Your Thoughts Exactly

Yes, this post is incredibly late in arriving, but I had to wait for SOMEONE to finish the book, and it only took him 2 months! OK, seriously. I wrote in my DT 6 review that I thought it was the best in the series. OK, so I was a little optimistic after I read it. But I left some wiggle room: it all depended on DT7, the final in the series.

For those new to the Dark Tower Universe, it's a 7-book series, started in 1972(?) and ended when DT7 came out in September 2004. It was King's epic, it was supposed to be bold and beautiful. He said that DT7 was supposed to be his art, his masterpiece. After the first 6 books, I believed--I thought it would be his "swan song" (my own words). Well, I was right and I was wrong.

King did convince me that this was his swan song; it doesn't seem like he wants to keep reading in the light of this last book. What this book wasn't was a masterpiece. In fact, this may be the weakest book in the series. And you just don't want to go out with a whimper, not after 3,000+ pages. But he did.

From a literary perspective, King seems to lose his passion for the series, resorting to deus ex machina way too much, and explaining the character's reasoning through thoughts that mysteriously pop into their heads. Of course, they KNOW that these thoughts are right. So there's some supernatural force going on here, but we don't know what. Is it ka? Is it the Beam? Is it the Tower? Hell, it could be anything. But King leaves it all up in the air. Something is driving these characters, we just don't know what. In fact, the only reason we know that our characters are driving for the Tower is that it just feels right to them. We never get any real explanation for it. The character development feels messy, and there are too many peripheral characters and not enough emphasis on our protagonists (or even our antagonists.) We know that the villians are out there, but we don't know why. All we know is that they are mostly gross, horrific, and evil.

But let's say we take this all in stride; after all, it is a fantasy book, and he's allowed some freedom. From a purely storytelling perspective, King also seems to get lost in the breadth of the whole thing. After 30 years and thousands of pages, I can understand that he gets a little lost. And I can understand that the focus of the story has changed, and that the author himself has changed styles. That doesn't make it okay, though. It seems clear to me that King is writing straight from his imagination, something that he could get away with, and even excel at, in his youth, but after so much other fiction, his imagination seems to have wandered into his literary past. That's why he references his old work time and again; it's all he remembers. In my opinion the story always excelled when the characters' immediate wants were clear. I thought that boded well for the final book, but instead the characters went off on tangents. We never really knew why they were doing what they were doing, just that ka willed it. I think King let up because he thought there had to be something other than a fight to the finish. He had to get philosophical on us. And I thought he did so well in action mode. In the end, the story was just too confusing, too unfocused, and too long. King really could have used an outline. If only his 20 year old self would have written down the ending, I think we'd be better off.

Philosophically, many people are going to disagree with King's decision to write himself into the final two books. I thought it was an acceptable thing to do in book 6, mainly because I thought there would be a good reason for it. Turns out there wasn't. King didn't paint himself as god, which would have been absolutely unacceptable, but he does have a little too much fun with it, poking fun of himself, and imagining that outside forces saved his life in a car accident in 1999. It just reeked of what someone would write if they had a near-death experience... at the age of 14. But I didn't get really upset about that; I can take that in stride that he was supposed to be the storyteller in the story itself. But this wasn't the only issue.

And here's the spoiler for those who plan on reading it, despite my bad review. But the Dark Tower is a rewind button for Roland's life? I don't get it. I feel like this is just an attempt at King to leave the ending as open as possible so that the readers can fill in the blanks with our imaginations. Maybe I have a failure of imagination, but I have always been imaginative. Wasn't the Tower supposed to be that which creation was based off? What about the beams? What about all his other tie-ins? What about the other realities? Is the truth of the series that the story was what was important? So what about those of us that think the story was no good? I'm not going to say the ending sucked, because he could have done a thousand worse things. But it just felt a little hollow to me. I'm sure he couldn't have pleased me and also pleased his other fans, but I'm entitled to my opinion.

So here's my final scoring The series gets pulled up on the merits of the even-numbered books, and dragged down by the odd numbers, and especially number 7. (Sounds like the Star Trek movies!) So here's my review of all the books (some of them may be off because I haven't read them in a long time.)
DT1: 7.0
DT2: 9.0
DT3: 6.0
DT4: 8.0
DT5: 4.0
DT6: 8.0
Dark Tower 7 score: 5.0
Dark Tower series: 6.0

So, worth a read? I'd say wait for the TV miniseries. It'll be a lot cleaner, a lot shorter, and lot less time-consuming.