I read Stephen King, religiously, throughout my teens (including what he wrote using his pen name, Richard Bachman) so quite familiar with his dark delights.
This is similarly delicious stuff, Guy, your lengthening shadows--menace of scarecrow growing as sun sets--visuals worthy of Tim Burton, every word in place.
I'm not too fond or overly familiar with his horror (very active imagination, you should ask me some time to tell you of me and the terrors of the dark in my youth), but I can tell you that I've found the first 3 books in particular of The Dark Tower so much better than everything else of his I've read. Except maybe his autobiographical storytelling in On Writing that often had me howling in laughter. Makes you wonder why he didn't write more humor.
And thank you kindly, Yahia. I like painting pictures with poetry. I feel like painting a picture that evokes feelings is the one thing poetry does better than any other form of writing, so hearing it worked on your end? Very nice to hear.
And Tim Burton? That's someone whose work I've consumed most of, and is exactly the sort of accolade you'd like to go along with this sort of piece. Though this is darker, with no humorous undertone, heh.
The dark tower series is so much better than his other work. It does have nods to his other stories but it is so much more polished in tone and narrative. And the characters are ones to love and cherish, forget anything you know about him when you read it it is a class in it's own.