The Dark Tower (the series) by Stephen King
This sprawling epic of 4,000 pages, written by Stephen King, consists of 7 main books, and tells the story of Roland The Gunslinger and his friends as they quest to reach The Dark Tower, possibly to save creation.
This is most certainly a recommended read for King fans. For others, there is certainly entertainment to be had, but you’ll need a lot of time on your hands. The books aren’t all necessarily self-contained either. The first book does stand alone as a series of short stories linked by a greater arc, and is a fairly short book. It doesn’t quite serve as a taster, as it doesn’t have the richness of characterisation that comes in book 2 and onwards, but it’s still nonetheless the perfect place to dip your toes in this particular pond.
Book 2 – The Drawing of the Three – is the book where Roland draws together his quest-friends, helping them in their former lives and bringing them into his world. Book 3 charts their progress as a group (and ends with a cliff-hanger), and Book 4 details part of Roland’s past, and his first love affair. That makes it sounds bland and wishy-washy, but I believe it’s by far the strongest book in the series, with excellent characterisation, and antagonists that aren’t supernatural and offstage (which is much the case in the other books).
Book 5 details how Roland’s ‘ka-tet’ defend a town against raider-robots after the town-children, and is also quite a good, standalone tale.
Book 6 is rather weak, and really doesn’t stand alone as a read – it’s really the lead-in to the final book; and you’d only read it if you were invested in the series at this point. Book 7 is the resolution of the whole saga, and probably the second-best book in the series.
I’ll try not to give spoilers, but here’s the good and the bad of it.
Good things: Major sections of this work were almost wholly unpredictable, both in terms of story and in terms of characters and incidents. It’s hard to imagine a writer of exciting tales about a travelling quest deciding one of his major protagonists should have no legs, for example. Another good thing is that the ending is about perfect, in my opinion (though there’s by no means universal agreement on this) – I’m a long-time King reader, and he really struggles with endings for his longer stories. This one was fine, however.
Bad Things: He introduces things from other stories (such as references to Harry Potter, and weapons called ‘sneetches’) or things that take you out of this story, somewhat fracturing the internal narrative (Stephen King is a significant character in the later books!). These take you out of this story quite a bit when you first get to them. There’s also a little too much ‘deus ex machina’ going on, in that things get resolved by some convenient magic or gobledegook a little too often. I can’t say more without spoiling the end of book 7, but the death of the final villain is probably the worst instance of this. And finally, some ofthe major villains in these books – who are built up as near-mythically-powered – are way too easy for Roland to tackle.
Overall, I would recommend this series, but I think you need to decide for yourself at the end of book 2 – that’s the point you’ll know well enough if you want to stay with Roland on his quest.
Rating: ODD 8/10