Minireview: The Dark Tower book 7: The Dark Tower, by Stephen King

Well, here it is, the last installment in the massive “Dark Tower” series – named, appropriately enough, The Dark Tower. It would be fair to call it the second half of one book, started in the previous book “Song of Susannah”; that book ends on a cliffhanger and this one continues from that. Where “Song of Susannah” was quite a slim volume (for this series, at least), this last book is a brick. My paperpack copy clocks in at over 1,000 pages.

The book tries to end the epic in an appropriate fashion and tie up loose ends, and in my mind it mostly succeeds. The ending is controversial (I’ll try not to spoil anything here). I found it to be a fitting and good one, but I can understand some people utterly hating it – it’s not a traditional series ending. Like the rest of the series, this last book is a bittersweet affair. Victories are won at a hard cost, nobody is really safe, and Roland is ultimately a very lonely character. However, by the end of this book he’s a very different character from the spaghetti western cartoon he was in the beginning; we’ve seen what sort of man he is, the good and the bad. That’s the gift King has, when he decides to use it: he’s very good at describing characters, making them come alive and become interesting – sometimes just so you’ll care more when something horrible happens to them. And lots of horrible things happen to lots of decent people in his books, these ones included.

So, the story… I find it hard to write about it without spoiling things, but… things start out where they were left hanging in the previous book, with Jake, Callahan and Oy preparing for a suicidal attack on a certain restaurant and Roland & Susan busy elsewhere. People find each other, people die, Roland’s monstrous son makes his (its?) bid for power, and the Crimson King keeps on laughing. There’s some more metafiction stuff here with Stephen King himself being an active character in the story, but it’s handled pretty well and King ultimately leaves “himself” in the background. This is Roland’s tale, and the tale of his ka-tet, after all.

While it manages to tie up lots of loose ends, some of that feels a bit rushed (funny, in a 1,000+ page book, but there it is). Some things seem a bit contrived even for this series, and some come off as quite anticlimatic. I did like some of the reversals of expectations; I loved the actual reality behind the Breakers and their lair vs. what we were led to expect, for example. On the other hand, the Crimson King came off as quite impotent, all things considered. Especially considering the Deus Ex Machina solution to his (its?) demise. So… some things worked, others not so well.

It’s a bittersweet ending to a long tale. I liked it, generally. Like the whole series, it wasn’t perfect but when it was good it was damn good. I’ll remember the characters for a long time to come.

In retrospect: if you like King’s writing, you’ll probably like this series, maybe like it a lot. I know I did. If you don’t like King’s style, I doubt there is anything here that will change your mind. I’m glad I took the time to read the whole series, it was well worth the time and effort. In the end, it proved to be a pretty unique blend of fantasy, science fiction and western – and in this age of carbon copies and generic fantasy, being unique is a value in itself. Even if the tale stumbles now and then, it stumbles in interesting ways. […]

Minireview: The Dark Tower book 6: Song of Susannah, by Stephen King

Song of Susannah is the penultimate book in the Dark Tower series, and it suffers a bit from clearly being “part one of the end”. It ends in a cliffhanger, and even though it’s looks as thick as the other books that’s actually due to the large font used in the paperback version I have – it’s a shorter affair than most of the other books in the series. It’s also mostly situated in our world (or at the very least, one that’s extremely close-by). That’s not a bad thing in itself, it just means a small change of pace.

The story picks up right after Wolves of the Calla, after the final main event in that book. Susannah/Mia are now in New York (one of them), and must come to an agreement within their own head as to who is in control, and what to do. Mia turns out to be slightly different from what we were led to believe, in an interesting way. Roland and Eddie go to deal with the rare book dealers met earlier, and Callahan, Jake & Oy are left to try to rendezvous with Susannah (or Mia, as may be).

It’s a good enough read and moves along nicely, despite feeling like an “inbetween book” now and then. The inclusion of characters from King’s other books picks up pace here, and the story actually has some of the characters meet King himself. Now, in lesser hands this would be horrible, here it sort of works; King isn’t presented as being exactly an idealized person in any way, and there is some sort of method to the madness. I’m not sure if all these metalevels are really good for the story, honestly, but it keeps rolling along well enough. The interconnectedness of the multiple worlds, with shared characters, some of which may (or may not be fictious), does add an interesting twist – especially since it’s not totally who is in charge here, the creator or the created.

As before with the series, some of the foreshadowing is a bit overdone. King tends to do that in other books, too.

