The Dark Tower

Stephen King

"The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed."

When the first sentence of what has become The Dark Tower was published, in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (October 1978), a few thousand souls were treated to a new Stephen King story, "The Gunslinger." It has been twenty-six years since, and those few thousand have expanded into uncounted millions, drawn at first by the collectability of the limited edition hardback of the first volumne, put out by Donald M. Grant in 1982 and illustrated by the inimitable Michael Whelan, and then, once it was released in trade paperback, by the strength of the story itself and its characters. Now, in October 2004, Stephen King has finished the tale of Roland. What began as a short story spanning about twenty pages is an epic series of seven novels, weighing in at closer to five thousand, and with so many things pulled from other King novels (including those not considered ancillary Dark Tower novels; in this final volume, you will find three big references to novels that weren't ancillaries) that at times it has seemed everything King ever wrote is part of this one huge epic story cycle.

The Dark Tower, like King's other work, has been inconsistent over the years. The Waste Lands and Wolves of the Calla were not high points in Mr. King's career, and some of the ancillary novels have been just shy of unreadable (what Roland does with a copy of Insomnia in this novel is, truly, what we all should have done with it ten years ago). Thus, when King finally drew it all to a close, and in the largest book he has released since the uncut version of The Stand in 1990 (clocking in at just shy of nine hundred pages, with the afterwords and appendices added), I had to look forward to the book with some trepidation.

King's final novel (so he tells us, though he hints in his afterword that retirement may not yet have caught up with him) continues right after and/or just before (depending on the storyline) the cliffhanger ending of Song of Susannah. Jake, Father Callahan, and Oy are just about to storm the Dixie Pig, one of the Crimson King's gateways to New York City, in 1999. Susannah is in the town of Fedic with Mia, giving birth to the baby they've both been carrying for a number of books now. Eddie and Roland are off, once again, looking for things in Maine. Afterwards, the raggedy band of survivors have to find themselves and, naturally, continue trying to both save the beams and get to the tower. Nothing new here, except that, well, this is the last book; we'll get our answers. We think.

It's impossible to analyze the book's strengths and weaknesses without major spoilers, which is why so many of the reviews on Amazon are things you do not want to read unless you have no intention of reading the book itself; it's been out less than two weeks, and already over half the reviews there have given away the ending. Kind of. That is simultaneously one of the book's greatest strengths and its greatest weakness. Without giving too much away, I'll say this; the book has two endings. King ends it in simultaneously the truest and least satisfying way he could, but then (presumably to stave off death threats from readers who just don't get it, and haven't gotten it the whole time), he adds a small continuation. It is likely to get him some death threats, too, and judging by the tone of some of the Amazon reviews it probably already has. The second ending, however, is still about as good as it can be, under the circumstances. It, too, rings true, though some will undoubtedly wish King has left it all with the first ending.

Another of the book's strengths is that King and Grant finally went full circle and brought Michael Whelan back to illustrate. Hallelujah, because the folks who have done the intervening Dark Tower books have just not done them as much justice as Whelan both did in 1992 and does in 2004. Lavishly illustrated in both color and black and white, Whelan has given real depth to the illustrations (and, according to a final note of King's, also contributed to the writing of the book by making a key suggestion). The series' best since the first novel.

I feared (and that fear has been confirmed by a number of the already-posted reviews) that there would be a lot of people who wouldn't understand the way the book is structured, and why King played out a number of the book's events like he did. It's unfortunate that it ticked a lot of people off to read some of the events therein, but there you have it. King pulled no punches, and he did the best he could within the framework of the story. And his best does make this ring true more often than not. I rarely cry when reading books, but one scene did reduce me to tears. I couldn't believe it myself. But it did make sense within the framework, and was necessary.

The book also contains a copy of Browning's original poem, and I strongly suggest that those unfamiliar with it read it. Perhaps those who don't get it will have a better understanding of some of these events after reading and digesting Browning's original work (only five stanzas of which are referenced within the text, in a single interpretation dealing with a single character; obviously, the poem has far more to do with the series' underlying context than that).

The book's main weakness, aside from the abovementioned problems with the ending, is its overly episodic nature, which was one of the big problems in The Waste Lands, as well. Characters are set up, sometimes with the kind of foreshadowing that signals a major character ahead, only to end up going out of the story's scope within a few pages. This happens twice in the novel (and those who've read it will already know which two characters I'm talking about). The episodic nature of the first book could be forgiven. After all, it was a collection of related short stories, not a novel. This, however, is not, and it gets annoying after a while. King is a master of character development, but sometimes it seems that a petulant six-year-old takes his mind over now and again in order to overstate the importance of characters in the general scheme of things.

I'm already well over a thousand words, and that's without actually getting into any of the spoiler details, some of which simply beg for inclusion here. The best thing I can sum up with is to ask the question, is The Dark Tower (the novel) a worthy ending to The Dark Tower (the series)? After reading it, my answer is an unqualified yes. If this is to be King's final novel, he's going out with a bang. It's not Misery or 'Salem's Lot, but it's a good'un.