Stephen King thinks the book is terrific. Then, at the end of Whistle, in the Acknowledgements, Barclay admits that King reviewed a first draft of the book.

This pisses me off. All those big-name authors are incestuous, knowing each other, swapping personal emails, chitchatting around the globe with the peers electronically and on the phone. They say a book is great whether it is or not. In the case of Whistle, the book doesn’t start getting good until page 310. The rest of the book is mundane dreck.

6 stars out of 10 — 5 stars for the first clump of the book.

The book is about a man named Nabler who is an inhuman purveyor of death and destruction via his specially made toy trains. In real life, Barclay the author is an aficionado of toy trains and has at least one set up in his suburban Toronto home. That’s another thing that pisses me off. Barclay always writes his stories set in the U.S. What about Ontario, mo’fo? Huh? What about Burlington or Oakville, whichever luxe burb you live in? How about writing ONE story set there?

Oh well. Maybe I missed it. Maybe he wrote something set in Canada. There is a reference to the Ontario Northlands rail system in the book, and to the near-disaster of a train derailment near Toronto around the turn of the millennium. So he’s name-dropping his home province — a bit.

The book has a lack of focus. Its main character is a woman named Blunt and she is the curse-word-swearing mother of a single boy, Charles. Charles discovers a train set in the shed behind their summer home. Blunt is a children’s book author and artist who has created “Pierce the Penguin” and feels bad that a boy jumped to his death following one of her book’s lead insinuations.

The conclusion of the book has Nabler trying to seduce Blunt into taking his place as the new purveyor of destruction, using books instead of toy trains. Is it a good book? Like I say, it gets pretty good toward the end. The end is 8.5 stars out of 10. But there’s a lot of boring-ass shit going down in Lucknow, the town where Nabler has set up his Choo-Choo train shop. And it doesn’t help that the main character is an unsympathetic one.

Linwood Barclay is better than, say, John Grisham at drawing characters. But Stephen King (at least early Stephen King) crushes him in this department. The cops King draws — such as the main character in Needful Things, a King book that seems partly the inspiration for Whistle — are real people, and they move on the page, even when the book is bloated and half-ass, as Needful Things is. The notion of an evil wizard recruiting a goodhearted simp to join him recalls another Stephen King work, the made-for-TV Storm of the Century, where the devil gets a boy of his own to raise to replace him. I still recall the father seeing his son and the old devil limping along, and the boy turns and snarls at his father. Good scene in an otherwise shitty telenovel.

Linwood Barclay started out his novelist’s career writing light-hearted cop capers that went nowhere commercially. His smart move came when he started writing high-drama, serious, suspense novels about ordinary people under great pressure from mysterious but real forces. Books like I Will Ruin You explored this genre, but Barclay seems to be drifting toward supernatural horror, taking King’s place at the periphery. Maybe he’ll succeed, but I think Linwood lacks the humanity to successfully humanize his books the way early King did. We’ll see.