One more book to go till the clearing at the end of this particular path. I have to admit that the last book will have to be really crappy to ruin this series for me, it’s been quite a ride despite some minor faults here and there. […]

Minireview: The Dark Tower book 5: Wolves of the Calla, by Stephen King

While Wolves of the Calla is just as much a Western as the previous book, here the (intentional) cliche is slightly different. We have a small town our heroes arrive at, as before, but here instead of internal secrets we’re given a town full of desperate folks begging the gunslinging strangers to save them. The problem concerns a band of “Wolves”, masked raiders who steal away half of the children once a generation and return them as changed halfwits – but the actual story here is about the internal chemistry of the town inhabitants, and also about how the main characters (Roland, Eddie, Susannah… and Oy) have slowly changed.

It’s a good book, though not without faults. King spends a lot of time here doing tie-ins with his previous books (we now encounter a character from Salem’s Lot and other books also feature on the side), and while it mostly works it’s also a bit of a vanity show and a distraction. Also, the repeated jaunts into the New York of our world (?) to save a certain empty lot and rose serve to distract a bit from the main narrative. It (mostly) works, but I’m afraid the last two books may suffer a bit if this trend keeps up. King also plays coy with the real identity of the Wolves, which is a bit annoying since the main characters have this knowledge a few hundred pages before the reader does; and also because it’s an easy thing to guess way before it’s finally revealed.

I liked a lot of the things here, though. The town of Calla Bryn Sturgis and the inhabitants thereof are well realized and the alien touches (the plates, the robot, etc) here and there work well. Susannah’s internal struggle with Mia, “daughter of none, mother of one”, is an important plot point and apparently features importantly in the next book.

King has built an interesting mythology here. I just hope he doesn’t ruin it with too much interlinking with other stories. […]

Minireview: The Dark Tower book 4: Wizard and Glass, by Stephen King

At this point I have to say that the people who I’ve heard dissing this series are, well, wrong. It only seems to get better with each book; this fourth installment, Wizard and Glass, finds the story in full swing. It’s a prequel of sorts, telling the story of how young Roland came to be what he is. It’s a classic Western, with a town full of secrets, a band of gunslinger “good guys” riding in, and the obligatory gang of “bad guy” toughs. It’s also a love story between Roland and a girl named Susan Delgado (referenced in passing in earlier books). It’s also a lot of other things, building up structure for the “Mid-World” Roland comes from, with hostile magic, possible caches of high-tech weaponry, and otherdimensional horrors thrown into the mix.

I liked this installment a lot, it’s probably the best of the series so far – which is a bit odd, since often “prequel” books aren’t all that engaging since you know large parts of how things will turn out. Here that’s part of why it works, the feeling of doom over the happenings twists even some innocent “everyday” scenes into poignant moments. King remains a master storyteller when he hits his stride. And he’s hitting it here.

It’s not perfect. The “Wizard of Oz” bit near the end seems a bit superfluous, and ends the book on a perhaps too “open” note after the intense “campfile tale” that has just concluded… but that’s a fairly minor fault.

I’ve understood the final books of this series aren’t quite as good as these middle ones. That may be, but I’m still looking forward to reading them. I want to know how this ride ends, on what sort of clearing at the end of what sort of path. […]

Minireview: The Dark Tower book 3: The Waste Lands, by Stephen King

With The Waste Lands, the Dark Tower story moves into gear. While quite good, the first two books spent most of their pages in establishing the characters and the in laying story foundations. Here that’s mostly done with, and we get a strange sort of road trip. A good one, mind.

Roland starts training Eddie and Susannah to be Gunslingers, which proves to be suprisingly easy (largely due to the heavy hand of Fate, always present in this story). To complicate matters, a version of Jake who hasn’t died yet (due to time-travel weirdness) joins them, and proves to be one more member of their Ka-tet, their group-bound-together-by-fate. The fact that Jake’s survival, due to Roland’s actions in the previous book, creates a paradox is one critical issue that takes up the first half or so of the book – Jake must switch worlds, or both he and Roland are doomed.

The second half of the book sees the group finally moving towards the mythical Dark Tower “at the center”, with each having decided that it’s something they really want to do. This part of the book is the strongest, in my mind; we get haunting visions of a world slowly winding down and meet lots of strange characters – Oy the heroic bumbler, the Tick-Tock Man & his Greys, and finally Blaine (the Pain). The strange mixing of different historical periods continues – while the feel of Mid-World is largely Old West to begin with, by the time the group makes it to Lud it’s more of a post-apocalypse wasteland, with deranged computers, ruined high-tech cities, and ultra-tech railways. A strange mix, but it works and emphasizes the strange way time works (or doesn’t) in Mid-World, and how everything is really winding down, growing sick. I really liked many of the anachronistic scenes in the book (including the one with the not-quite-bear in the beginning). They create a fairly unique “feel” to the story.

