Does nobody read???
Well, in the two months since this, I've been making my way through the last three "Dark Tower" books by Stephen King.
It's a very odd series. Essentially, it starts with the last Gunslinger - a breed of professional knights in an alternative dimension.
Their world holds the Dark Tower, which is the point from which all of existence is held in place, held up by invisible, but powerful beams that lock across the world.
The beams have been breaking for some time and Roland - the Gunslinger sets out to cross his world to try and fix the Dark Tower and save all existence.
Through the books, he passes into our world and other alternative worlds. The series as a whole is a mix of The Good, the bad and the Ugly, Lord of the Rings and everything Stephen King has written before. I don't know how many pages the entire seven books run into, but I think it's around 4,000.
Some of it is brilliant, some of it is a real shore. The brilliant bits seem to have been written when King was much younger and essentially wanted to write a fantasy western. The books that heavily lean on the idea of an alternative Wild West with cowboy knights is brilliant. However, surrounding all of this (particularly in later books) is King's decline into self pity, self analysis and sense of mortality.
The last three books were written (mostly) after his accident which almost left him dead at the side of the road. This features heavily and massively influences the latter side of the story. It becomes less "A fistful of Dollars" and more "A fistful of self-pity". It's a shame, as the characters are likeable, and you've been through a couple of thousand pages of adventures with them by this point.
The last book picks up the pace though about a quarter of the way through. It finds its footing again to a degree, but compared to the exciting Western it starts off at (and is interspersed with) it's peters into a bit of a rambling squib towards the "climax".
However!
If you enjoy King's work, it is actually a must to read. It ties up so many of his previous books, and gives you an idea into some of the more bizzare things that happen in them. If you know you King lore, then you this will answer a lot of questions. There are returns of old characters from other work, and a lot of direct background telling from some of his books (he focusses for a while on Derry for instance). We even find out finally who the turtle is!
So, if you're a King fan, sorry, but you will have to suffer your way through the series. I borrowed the last three books and the first from the library. Books two and four I picked up over time from Oxfam. Definitely worth the library approach as it's not worth buying all seven (IMO) as they're ****ing expensive).
. Would make a stunning film,
