Book Update: Farewell Hobbis, Hello Creepy Kid stories

Well, as I said in the previous post I was having trouble really getting into the Lord of the Rings trilogy so, being that it was a library book, I gave up on it for a while and started a new quest.  For some reason, John Saul books have always been a quick easy read for me, and I get the feeling they probably are for a lot of other people, too.  This is not to say that they aren't good, but they seem to go by so much faster than Stephen King books.  They're not really formulaic in the way they're put together with the exception of the fact that the protagonists in most of his books are between age 14-21 or so.  At least that's true of those that I've read so far which include:

Black Creek Crossing
In the Dark of the Night
Faces of Fear
Perfect Nightmare
The Devil's Labyrinth

And at the moment I'm working simultaneously on House of Reckoning and The Manhattan Hunt Club.  I can't decide which I want to read first.  House of Reckoning is moving along at the pace I'm used to with Saul's books, but The Manhattan Hunt Club seems to be a bit slower going.  Does it use bigger words that I can't understand?  I don't think it does, but according to reviews it seems like more people like The Manhattan Hunt Club than House of Reckoning.  Hopefully within the next week or so I'll be able to decide for myself which I like better.  Of all the Saul books I've read so far, I think In the Dark of the Night and The Devil's Labyrinth are tied for my favorite.  I do have some of his older books like Creature and Comes the Blind Fury in battered paperback sitting on my shelf, waiting for me to read them.  Maybe I'll like old-school Saul a lot better than the new ez-read stuff.  Who knows?  For now I'm going to keep working on Manhattan and then reward myself with easy-breezy-Reckoning.  And THEN maybe I can finally finish King's IT.