Phrase of the Moment:
¤ Phrase: "Camel army"
¤ Usage: Right right... left left... right right left left... camel army!
¤ Origin: While watching a nature program one night the camera was turned on a flock of ambling camels, a sight that cracked Malaya up due to their right-right then left-left walking style.  We started verbally riffing on it, and from somewhere I came up with the above marching theme, to the tune of "1-2, 3-4, 1-2-3-4, go army!"
¤ Notes: Since the initial invention of this months ago, we've used it in numerous occasions that have nothing at all to do with dromedaries. Our favorite current use is to walk around the house and scare the cats; I stand directly behind Malaya with my hands around her waist and we walk in step, left-left then right-right, and relentlessly pursue the cats until they get freaked out and leap behind the couch or run under the kitchen table where we can't get at them. -- October 13, 2004

ince I've been carrying three book reviews for weeks, I was just going to review them all today and get it over with. Unfortunately, I started writing my Dark Tower 7 review, got to reading some comments about it on Amazon.com, thought it over a bit more, and my initial quick review grew and the hour got later. As a result, here's just that review, in relatively long form, with the other two pushed back another blog or two.  I will eventually get to Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenesis and The Color of Magic, by Terry Pratchett. Later this week, hopefully.

So with no further ado, here's my Dark Tower 7 review.

I am a big fan of King's Dark Tower series, and was quite eager to get my hands on the concluding volume, even though I was relatively disappointed by book 6.  Book 7 was a lot better, and while I'm not entirely satisfied by the ending, it is logically defensible, while being both too happily ever after and too infinitely depressing... at the same time.

I don't think Book 7 is my favorite book in the series, but it's almost certainly the best of them all in terms of writing quality and organization and money scenes and tying up loose ends. It's also one of the most emotionally-wrenching books I've ever read, even if some of the tears feel a bit jerked.  I would definitely recommend it, but you've pretty well got to read the whole series for it to have any impact on you, so either you're in for all 7 books, or you might as well stay out.

Since the biggest points of contention about DT7 are how the fates of the main characters and how it ends, this review should not be read below the "Characters" discussion if you haven't read the book yet, since there are spoilers galore.

Score time:

Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower, by Stephen King
Plot: 6
Concept: 7
Writing Quality/Flow: 7/4
Characters: 4
Horror: 4
Fun Factor: 5
Page Turner: 9
Re-readability: 7
Overall: 7

These rating categories are explained here.

It's not a masterpiece, but there are a lot of masterful scenes and moments throughout, and King shows his writing skills by tying up an amazing amount of loose ends, in more or less satisfying fashion.  It's also got good action moments, funny moments, great writing, great imagination, and more.  A very well-executed project, on the macrocosm level. As for the microcosms... I hated a lot of the things that happened, didn't like how the characters (especially the bad guys) were handled, and thought much of the plot was bullshit. More on all of those issues below.

Plot: 6
This score required some debate, since while there's not really that much plot to DT7, and what there was of it didn't especially thrill me, the book does a good job tying up most of the loose threads from at least a dozen other Stephen King books. Characters and villains not seen in years appear here and are sorted into their final slots, though I didn't agree with the sorting or the slots in several occasions. I'm torn on the score though, since I hated several of the things King chose to do with the story, even though they basically worked and made sense. The repeated examples of deus ex machina, overt and coincidental, were unacceptable... except that there were so many of them and they were explained in the story itself, so in that way they sort of make sense.  The unrealistic parade of minor characters who showed up just in time to save the day before vanishing back into obscurity was ridiculous... except that it happened so often it sort of began to make sense. And so on.

Basically I didn't much like the way King wrote a lot of things, but since they more or less made sense and were consistent, I don't feel like it's my place to complain about the choices he made in writing his novel.

Concept: 7
This rating is more for the whole series than just this last book, which became too cute and too clever on several occasions, as the characters travel back and forth between the worlds. The overall plot and structure was fine; it was some of the details along the way that disappointed me.

