school in that I think horror TV shows are supposed to be scary. Go figure!) Compare and contrast with Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining: It’s very much Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, not Stephen King’s, and it just so happens to be one of the greatest movies ever made; King, of course, despises it.

So no, a lack of fidelity isn’t going to get on my nerves per se. It never does! So I’m not interested in comparing chapter and verse, describing what the series got “right” and “wrong” about the details or even the broad strokes. In the end, it’s all in the execution. And in this early going at least, the execution is intriguing enough to keep me watching. The fading between times and places, the freeform mixture of “now” and “then,” gives the show the feel of a dream, or a nightmare (several of which punctuate the action, after all). The lush, traditional score (no John Carpenter knockoffs here) by Nathaniel Walcott and Mike Mogis contributes beautifully to that dreamy feeling. Will it last? Or, in the absence of the harrowing rise of the superflu plague, will the flashback/flashforward device wear out its welcome before the real action kicks in? These are open questions, but compared to “Why the hell am I watching this?”, they’re questions I don’t mind asking at all.

I’m covering The Stand for Decider, starting with my review of the premiere. It’s bold, I’ll give it that!

Take a pandemic. Add the paranormal. Make it a uniquely American story of survival horror. The result: “The Stand,” Stephen King’s epic post-apocalyptic novel from 1978, a new mini-series adaptation of which debuted Thursday on CBS All Access.‘The Stand’ Review: Stephen King’s Pandemic Story Hits TV AgainDec. 16, 2020

Conceived in the pre-Covid era, the show has taken on new resonance since, telling the story of a weaponized virus that wipes out 99 percent of the population. But that’s only the beginning. The real battle happens afterward as supernatural forces of darkness and light — embodied by the demonic dictator Randall Flagg (Alexander Skarsgard) and the holy woman Mother Abagail (Whoopi Goldberg) — duel for the souls of the plague’s survivors.

Since the original novel’s original release, King’s saga has entered the pop-culture consciousness in many different incarnations, including an expanded edition of the book and an earlier mini-series adaptation. In anticipation of the show’s arrival, we’re tracing the story from its point of origin to its latest mutation.

I wrote about the many inspirations and iterations of Stephen King’s The Stand for the New York Times.

When I think about Stephen King’s The Stand, which I have done with some frequency since I first read it in 1994, there’s one passage that always leaps out at me. It’s a description of the novel’s villain, Randall Flagg, a bad guy with such a magnetic presence that King would reuse him across nearly a dozen other books and stories in various guises. In The Stand he’s effectively the Anti-Christ, an ancient, grinning, denim-clad psychopath with magical powers. With little or no knowledge of who and what he really was, Flagg wove in and out of 20th Century America’s violent fringe movements — he was a member of the group that kidnapped and brainwashed Patti Hearst, for example — before emerging to lead a totalitarian nation-state based in Las Vegas (!) after a weaponized flu virus wipes out over 99 percent of the world’s population.

It’s during this phase of his life, which we experience in the pages of The Stand, that Flagg takes unto him his bride, a schoolteacher named Nadine Cross, who for reasons unclear (to her, him, and the reader) had been destined all her life to wind up in his clutches. During the grotesque and violent consummation of their relationship, his human shape melts away, revealing the demon beneath. This shatters Nadine’s sanity, but it also provides her with piercingly clear vision of this supposedly all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful entity’s chief limitation: He’s a moron.

…and now it was the shaggy face of a demon lolling just above her face, a demon with glaring yellow lamps for eyes, windows into a hell never even considered, and still there was that awful good humor in them, eyes that had watched down the crooked alleys of a thousand tenebrous night towns; those eyes were glaring and glinting and finally stupid.

Forgive me for the oft-repeated comparison I am about to make — I am but a writer of thinkpieces, and such is our lot — but does that sound like anyone you know?

I wrote about Stephen King’s The Stand and Our Present Moment for the Outline.

Boardwalk Empire, Terence Winter’s underrated Prohibition Era gangster drama, featured many real-world figures of underworld renown, though mostly at ages much younger than the ones at which they’d become famous. They’d be mixed in with entirely fictional characters, or heavily fictionalized analogues of actual people. Often you didn’t realize until halfway through a scene that, oh my god, that’s Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel and Al Capone all hanging out together. The resulting frisson was a thrill.

In his lamentable mega-series The Dark Tower, Stephen King officially introduced the concept of ka-tet, a group of people drawn together by the benevolent force that partially orders the universe for a specific purpose. I say “officially” because if you’ve read his work you know that this is a recurring feature everywhere from It to The Stand. Often the characters themselves recognize that something has happened when they’re all finally assembled together—that the final piece of a puzzle they didn’t even know they were solving has slipped into place, that the whole of them is somehow greater than the sum of its parts, that when faced with other people there’s a palpable sense of belonging and un-belonging. Great deeds can be done in ka-tet.

Here you see Emmett, Red Webster, Frank Tilghman, and Pete Strodenmire, together for the first time. Until now Emmett had never been seen off his ranch, and Strodenmire had only been seen one time before in total. They’re watching Brad Wesley walk away, having proclaimed “This is my town—don’t you forget it.” Red is about to bust Strodenmire’s balls by repeating what Strodenmire said to him after his auto parts store was destroyed: “You got insurance, don’t you?” Tilghman is, as always, very peculiar.

