Yes, I completely agree with this. It's one of King's better efforts and I'm so pleased he owed his publishers one more book as a severance deal, otherwise we might never have seen it.
It's a powerful novel. Even without the worst horror of revivification, it's an incredibly atmospheric read simply by virtue of the landscape and the 'frontier narrative' genre. The idea of having woods stretching for hundreds of miles - ie right up from the Northern US into Canada - into which a person could easily wander and never find their way out, is a very alien idea to us here on our tiny, densely populated British isles. And of course the woods are full of predators we'd never meet in the UK - bears and lynx - and they are also full of terrifying stories that are both local and alien to northern US culture.
The backstory of the Mi'kmaq first nation people trying to reclaim the lands - this is mentioned in the book - was true (in the end they did get them back). Then was the material from the Algonquians - the Wendigo legend they created to cover up the darkest extremities of human behaviour - this being the cannibalism they might have had to resort to during the long, hard, Maine/Nova Scotia winters.
It's those narratives - and lives built on secrets: both sexual and the idea of men 'playing God' - that lie at the heart of this story. This is one reason why the film was so ineffective: the Wendigo/First Nation element was completely left out. This loses some of the cross-cultural enigma, the oldest legends of the region, and the actual reason why a patch of land exists somewhere out there in the woods that can apparently bring the dead back to life and corrupt seemingly decent men into perpetuating the cycle, despite the anguish and trauma this causes them. Without this centre to the narrative, you also lose the nuance of why Louis (and Jud, for that matter) are so susceptible to the power of this evil in the first place.
A 'remake' has come out recently but I haven't seen this. The whole story is chilling, and having become a parent since first reading/watching this I find it an even more difficult read. To King, this was a 'what if?' story - what happens if your worst fears as a parent come true? Nowadays I just don't want to go there.