Listened to this via the Libby app. It's one of the newer Stephen King novels, published in 2021. I can't say how it compares to other Stephen King books because this is the first one I read, I think.
The story is captivating—like any good thriller1—and the narrator (Seth Numrich) is fantastic. This is very good material to listen to while working in the garden! In contrast, the book I'm listening to now—George Saunders' Liberation Day—is not. I wonder if fiction could roughly be divided into books that leave some extra mindspace for simple tasks like cooking, cleaning and garden work, versus books that require one's undivided attention.
One small thing is that while the title's "later" was a nice motif (as in, "I'd learn this later"), the whole thing ended up feeling like kind of a prequel to something else. It left me wishing that "later" meant later-er than it turned out to be.
Another thing is that I still don't know is whether Stephen King is pronounced "ste-fen" or like "Steven" (I've always thought "ste-fen", but the audiobook said it like "Steven").
Footnotes
"This is a horror story", warns the book. As someone very sensitive to horror (I saw The Shining three or four times and I still cover my eyes+fall for the jump scares) I can promise that this is fine. ↩