Read: The Dark Tower–“Hides”; “Joe Collins of Odd’s Lane”; “Patrick Danville”; “The Sore and the Door (Goodbye, My Dear”); “Mordred”; “The Crimson King and the Dark Tower”; “Epilogue: Susannah in New York”; “Coda: Found”; “Appendix: Robert Browning–‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came'”; Author’s Note

Hey, everyone.

Hey, Constant Reader.

There, in the scarlet field of Can’-Ka No Rey, I heard the sound. The Horn of the Eld.

Would you like to know what it sounded like?

Okay.

Listen closely…

Hark thee well, may it do ya fine…

It sounded like this.

—–

I don’t know what I was expecting. Not in terms of the ending itself; I totally expected that one. (God bless you, Bruce B., but like I said, you sure did spoil that sucker.) I mean in terms of the quality of the ending, the whole build-up included. After everything I’ve read and everything I’ve written about it, for some reason my hopes were up. Shoulda known better! But I wanted to believe.

I wanted to believe that the likes of the Three Stephen Kings, the evil stand-up comedian, and a guy with Harry Potter hand grenades couldn’t possibly be the best final bosses King could come up with for his goddamn seven-volume fantasy epic.

I wanted to believe that the successful resolution of the quest of Roland, this great lone warrior who strode the sands of time and space alone even when surrounded by friends, friends he almost inevitably led to their deaths on his behalf, wouldn’t hinge completely on the godlike actions of another character we’d never met until the book’s final chapters–unless you’d read another goddamn Stephen King book first, and if you hadn’t, hey, visit your local bookstore!

I wanted to believe that King would stop belaboring points that were painfully obvious to everyone, perhaps, but his own entranced self. That maybe he wouldn’t spend three full pages unraveling an anagram obvious to every single reader the second he had a character think “hey, why do those words look familiar?” That maybe he wouldn’t draw out the question of why the evil stand-up comedian cut the erasers off the pencils of the idiot-savant deus ex machina when it was plain as day that he could use them to erase things out of existence.

I wanted to believe that Mordred, who as both character and nemesis started lame and hadn’t improved, wouldn’t die the way he lived. But c’mon, you’ve gotta grant me this one. The whole sixth book was building up to this sucker’s birth! He was supposed to fulfill some prophecy (that we’d never heard before, but still)! He was named after the infamous Arthurian patricide! And he totally killed Randall Flagg (in the most bush-league and anticlimactic way possible, but still)! Surely he’d do something really cool and important and unpredictable before it was all over! Surely he’d do more than just run at the gunslinger’s camp in spider form, get shanghai’d by Oy, and get shot to death like a bobcat who smelled the food in their RV? I mean, that would be incredibly stupid and a colossal waste of time for it to play out like that, wouldn’t it?

I wanted to believe I wouldn’t literally be mocked and berated by the author of this series for wanting to read a satisfying ending. I thought maybe that this would be at least as important to the author (whether or not he’d truly deluded himself into thinking he was transcribing this nonsense rather than writing it himself, as he so frequently claimed) as it was to me. Shit, they sure would have been better books if it had been!

I wanted to believe the payoff would make the pain in getting there worthwhile.

Oh well!

I’ll tell you this, though: I actually liked the resolution (“resolution”) to Roland’s storyline just fine, as I predicted I would. It’s a good idea, and it fits. And interestingly, the prose in the section leading up to and following the revelation that Roland’s about to do the time warp again took on the tone of The Gunslinger, which is obviously a treat to me. I guess it’s appropriate considering that he goes directly to Chapter One, do not pass Go, do not collect $200, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned from reading The Dark Tower Saga it’s not to expect the appropriate, and not to look a gift piece of good writing in the mouth when it comes along. So yeah, that part was just fine. It’s just everything that surrounded it that was either infuriating, insulting, or uninteresting. And need I even list the loose ends forever untied? From Bango Skank to the fate of the Grandfathers, from what Nort told Allie to what happened to Black Thirteen on 9/11, from LaMerk Industries to Rhea of the Cöos, from why the Mejis portion of Roland’s pre-The Gunslinger story was filled out in such detail while the rest was sketched in or ignored completely to the unimaginable battle Roland was supposed to wage at the Tower (please don’t tell me it was this ridiculous skeet-shooting game he played with the lame-ass Crimson King)…I mean, it was like King wasn’t even trying. Wow, is this whole “hey, I’m just the messenger” business a convenient excuse.

As for me? Well, now I’m done, which is a good feeling, let me tell you. It’s also the longest blogathon I’ve ever done, by a long shot. That much at least I’m grateful for. I learned I could read and blog about what I read every day for a long time, which I’d tried in the past and couldn’t keep up. I think I got something out of the exercise of reading every day and picking apart what worked and what didn’t in what I read. I think I was able to articulate certain ideas about genre and storytelling, and pinpoint what both what excites me about them and what leaves me cold. I think I learned a lot about where writers can go wrong, but I also learned that it’s possible to zig where they zagged. And it was a lot of fun interacting with the comment crew. I totally felt like it was a group effort.

Was it worth it? I don’t know. This is certainly the most time I’ve ever spent reading books I didn’t like all that much outside of a classroom environment. I can’t really say I enjoyed it. I can’t really say I’m glad I followed the advice of everyone who encouraged me to stick with it, the books get better, I’d come around. They didn’t and I didn’t. I don’t think the nuggets of goodness scattered throughout the seven volumes were worth the junk I had to wade through to get to them, and not just because of the junk in and of itself–I worry that exposure to that junk will leave me less favorably inclined to the Stephen King books and stories I’d come to know and love and really treasure before I laid eyes on the damned Dark Tower, and that’s a real tragedy, because those books mean a lot to me. Time will tell.

Go, then. There are better books than these.

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