I really sort of disliked the whole Stephen King as a character in his own book thing.
I didn’t mind the ending though. How else would it have ended? Roland ascending up to heaven on a glowing beam of light from the top of the Tower or some such nonsense?
The story isn’t about a Tower. It’s about Roland. He has to learn that he isn’t the center of the universe and getting to the Tower at all costs is not the point. And he is basically doomed to repeat his quest over and over until he gets it right. We are also left to assume that he is a little closer to getting it this time since he is now starting with the Horn of Eld.
But yeah, it sucks for him that he has to go through all that again.
True. My biggest problem with it wasn’t the cop out ending, although it was quite lame. My biggest problem was the way he did it. I agree 100% with HazelNutCoffee’s assesment.
King’s whole pissy attitude aside it should have ended right where he said it should have. With Roland entering the Tower. You don’t really need to know what’s in the Tower. Like you said the story wasn’t really about the Tower, the story was about Roland.
I’d have been way more pissed about that. I guess msmith537 and I are in a minority, but I thought it was a great ending (or at least, the only possible ending).
My favorite book in the series is far and away The Drawing of The Three. However, one of my favorite parts is from The Waste Lands, the entire arc dealing with Jake in New York, trying to come back.
I really disliked King inserting himself into the story and then being so damn tedious about it. Just pop in and get out if you need to be there at all.
I actually did like the ending, but hated that King did all that whining about it before hand. Just write the darn story. (On the other hand, I like when he does the “Constant Reader” bits as prologues and epilogues.)
When King references himself casually in his other stories, like having a character refer to the horror writer in Bangor, that amuses me.
Inserting himself as a significant character, and an annoyingly lame one at that, just took me right out of the story. The whole series had a lot of ups and downs for me, but whereas I could overlook a hybrid demon-spider-people-eater, finding that crate of books in the cave just pissed me off.
I might have been ok with the ending if I wasn’t so ticked off by the “Stephen King” character.
And calling the Snitches “Sneetches” drove me nuts. Didn’t someone at his publishing house read or watch ANY Harry Potter?
Having Eddie, Susannah, Oy, and Jake die made me a little angry too. There were things he had said that indicated that all of them would make it to the tower.
It seems to me that he had a vision of the series when he started it on that weird ream of paper. Then he had that accident and everything written after that just feels different. It’s like he threw out his vision and started from scratch and it just didn’t work.
And it bums me out because even in the later books, which I liked least, there are still some interesting things.
That’s what I figure happened. The accident jarred him badly and he let it affect him more than seemed really reasonable. Yeah, it was a near-death experience, but those honestly happen pretty frequently, just not usually as dramatically as that. If one wants to get nasty about it, it’s like he started throwing this big ol’ pity party for himself in his books.
Yup. And while we had been getting hints the entire book, he’s not going to come out that blatantly. And of course the editing team had read Harry Potter - how else would they have gotten the Potter font for the chapter titles?
I’ve never read any of the Dark Tower Series, Malleus, Incus, Stapes! but I have read The Talisman by S. King and P. Straub, and from what I understand of some of the parallels, you might just as well read this as the second novel and perhaps inspiration of and for the remaining Dark Tower series. It’s a really great book, I highly reccomend it, and I think it might be just what you are thirsting for after having come off the series, and left, mayhaps, craving more.
I loved The Talisman. It was basically the entirety of the Dark Tower series condensed into one book with a more satisfying ending.
ETA: Not that that’s a big spoiler or anything. The plot and characters are significantly different, but the progression and feel of the story is similar.
To me, I can’t help but think Sneetch was a mistake because when there were different-world differences, like the Monarchs or the car names, our attention was brought to them.
He says in his intros to other stories that he does no research and to give credit to others when things are right, give blame to him when they’re wrong.
I don’t really care if he doesn’t remember the name of one minor detail from HP. No one is perfect. But it was over and over and over and the other weapons in those scenes (light sabers maybe?) were correctly named. I don’t think it was intentional but I wish someone had caught it. I wonder if it still says Sneetch in later printings.
Oh and I had forgotten about Flagg. It was a waste of one of the best characters he ever created. I still have a hard time watching Law & Order CI reruns and watching the captain who played Flagg in the miniseries.
Okay, I’m finished the series now. Hey, where is everybody?
I loved it from beginning to end. I can understand people’s quibbles, but I don’t agree with hardly any of them (except the goddamned spider again - King must have had the world’s worst spider trauma as a child). The ending - yeah, it pretty much had to end that way. I also sort of envisioned Roland being trapped in the top of the tower, being a human generator for The Force or something like that.
I didn’t mind King putting himself in the story - it was nicely convoluted. I appreciated that.
It wasn’t just a dream, though, was it? Roland got to the top of the Tower, and then realized as he opened the last door that he’d done all of this before, and was about to do it all over again because he hadn’t got it right yet, then reset back to chasing Walter O’Dim through the desert.
I bawled my friggin’ eyes out reading almost the whole last book.
ETA: I think I’m actually going to read “Insomnia” now.