Writing Quality/Flow: 7/4
I changed these scores several times, as I thought back over the novel. Initially I had 7/7, but when I remembered some of the techniques King used, I wanted to drop it to about a 5/7. I think gave it some more consideration, and realized that the writing quality was fine. It was the choices in flow and presentation that really bothered me.

He strings the words together very well, for the most part. There was one scene where an aroused female character had nipples that were "hard as a rock" and I literally coughed reading that. Could you settle for an older cliché, Stevie?  That aside though, most of the metaphors and descriptions and pacing and flow were very well done.

The thing I hated was how much he gave away in advance. There were at least half a dozen times, in the buildup to a big scene, that a chapter ended with something like, "But Roland never imagined for a second that the one of his ka tet to fall might be him."  Those drove me crazy, since with that sort of foreshadowing the suspense is gone.

The authorial intrusions and metafiction-y stuff bothered me a great deal also. Not so much that King made himself a character in the story; that was sort of silly and the character study of King the character was vastly overdone (no one else in the entire novel gets half as much detailed analysis and psychological insight/profiling), but it made sense, so I can't really complain. No, what bothered me so much were the increasingly-common asides, often right in the middle of a narrative section, where King was breaking the 4th wall and talking right to the reader.  It's like something bad is about to happen, and suddenly the story vanishes and the words on the page are like, "Sorry guys, I'm about to write something you may not be able to forgive me for writing."

Literally, it says that right on the page, in the middle of the story. It was definitely the most blatant authorial intrusion I've ever seen, and it never failed to completely break the mood and suspension of disbelief.  I hated the technique, and I strongly disliked the way it was done. If I'd been editing every one of those type remarks would have been straight into the trash can.

Characters: 4
This one is my lowest score, and I could write a full blog-length essay about what went wrong here. Lots of other critics, readers of Amazon.com for instance, noted and disliked the way the language changed so much within the ka tet. Suddenly in book 5 Roland, Eddie, Jake, Susannah, and even Oy started talking in the Callah patois, throwing in expressions like, "if it do ya" and "cry thy pardon" and other such things. It didn't really bother me, even though it was strange for them to all pick up so much slang all of a sudden, after retaining their individual speaking mannerisms up until that point. Susannah especially, who was so proper and mannered initially.

That's a very minor point though, compared to how the characters left the book. Most left feet first, with excessive foreshadowing, but their method of death was almost never sufficient. Especially for the bad guys.

Eddie got killed by the lucky shot of some dying minor character, lingered for several days of additional sorrow and tear-jerking, then finally went out with one last burst of brilliant lucidity. Jake threw himself between Stephen King and the onrushing van, saving the idiot savant author of all the book's creation. Jake's death, while lame, was probably the best, since he came in when Roland's body failed him and by Jake's sacrifice all was saved. Still, being hit by a van driven by that drunken loser was no way for a gunslinger to go out.  Oy went out in combat, dying to save Roland from the amazingly-disappointing Mordred, but even his death was tainted by the stupid "thrown fifty feet to be impaled upon a tree branch" method, that let him die, after lasting long enough to give a few parting yips. The most disappointing of all though, was Susannah. She survives Eddie's death, outlasts Jake, saves Roland from Dandelo... and then has a few bad dreams and chooses to go through a door to nowhere just before reaching the Dark Tower, leaving Roland alone with Mordred on his heels and the Crimson King ahead. That's a gunslinger? I could not believe Susannah went out like such a pussy. Where the hell was Odetta when she needed some spine?  Some things, like saving the entire universe, are more important than seeing your boyfriend again, sweetie. I wanted Roland to leave her name off of the Dark Tower roll call, just for that.