Yet something looks right here, doesn’t it? Something about this configuration of four weird old men staring into the middle distance rings true. When ka-tet is formed, how can any JC Penney magnate hope to stand against it?

Brad Wesley’s pants are a mess. Look at those wrinkled-ass trousers. Like an elephant’s trunk, twice, in khaki. This is his apotheosis right here, his truest moment of pure power, the point at which instead of blowing up buildings in the middle of the night with no one looking he feels able to order his man to run over a Ford dealership in a monster truck in broad daylight with a crowd of like two hundred witnesses watching. Dalton’s there, the owner of the Ford dealership is there, Wade Garrett is there, his own ex-wife Elizabeth is there, and guess what, the man don’t give a fuck, this is his town, don’t you forget it, but apparently the dry cleaners is not included. Those pants are the visual equivalent of him crowing about having the raw kingmaking power to open a JC Penney. What the hell was Ben Gazzara doing to wrinkle his pants up like that? Did no one from wardrobe intervene? Did they think it made for a nice feet-of-clay visual shorthand and just let it slide? Jimmy, couldn’t Jimmy have said something? Ketchum, a man who looks like he was born starched, what about him? Will no one tell Brad Wesley his pants are embarrassingly wrinkled? Is this what it feels like to be truly alone, even with the world at your feet? Standing in front of your great triumph over your enemies and looking like a goddamned fool and you have no friends to say so? What? Is up? With the pants?

The Stand is Stephen King’s best book, I decided about three decades into my career of reading and re-reading Stephen King books. One of the many reasons I think this involves a fellow name of Starkey. Starkey’s a military guy, brass, way up on the totem pole but it’s a totem pole they keep hidden in the dark at all times. He was in charge of the bioweapons project that had a little hiccup and started to destroy the human race, and so he’s in charge trying to halt that destruction. He’s also in charge of trying to cover it up, first under the pretext that it will buy them a few extra days to find a vaccine or a cure before panic sets in, and then mostly out of sheer force of American military habit.

The thing about Starkey is that as time goes by and it becomes increasingly clear he won’t be earning any medals for this one, to say the least, he grows fixated on the security monitors that show him the inside of the facility where Captain Trips emerged and started drowning everyone in their own snot while their brains boiled. At first this happened much faster than it does later, for reasons that I don’t think the book ever quite makes clear, and even if it did the idea of a flu virus that kills in under a minute the same way a regular flu virus would kill over the course of several days is science-fictional even for The Stand.

Be that as it may. The important thing for Starkey, less important than other things really but increasingly important to him as the bodies pile up outside that’s for sure, is that one of the people in that facility died in the cafeteria, just dropped dead at his seat, and when he did his face fell right into his bowl of soup. The soup starts congealing and getting really disgusting, which is the case with everything else that used to be warm and made of organic material down there, but the soup and the face in the soup are what start to bother Starkey, and bother him bad.

It’s the indignity of it, you see. This fellow in the lab, for all anyone knows his face will remain in that bowl of awful soup for…well, for as long as it takes for the site to be deemed sterile enough to enter at first, and then, when it becomes clear no one will be left alive to enter it, for all eternity. Starkey just stares and stares at this guy with his face in the soup. Did I mention Starkey also gave the order to have secret agents in Russia and China open vials of the flu without ever telling them what they were doing, just to make sure that when America dies she takes the rest of the world with her? Yeah, but anyway the soup. It’s just not right, a man dying like that, like a slob, like a joke. Something must be done.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking a lot about Brad Wesley’s pants. They’re wrinkled, is the problem. See? See? See?

Which leaves us to wonder: What, exactly, was the point?

It’s not just that you can find more compelling (and bewildering) horror-tinged alternate-reality dramas without breaking a sweat, from Lost to Twin Peaks to The Leftovers. It’s not even that the ending cribs so hard from The Shining (and, from non-King country, The Babadook) that you feel déjà vu. It’s that Castle Rock undermined its own big twist — the introduction of the whole parallel-world concept and the idea that the Kid might be a hero rather than a monster — almost immediately after introducing it.

As a drama, the show boasted intelligent, understated performances from Holland, Skarsgård, Spacek, Melanie Lynskey, Scott Glenn and more. As a Stephen King riff, it understood and updated his concept of everyday American evil better than any adaptation of his work in recent memory. But as a horror story of its own, the series made promises then all but went out of its way to avoid delivering in the end. A finale that seemed destined for dark magic was just a bait and switch. The show has been renewed and a new tale will be told. Let’s hope our next visit to this terrible Maine town lives up to its potential.

I reviewed the final episode of Castle Rock’s first season/storyline for Rolling Stone. The bottom line is that it never really got scary for more than a moment or two, and it doesn’t amount to much as a head-scratcher either. The acting is there, and the attention to American evil too, and both were handled with smarts and restraint, but it was pretty much exactly the sum of its parts.

