Childe Roland, to the Dark Tower Comes
 

If anyone here has read the Dark Tower series by Stephen King, you'll know what that means.

I just finished the seventh and final book, even though I bought the last book when it first came out, which was earlier last year. It was a thick book, but really good.

My question is, how many other people have read and finished the series?

Me. It was so Friendly sad. . . and magnificent simply because of the scale of the story. I mean in the sense that it's the sun around all the rest of King's stories orbit like planets.

And the scale of the tower itself, symbolic of the story. I simply love the image that adorns some of the early book covers, with the tower standing impossibly tall on the other side of the sun.

We thought that the first half of the Dark Tower (Book 7) with all the Mordred and Jake and reuniting and Ted and all that such was amazing, truly deserving of the Dark Tower title.

The last half? Cmon Sai King, you coulda taken off a year to make a slightly better ending. NOTE: We're not talking about the Tower's "Good job getting here, have fun doing it all over again" Ending. That was well done, puts things into perspective (Although when you think about it, if he has to repeat it all over again, why does he get to keep the horn this time?). No, We don't like basically everything that happens AFTER Eddie gets shot. We've heard that King was just getting rid of the characters to symbolize the 'cycle of ka', and We can see the merit. But cmon. You can't have Pere Callahan beating back a roomful of Type 1s in the begining, then have the Crimson King, the largest baddy in all the Universes, Commander of Evil...be a thin Santa Claus clone with a bunch of easily shot heat seeking missles as the ending. And once Roland got to the Tet bulding, it was like King realized "Oh shit, I forgot I mentioned that one kid in Insomnia...how to fit him in...hmmm..." and then BAM, a kid who creates THE most anti-climactic 'battle' ever. We read that "And all that was left was his red eyes" page over and over, and We still don't get how that qualifies as closure.

Now, the above might be taken as Us hated the last book. Not true. We just think that King felt the "Yo, Mr. Epic-Opus Author, how bout you finish the book huh?" pressure from his fans and decided to rush out the last (and to a lesser degree, 6th) book, just to get the weight off his chest. If King were to release a new revised "Dark Tower" in a year or so, We would snatch that up.

Spoilers:
Yeah, the final boss battle was less epic than I'd expected. But then I thought, "Wait, this isn't a videogame".
I thought the writing in general felt kind of rushed and uninspired though. It lived only on the story, which built entirely on the previous books.

What I really loved, though, was [Spoiler]:
how Roland was beginning to crack near the end. When Susannah left, he was actually on his knees, begging. You go from the first book, where he walks alone and needs no one, to the point where everyone is leaving him. I see what you mean, Lead, when you said he might be rushing things. While I was reading, though, I saw a whole shitload of symbolisms in there. Like how he was breaking down because he had already lost his family before, and now he was losing his family all over again. And how the tower was really just a show of his life. And the very ending, where he has to repeat the journey, works into it, too. They kept saying throughout the entire series that Ka is a wheel. Hence, he had to do it again. What makes me wonder, though, is what will happen when he gets to the top of the tower this time around, and he has the horn?

Also, a song that made me think about Roland and this book a lot was "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" by Greenday. It just sounds like it was made for Roland.

Well, We're not such a Greenday fan...

Anyways, if/when King releases the Dark Tower "Revised and Uncut" or whatever, this is all We ask...
1. Don't change A FREAKING WORD in the first half. NOT ONE WORD!

2. Stop with all the pointless foreshadowing. We don't want to read "Later that day, Roland would feel immense grief at what would happen to [ka member]". Seriously, We're pretty sure we saw that particular sentence at the end to four chapters.

3. Make Dandelo something we actually can go "Wow, that was worth half a book of buildup." Not "Wow...half a book of omens...for an emotion eating vampire...and Roland almost died from laughing...wow..."

4. Same also goes for Mordred. Except triple, because you built that little fucker up for a book and a half, and he should not go down by a tangle with Oy, no matter how great the bumbler is.

5. Make the Crimson King evoke images of pure unadulterated hatred of all things good, a shining beacon of evil, not remind Us of Our Grandfather and horseshoes.

6. Let the mute artist boy have his little magical drawing powers. But cmon, Roland should be the one to kill the Crimson King, not some dude thrown in at the last thirty pages.

I agree there with the whole Mordred thing. That was WAY to quick a fight for Mordred to go down like that. I did like the emotion that Roland was giving. It was good, but still. Not worth reading through the entire book for. And Roland was the incredible gunshooter. No matter how far away the Crimson King was, he should have been able to put a bullet between the fiery red eyes.

And also, I'm pretty sure that Dandelo was supposed to be that "IT" clown. It sounds like he was trying to make the creature look like him.

I agree with Raiden that (spoilers for IT as well as DT) Dandelo was supposed to be Pennywise the clown/spider from IT, and I definitely think they could have made more out of that connection throughout the series. I personally think that out of all the characters who could have crossed over into the DT universe, Big Bill Denbrough was the most deserving, and was conspicuous by his absence.

Also, IT is the book where the concept of ka-tet is introduced, although it remains unnamed at that point: the group are drawn together by ka, and they twice reinforce their bond by sharing khef in the "before" section of the book, once through blood, once through sex (my understanding of the High Speech is that khef can mean both sex and blood, as well as water, strength and other things.)

One thing I DID like about the final volume was Flagg's death. I thought that was really well done, and the small redemption he gains by dying under his original name was actually quite a beautiful thing. It didn't bother me at all that Roland didn't get to kill him himself, and the fact that Roland and Flagg/Walter/Whoever's ancient rivalry had ceased to even bother Roland by that point evoked the saga's epic scale nicely. Slaying Roland's one-time nemesis and the principal bad guy of The Stand with relative ease also built Mordred up as an uber-badguy, making his defeat by Oy and Roland all the more disappointing, but oh well.

Finally for now, and I guess this isn't really much of a spoiler so I won't tag it, did anyone find some of the concepts in DT to be reminiscent of FFs VI and X? Specifically, the way in which the Old Ones stopped trusting the magic of the world is VERY like the War of the Magi in FFVI, and its subsequent combination with technology is SO Magitech. Also, from what little we learn of the great war that blighted Roland's world, it's quite similar in nature to the War of the Magi, or to a lesser extent the Zanarkand/Bevelle war. I'm not saying that sai King ripped of FF (I doubt he's ever played it), I'm just saying there are parallels to be drawn with the magic vs technology thing.

That is an interesting connection. I could see why Roland wouldn't want to mess with any of that stuff, though. It contained so many things he didn't understand, he wouldn't want to mess with it. And the stuff he knew were probably loaded with so much radiation, it wiould kill him just to test it.

So, wait... Flagg was Walter? I was under the impression that Flagg was the king, hence his not dying in that huge Stand nuke

Also, I was disappointed with the characters that king did tie into the story. I really wanted to see Jack Sawyer, from the Talisman/Black House to get in on the story, I always thought the coppiceman would have been a great addition to the story, [color=black] since he was left at such a cliffhanger[/black]

I just got to when Jake dies in the dark tower. Well, I mean I just got there like months ago and was too annoyed with it to finish yet, but so far I enjoy the hell out of it. I wish King did comics :-/