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Comments
I simply love the book very very much.
Can't wait for Jake's review ;D ;D
But the allure and pull of the Dark Tower is just as strong for those of us who have partaken in Roland's journey and, inexorably it draws us on also...even to the bitter end...
"The door closed silently behind him..."
Oh, how those words ache to the very depths of the soul.
Generally, pretty good
It appears the critics have been treating this last DT book with more respect than they ever accorded King before this. :)
Very odd :-/
Eloquently said, both of you:)
'The Dark Tower': Pulp Metafiction
By MICHAEL AGGER
Published: October 17, 2004
IN 1970, when he was 22, Stephen King wrote a sentence he liked: ''The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.'' It's an innocent sentence -- pulpy and suggestive -- but it grew to become a monster. As the first line in the ''Dark Tower'' series, it begins a story King intended to be the longest popular novel in history. With the publication of ''The Dark Tower VII,'' the series has topped the 4,000-page mark and, mercifully, reached its conclusion. If that fact alone does not send a shiver up your spine, you're probably not a King fan. He was almost killed in a 1999 roadside accident, and, as he has written, the reaction of a Michigan reader was typical: ''I was with this good friend of mine when we heard you got popped. Man, we just started shaking our heads and saying, 'There goes the Tower, it's tilting, it's falling, ahhh . . . he'll never finish it now.' ''
So now, with the ''Dark Tower'' books stacked before us, the question can be answered: would anyone read these things if they weren't by Stephen King? It's not an idle question. King has built the series into a monument to his ambition. He has folded in characters from his non-''Dark Tower'' novels, turning this into an uber-narrative that, he suggests, is the keystone to his other work. To emphasize this point, the back of each volume shows a picture of King as a young man (perched over a typewriter, naturally) juxtaposed with one of him now. The message: faithful fans must make the journey to the tower if they wish to comprehend the master.
Should you decide to do this, be prepared: it won't exactly be the year of reading Proust. The ''Dark Tower'' series is not the longest popular novel ever written, but it's easily the one with the highest body count. In the opening chapters of ''The Gunslinger: The Dark Tower I,'' our hero, Roland Deschain, blows away an entire town. According to King, he was inspired to start writing this story after watching ''The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,'' and he had the further notion to combine a western with a fantasy like J. R. R. Tolkien's. This is the sort of awkward idea most writers would not admit to having even considered. King plunged ahead, with the combustible mixture of confidence and naivete that seems to propel his writing still. He filled the stories of ''The Dark Tower I'' with foreshadowing, laying the groundwork for a place called Mid-World.
The central figure throughout is Roland, who is essentially Clint Eastwood's spaghetti western antihero, except he's not afraid of the occasional hug. During the first four books, he acquires a ''ka-tet'' composed of three New Yorkers from different historical eras. There's Eddie, an ex-heroin addict from Brooklyn, who is meant to be the comic relief of the series, spouting a corny saying (''Roll me in sugar and call me a . . . jelly doughnut!'') every three pages or so. Eddie is married to Susannah, an African-American woman who has two personalities and no legs. One of her personalities (the rude one) speaks in guttural ebonics that would be cruel to quote. Their adopted son is Jake, a boy with a gift for reading minds. He has a pet badger-like creature named Oy, who tends to save the day when you most expect it. Finally, Roland has trained all of these people to fire guns.
At this point, readers of the series will be howling at the simplification of their heroes, but the whole project eludes description -- it's a double-black-diamond ski run for fantasy nerds. There are the multiple worlds, the multiple names and characters who die and come back to life in different times and places. Even King can be overwhelmed. Here is his attempt to summarize events at the beginning of ''The Dark Tower IV'': ''Roland rescues Jake, leaving the Tick-Tock man for dead . . . but Andrew Quick is not dead. Half blind, hideously wounded about the face, he is rescued by a man who calls himself Richard Fannin. Fannin, however, also identifies himself as the Ageless Stranger, a demon of whom Roland has been warned by Walter.'' It's easy to understand why these books have generally been among King's most neglected. At times, the series feels like a dumping ground for his wackier notions (a talking monorail that likes riddles) and for the further explication of ideas from his previous books (the superflu from ''The Stand'').