Read: The Dark Tower–“The Shining Wire”; “The Door Into Thunderclap”; “Steek-Tete”; “The Master of Blue Heaven”

So that’s it? He’s dogged the forces of good through The Stand, Eyes of the Dragon, and six and a half volumes of The Dark Tower, and how does Randall Flagg–the villain formerly known as Walter–go out? Like a punk. Like a sucker. Popping up again only to be hoodwinked and eaten by stupid spider-baby Mordred, a character he’s at least an order of magnitude more interesting and more frightening and more established and funnier and cooler than. Boo! Hiss!

To make matters worse, this account of Flagg’s demise futher mucks up King’s already shaky (that’s an understatement) continuity. One of the few clarifying revisions King made to The Gunslinger was to spell out that Walter/Marten/Flagg wasn’t a servant to John Farson, Walter/Marten/Flagg is John Farson. So what does King do just a couple years after writing that? Ignore it and say Walter/Marten/Flagg and John Farson were indeed two separate people. Why? Your guess is as good as mine. Ditto the new assertion that Walter/Marten/Flagg was once a full-fledged human being and is approximately 1500 years old, rather than the indescribably ancient demon he’s tagged as in The Stand, a book superior to this series in every way including positing an interesting origin for Randall Flagg.

The thing that really rankles here is that we King readers have been following Randall Flagg for just as long as we’ve been following Roland Deschain, and through better books for that matter. To punk him out like this just plain feels like a rip-off, and once again displays a shocking lack of understanding of what is interesting about these books. Having your new big bad kill the former big bad is the oldest trick in the book writers have for making the new villain look dangerous, but that’s not what happens here. Here, you just wish there was no new big bad, because the original one was just fine, especially after King informs you that no matter who he’s nominally working for, Flagg is always looking out for number one. That’s the kind of villainy I can get behind!

So. Now the guy who teleported out of Las Vegas in time to avoid a nuclear bomb blast has been eaten alive by a psychic spider, and we’re left with–what, exactly, as an antagonist? Nothing all that frightening, to be honest. The Crimson King is by all accounts crazy, and no more an “antagonist” for Roland than late-seasons Uncle Junior was for Tony Soprano. His minions, as represented by Pimli Prentiss and Finli o’ Tego, the head honchos at the Blue Heaven telepath gulag, are basically working stiffs; I know this is King’s attempt to say “and the Nazis were just regular people too,” but I don’t care, it’s still an incredibly uncompelling set-up for the books’ big climax. I guess Mordred is kind of a villain in the classic sense, but not really–he’s a grumpy kid who hates his dad and likes to eat. I want Randall Flagg’s gleeful, giggling nihilism and swagger.

Finally, I don’t care about Ted Brautigan.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 20th, 2007 at 3:01 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.