Have you guys seen Henry Deaver around? You know — tall skinny guy, floppy hair, big Gollum eyes, white as the Swedish snow? The renowned Alzheimer’s researcher who fled Castle Rock when his mother escaped his abusive preacher father? The guy who found a little boy locked in a cage in his old man’s basement, where the kid has apparently lived without aging for nearly three decades? The one who realizes that this little boy’s name is also Henry Deaver?

You have now.

Titled “Henry Deaver” after not one but two of its main characters, the penultimate episode of Castle Rock‘s first season takes the biggest storyline swerve the show has seen yet. It relocates us to a different version of the town, one that’s still marked by tragedies like helicopter crashes and schoolbus accidents but noticeably healthier and wealthier overall. (Best gentrification joke: That awful dive bar is now a “gastropub.”) Here, Molly Strand isn’t a pill-popping real-estate agent, but a member of the city council who’s got serious clout with folks like the police department — and their top cop, Dennis Zalewski.

Most importantly, Castle Rock 2.0 is the hometown of Henry Deaver — not the African-American defense attorney played by Andre Holland as an adult and Caleel Harris as a teen, but a white neurologist played by Bill Skarsgård, a.k.a. The Kid. You thought Lost had some wild timeline-shifting tricks up its sleeve? Hold Castle Rock‘s beer.

I wrote about episode nine of Castle Rock for Rolling Stone. As narrative sleight-of-hand, and as a showcase for the surprisingly wide range of Bill Skarsgård as an actor, it worked. As horror? Not really, and that’s the show’s biggest problem.

Saying this episode continues the show’s hot streak isn’t telling the whole story. It doesn’t rely on the introduction of world-building sci-fi/fantasy concepts like “The Schisma” and “The Filter,” nor is it carried on the back of an Academy Award winner given an entire hour to herself. It simply expresses the horror of sublimated violence and the ability of the supernatural to unleash it — the stuff that drives so much of the Master’s work — in its own voice.

If you’ve ever watched a show like Boardwalk Empire or The Americans, you might recognize the vibe. Like the Prohibition-era mob in the former and Cold War espionage in the latter, the particular strain of horror on display here is the mannequin that writer Mark Lafferty and director Ana Lily Amirpour (of the modern horror classic A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night), as well as showrunners Dustin Thomason and Sam Shaw, can position into new shapes of their own devising.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Castle Rock for Rolling Stone. It was my favorite to date.

The most striking thing about the performance is, well, that it isn’t that striking at all. Eschewing straight-up tear-down-the-sky “tour-de-force” emoting, the veteran actor keeps Ruth’s reactions well within the range of normal human experience. When she’s sad, she cries rather than wails. When she’s angry, she yells rather than screams. When she’s frightened, she’s furtive and trembling rather than panicked and flailing.

It’s a rewarding approach. By rooting her performance in recognizable everyday reactions and emotions, Spacek avoids playing Ruth’s dementia as a source of horror itself. What’s happening to her brain isn’t treated as somehow creepy or gross, the way mental illness often comes across in projects like these. She is still a “normal” person, just one who’s no longer in control of how her mind processes space and time. Sure, it’s a frightening condition to suffer from. But both series co-creator Sam Shaw’s writing and the acting emphasize that it’s mainly emotionally exhausting.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Castle Rock for Rolling Stone. It’s a straight-up showcase for Sissy Spacek that she underplays beautifully. I remain at arm’s length from the show as a whole for reasons I get into later in the review, but across the board the performances are thoughtful and quiet.

Castle Rock has just leveled up.

That’s the big takeaway from this week’s episode (“Filter”). From the start, the show had a baseline level of quality — talented cast, understated writing, a keen eye for everyday American evil and a willingness to aim for “eerie” rather than “over the top” — that’s a step up from most Stephen King adaptations (and also several prestige dramas in their shaky early episodes). Yet it’s never quite gelled into anything more transcendent than the sum of its competent parts. This installment was the first time it felt like you could see the series as something closer to a cohesive whole.

I reviewed this week’s Castle Rock for Rolling Stone. It’s getting there.

Castle Rock is burning. Not just because of the wildfires raging across the hills that surround the town, either, although their hazy orange glow, reflected in the skies above, gives this new episode — “Harvest” — an appropriately infernal vibe. Consider the opening flashback, in which Henry Deaver seeks treatment for the unexplained ringing in his ears that’s plagued him on and off since he was a teenager. “I guess everyone thinks they grew up in the worst place in the world, huh?” the doc asks with a smile. In the lawyer’s case, of course, the answer is a resounding yes. But the implication, via a smart script from Lila Byock, the dreamy direction of Andrew Bernstein and the inclusion of real-life, ripped-from-the-headlines horror that’s become part of this show’s dramatic schematic, is clear: Everyone did grow up in the worst place in the world. The world is not a nice place to grow up in at all.

I reviewed episode five of Castle Rock for Rolling Stone. There’s a lot I think is admirable about this show—it handles the Everyday All-American Evil that’s King’s specialty in a way that feels current and urgent rather than nostalgic and corny, and the cast of fine actors is taking the material seriously. But in the end, it comes down to what kind of villain the Skarsgård character is, doesn’t it? And we don’t know that yet.