Stephen King has disappointed me.

Actually that word is too strong.

It implies that I disliked in some way King’s latest novel, “Holly.”

This is not the case.

King is, I think, congenitally incapable of crafting a story which is not so compelling that it pulls me effortlessly through the pages and chapters, leaving me, as I read the final line, feeling bereft.

“Holly,” in fact, is for me one of his finer tales of the past decade or so.

(Although he turned 76 on Sept. 21, King remains as prolific as he is creative.)

What surprised me about his latest work — and what prompted me to type “disappointed” even though that description isn’t altogether appropriate — was the extent to which he incorporated his viewpoints about a particularly divisive topic.

The pandemic.

Much of “Holly” is set during 2021, so King could hardly have avoided mentioning COVID-19 lest he leave his readers wondering whether this was some alternative universe which the virus spared.

As a novelist whose stories typically are contemporary, he has similarly acknowledged other major events, such as the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and the major recession several years later.

I appreciate the references. They remind me that King, who published his first novel, “Carrie,” half a century ago, when I was barely past the toddler stage, has continued to enrich my life, and so many millions of others, for more than two generations.

But I don’t recall any previous novel in which King put so much emphasis on a subject peripheral to the plot, or expressed so clearly his feelings about it, as he does regarding the pandemic within the pages of “Holly.”

(He takes several swipes at Donald Trump and the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, too, but these are minor compared with his descriptions of the virus, its effects and the disparate attitudes of Americans toward it.)

The characters King obviously favors — including the novel’s titular protagonist, the private detective Holly Gibney — recognize how severe the illness can be, and they act accordingly.

They wear masks routinely.

They are, we learn multiple times, fully vaccinated (at least as fully as they could be in 2021).

And they lament the lives lost and which might have been saved — including Holly’s mother, who dismissed the pandemic as hysteria and paid dearly for her hubris.

It happens that I felt much the same about the pandemic during 2021.

Although I wasn’t particularly worried about myself — by then the data clearly showed that I wasn’t in a high-risk group — I understood that for some others the virus was considerably more dangerous.

So I wore a mask when it was appropriate or required.

I had both doses of the Moderna vaccine early in 2021, and a booster dose late in the year.

And though we’ve learned quite a lot more about the virus in the past two years — the limited efficacy of masks, for instance, and the unnecessarily extended closures of schools — King’s descriptions of characters’ actions, and attitudes, during 2021 seemed to me reasonable.

I just wish there weren’t so many.

The effects of this repetition were minor, to be sure. I doubt I would have enjoyed “Holly” noticeably more had King dropped most of the pandemic references.

Still and all, I was bothered slightly that the unpleasant reality of the virus played quite so prominent a role in a work of fiction, most particularly one from my favorite author.

For me, and I think for most people, reading fiction — and in particular the work of a master storyteller such as King — is recreation.

The phrase “reading for pleasure” is a cliché, but I think it nicely expresses the feeling I have when I’m so engrossed in a novel that an hour passes with no evidence but a slight pain in my neck.

And I derived a great deal of pleasure from the hours I spent reading “Holly.”

Yet the experience wasn’t quite the complete diversion from the unavoidable absurdities of daily life that I have come to cherish as perhaps King’s greatest gift.

Several times I paused, albeit briefly, and posed to myself some version of this question: “Was that passage, another denigration of a character who dismissed COVID-19 or cast aspersions on people who donned masks or bumped elbows rather than shaking hands, necessary? Did it propel this wonderful story along?”

My answer, in each case, was no.

I don’t recall having such thoughts while reading any other of King’s books — and the list, as anyone knows who has perused his bibliography, is long. Several of my bookshelves sag with his accumulated work, and my collection is nothing like complete.

I have read interviews with King about “Holly” in which he surmises that some readers, perhaps even longtime fans, will be offended by the book due to his descriptions of the pandemic and of the Trump era.

He addressed the matter in the author’s note to “Holly” as well.

I am not among those aggrieved fans that King anticipated.

I knew, to a general extent, his political predilections before reading “Holly.”

And yet this literary trip wasn’t quite like the dozens of others in why King has been my faithful and endlessly entertaining guide.

For the first time there were moments — minuscule, sure, but no less real for their brevity — when I felt that, in the midst of an always gratifying detour into a world which does not exist, I was suddenly jolted into a world which absolutely does, and which I was happy to ignore while I turned the pages.