Kids/young people aren't his main target audience I'd suspect. FWIW, I think people tend to assume that if he writes something a certain way he is entirely out of touch, but I think he knows what he's doing when he does that because his point is to create a feel of a place, and plenty of rural places are a bit like living in ghost towns that are relics from the 70s and 80s. It's the feel of those places, IMO, that he's after, and if you've lived in, or been to, those areas, he gets the feel pretty spot on. We live in one. We still have an arcade. People are still driving trucks from the 1980s. They still talk like rednecks because they and their parents and their grandparents have never left town to expand their world and so they want everything to stay the same. That's pretty common in rural areas.