The bad guys had exits that were even worse, if you can believe it. First of all, Flagg shows up. Evilest character in all of King's writing universe, memorable star of The Stand, demented scheming wizard of Eyes of the Dragon, creepy bit player in numerous other novels and constant nemesis throughout the DT series... and he appears from nowhere in DT7, tries to scheme Mordred, fails, and gets eaten.  In like 15 pages.  Flagg's death almost felt like King wrote the whole novel, forgotten Flagg completely, and then had to go back and write him in at the last minute when his editor picked up on it.

After Flagg we have Mordred, conceived of Roland's own millennium-old demonically-stored sperm, bizarrely-nurtured in Mia/Susannah, spawned for the sole purpose of killing his father... and he does nothing but eat Flagg and follow Roland for weeks while slowly starving, before growing fatally ill from food poisoning after eating a magical horse and nearly being owned by Oy in one on one combat before Roland guns his wounded spider ass down. For that we needed the two-book background plot of the pregnant Susannah, all that kidnapping shit through NY and then the Dixie Pig, the nightmare delivery room, the divine conception method, etc? Talk about all build up and no payoff.

The Crimson King was even worse. He'd been built up since the beginning of the Dark Tower series, he'd been mentioned all throughout King's other novels, he was the cause of the entire breaking of the world and near breaking of the Beams, and so on. And when they finally catch up with him he's foolishly abandoned his stronghold castle in needlessly gruesome fashion and is standing on a low balcony outside of the Dark Tower, with a box of guided missile grenades that Roland effortlessly shoots out of the air. Until he gets erased, except for his eyes, by the human deus ex machina, ArtistBoy, and is left standing out there, shooting his angry eyes in, for all eternity. Or something. If all the guy had was a loud voice, red skin, some mental powers, and access to futuristic weaponry, how the hell did he do so much damage for thousands of years in the first place?

My biggest gripe about the characters though, was that we never got any more stories of Roland's early days. I'd been looking forward to the story of Jericho Hill, the deaths of Cuthbert and Alain, more info about Roland's early years, more about how the Crimson King brought an end to Gilead, what Roland did with his mother's belt, etc, since about book two. And since there was nothing about any of that in DT7, I guess I'll go on waiting.

Horror: 4
There were a few gruesome moments, but never anything scary, despite numerous opportunities with the stalking Mordred. Not that any of the other DT books have really had much of a horror element, but since this is Stephen King I'm reviewing, I had to at least mention it.

Fun Factor: 5
I enjoyed the read, much more at the time than in retrospect, and I'm giving it points for having a powerful emotional effect on me, even if that's not exactly "fun." I don't think I've ever shed so many tears while reading a single book, and even though most them were jerked forth by sad scenes of the aftermath of gunslinger deaths, that still counts.  I definitely learned something about handling grieving characters and making readers sad from this, and it's given me something to think about, stylistically, when I arrive at the various tragic scenes in my ongoing fantasy novel.

Page Turner: 9
I didn't start reading it for a few days, and paused about a third of the way through it, but once I got past about page 300 I had to see how it turned out, and read it for many hours straight, finishing in just a couple of days a book I'd planned on reading no more than an hour a day.

Re-readability: 7
No desire to read it again now, but someday when I have lots of free time and deserve a reward, I'll read the whole series again, start to finish and probably get more out of book 7 the second time through.

Overall: 7
My initial reaction was to rate this one higher, since it brought the whole thing to a close and made me both happy and sad numerous times. In retrospect though, the character and plot choices annoyed me too much to give it a higher score.

The ending left me cold and anticlimaxed when I first read it, but after rereading the last 50 pages a week later and giving it some more thought, I'm a lot happier with it than I was at the time. As Malaya said to me, "How else could it have ended, with all we know about Ka being a wheel and the tower going on forever?"  She's got a point, but I would never have ended a novel in that way, knowing it would leave so many readers unsatisfied and wouldn't really conclude anything.

King's frequent in-book remarks about a story being a journey, not a destination is one way to look at things, but it's also a very convenient cop out for a writer who couldn't come up with an ending that was an actual ending, while still making sense.

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