This is definitely a neck pickup which was designed to give you more of the Stratocaster single coil sound, without the noise. These are great for cleaning up the neck pickup tone of very dark, dull-sounding guitars. If you wire them up for parallel coils, they take on an almost acoustic-electric guitar type sound, which can give you some versatility. These are very similar to the Dimarzio Eric Johnson signature humbuckers, which are also very bright.
Contrary to some of the reviews on here, these pickups were not invented in the 80's for shredders. On the official Dimarzio website, it says the DP156 was introduced in 1992. The shredding 80's with big rack units were long gone by 1992.