This series is proving to be better than I expected. So far it’s been a really good read, and while the story meanders quite a bit it felt fitting; this is very much a “the journey is more important than the destination” thing. Sure, it gets a bit too self-important at times, and I’m not wild about this book ending on a sort of cliffhanger… but those are quite small niggles. I’m interested in seeing what happens next, and that’s the most important thing. […]

Minireview: The Dark Tower book 2: The Drawing of the Three, by Stephen King

Ok, onwards to The Drawing of the Three, the second book in the Dark Tower series. It’s an interesting and pretty good book, and one with a transitory role; it needs to transform the “pulp western” stylistic imagery of The Gunslinger into a more coherent, longterm story. I’d say it succeeds pretty well, and also goes into some quite unexpected directions.

The book begins almost directly where the first book left us, on a nameless shore after Roland’s encounter with the Man in Black. Attacked and badly wounded by lobster-like monsters, Roland stumbles along until he finds… a door, stading by itself on the sand. Beyond that door lies one of the “three”, one of his future companions and gunslingers-to-be. The fact that the door leads into our present (more or less), and into the mind of a heroin junkie, is just one of the curve balls the story throws at us. I found the juxtaposition of the mythical seashore, the door, and the addled heroin mule on an airplane to be pretty delicious, and it kick-started the action nicely.

After that we’re introduced to the second and third of “the three”, in the form of a schizophrenic young wheelchair-bound black woman from the 1960’s. How her conflicting personalities cope with things forms the bulk of the second half of the book, with the third door containing more of an epilogue than one more beginning.

In the end, we’re left with three people, still on the same endless shore, but with all of them both somewhat wiser and more scarred. It’s a good place for the beginning of the rest of the story, wherever it may lead.

I liked the book. King is good at describing flashes of images and feelings in the middle of a crisis, and in using those to build characters. Here, while Roland still remains a man of mystery, both Eddie and Susannah stand on their own. I also liked the continuing (purposeful) anachronisms in the story, they bring an interesting flavor to the mix. Looking forward to reading the next book. […]

Minireview: The Dark Tower book 1: The Gunslinger, by Stephen King

I’ve read The Gunslinger before, but that was so many years ago that I only remember some vague bits of it. I remember it being “ok”, but nothing really spectacular. Now that I’m starting to tackle the whole “Dark Tower” series, I thought it would be a good idea to re-read the first book, just to refresh in my mind what’s going on.

Turned out to be a good idea. For one, the book is better than I remembered, and has lots of little bits that I’d completely forgotten about. The story is… strange, and was one of those narratives that languished in King’s half-written pile for ages, apparently. Looking at the publication history, it seems that this book was originally published as separate short stories in the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, around 1980 or so. In the author afterword, King notes that at the time he wrote the afterword, he still doesn’t know how the complete story will play out.. but that he knows that it will comprise of lots of pages.

Now, that could be good or bad. There’s no rule that authors (or moviemakers, or…) have to know what the whole story will be when they start out. Sometimes it can lead to spectacular results, as the thing unfolds in an organic manner. On the other hand, it can lead to an incoherent mess, as the author desperately tries to fit various bits together to form a coherent whole, or tries to stretch things out way past their reasonable limits. “Wheel of Time”, I’m looking at you here. What will this story be? I don’t know, yet; I’ve heard that this isn’t King’s best work, but on the other hand he is a good writer and some people seem to like this series a lot. I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt, for now.

The story itself is a strange mix. We have the Gunslinger (who is called Roland, we learn later). He is pursuing the Man in Black across a desert landscape reminiscent of the (mythical) Old West – though it becomes clear quite quickly that it’s not quite our Old West. The saloon pianist plays “Hey Jude”, and Roland knows about nuclear power (as vague theory, anyway). We are treated with flashbacks from an earlier life, where Roland is being trained in a fairly brutal manner to be a “Gunslinger” – so it’s a title, also, and one that needs to be earned. His world, the old one, has “moved on”… but what that means, we aren’t told precisely. There are references to bloody rebellion, of civil war, of a dark and heavy past, but again things are left open. Why is Roland chasing the Man in Black? Apparently because he’s actually chasing knowledge of something called the “Dark Tower”… which, again, is left an enigma. Roland meets up with some people along the way, but the results are mostly tragic; he also concludes his quest to catch the Man in Black – but not in quite the fashion he would have imagined.

I have to say I liked this book quite a bit, but can understand why some people might be left somewhat bemused (or even a bit infuriated) by it. It combines mythical elements, visions of our modern-day Earth, and in general is a big anachronistic mish-mash… and apparently so on purpose. While at times it’s a bit too much style over substance, it left me wanting to know more – so as an intro to a long series I think it works well. As a self-contained work it’s somewhat too vague to be really satisfying. […]