God, I love a mystery box. TV shows built around the idea that there’s something going on, but the explanation is teased out over episodes – over seasons – before the resolution is offered. And everything in that show feeds into that central mystery, before being spat out, hopefully satisfying the viewers who’ve stuck with it.

Remember Lost? JJ Abrams does. It was partly his brainchild, after all; and it changed the landscape of television in what amounts to very JJ Abrams-shaped ways. Suddenly, for so many TV shows, the mystery box was everything. What’s in the box? Who knows! The mystery box has been a major part of some of the most intriguing TV shows of recent years, to varying degrees of success: from Fringe to Westworld to The Leftovers, the hand of Lost – of Abrams – has touched them all.

You know what else I love? Easter eggs. You know, when there’s a hint that the creator understands that you’re interacting with a text in some way, and they give you a nod at that; or a wink, that says, you’ve spotted a connection here! Clever old you. They’re fun little meta layers that fans of the properties love.

Stephen King does as well. His – frankly unimpeachable – career is full of Easter eggs. So many of his novels have shared universes and characters. If you’re one of his devoted fanbase – Constant Readers, we’re known as, a pet name that we lean into as hard as we can – then you’ll live for these moments. We’re reading 11/22/63, and suddenly, wham: some characters from It appear, just living their lives; old friends that we’re catching up with. Not to detract from the rest of the book, but that’s the most exhilarating moment in it. And while it’s not quite throwaway, it’s certainly not the book’s core.

And perhaps the biggest Easter egg in King’s back catalogue is Castle Rock. It’s a town in Maine, and bad stuff happens there. It’s the focal point of many of my favourite of his novels – The Dark Half and Needful Things, to name just two – and it’s like some weird hellmouth, an Eerie Indiana for real horror fans: a place where Very Bad Things (caps intended) happen, and Righteous People have to sort them out.

So, what happens when the Master of the Mystery Box meets the King of the Easter egg? Castle Rock, that’s what. A new show that’s defiantly set in King’s world, but not actually using his novels or stories. Instead, it’s channelling the tone, and – based on the few episodes available for review – seems to be set in a shared world where a lot of the stories from his books are in the narrative’s past.

The plot of the show is a very King-ish tale indeed. A few decades ago, this kid, Henry Matthew Deaver, mysteriously went missing on the day that his father mysteriously died. He mysteriously reappeared 11 days later in the middle of a frozen lake. Now, he’s a death row lawyer, and he’s called back to Castle Rock when a young man is mysteriously found in a secret cage in a prison after the prison warden mysteriously kills himself. The young man only says three words, and he says them pretty damn mysteriously – Henry Matthew Deaver.

Oh, and the warden killed himself because he says that God told him that the young man is the devil. Pretty standard stuff.

Now, that’s a hooky idea that I’d try whatever, regardless of the Stephen King and JJ Abrams associations. But you throw them in … and, well. The mystery box is stuffed full from minute one. Why did Henry Deaver go missing? How did his father die? How did he reappear, sans frostbite? Why did the warden kill himself? Who’s this boy in the hole? Did God speak to the warden? And if not God, who? Is the psychic woman actually psychic? So many questions. Some of them are answered, and some of them – in the first few episodes, at least – are not.

Then there are the Easter eggs. And let me tell you, for the King aficionado, this is a feast. The man who finds young Henry Deaver on the ice is a sheriff, and when I realised that he was Alan Pangborn – the sheriff who oversaw Castle Rock in the 1980s, who appeared in so many novels – I actually shouted his name out loud, as if this was some sort of game of Stephen King bingo.

The references don’t stop coming. They range from the subtle (the Mellow Tiger bar, which appeared in a scene in the aforementioned Needful Things) to the massively overt (checking that a deceased pet dog, now buried, has actually stayed dead – and as for the fact that it’s buried in a suitcase, in case … well, you should probably go and read Pet Sematary).

And I haven’t even mentioned the casting yet, which is a whole other layer of meta. Sissy Spacek, famously Carrie, is here; and so’s Bill Skarsgard, who played Pennywise in the recent incarnation of It. And Terry Quinn, the warden who spoke to the devil? Well, he’s the man who played Locke in Lost – a character who communed with the evil that was a part of the island that show was set on.

There’s a lot here for the Constant Reader; but, crucially, these references never get in the show’s way. Because, of course, this show needs to work for non-King fans. While the opening credits suggest this is a deep dive into his work, being little more than a series of manuscript pages from a variety of his novels, the truth is that the show itself has to be more.

And so far? It is. It’s thoroughly entertaining, and the mystery box is just the right side of the annoyance line – there are answers, and the drip-feed of them is just right. What the partnership between Abrams and King has cooked up here is quite remarkable: an eminently bingeable premium TV show that just happens to make me shiver with glee at the thought of my favourite characters popping up as the show goes on. Because I just know they’re all waiting for me.

• Castle Rock starts in the US on Hulu on 25 July with UK and Australian dates yet to be announced