Read: The Dark Tower–“The Attack on Algul Siento”; “The Tet Breaks”; “Mrs. Tassenbaum Drives South”; “Ves’-Ka Gan”

Bloodbath! Not since the shootouts in Mejis back in Wizard and Glass, and maybe not even since the massacre in Tull allllll the way back in The Gunslinger, have we seen the gunslingers cut loose like this. I enjoy that their methods go beyond the Thermopylae “pick the right place” strategy and generally dive straight for no-bones-about-it ambushing and shooting people in the back. They’re rough customers.

So naturally King starts killing them off in the least entertaining order possible, leaving my pick for “please off this one first,” Susannah, as the last non-Roland, non-Oy gunslinger standing. It certainly takes cojones on the author’s part to insert a race to prevent his real-life car accident right after the death of one of his main characters, and make it lead to the death of another. The problem is that the deaths aren’t as affecting as they’re supposed to be because, as I pointed out way back when, we’ve never been sold on Roland’s transformation from the grim hardcase who’d let a kid die rather than deviate from his quest to the loving den mother of his rag-tag bunch; it just sort of happened when King jettisoned the spare style of The Gunslinger for the busy Kingisms of The Drawing of the Three, as though the prose tics did the work for him. We’re supposed to feel this great ocean of grief overwhelming us, but I’m still not sure why. But because of this, the “King” material doesn’t bug me as much as it otherwise might. I actually like his character better than Eddie, and Jake throwing himself in front of a speeding van to save a guy is the kind of thing the kid would do, so that’s okay too. (It also helps that we’ve already had a great Jake death scene in this series.)

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