I did a lot of Stephen King in 2018 – so much that I’m going to split him up into two posts, because it feels pretty unruly not to.
My big achievement is that (after a several year break) I finally finished King’s self-proclaimed magnum opus: The Dark Tower series. I had already read The Gunslinger and The Drawing of the Three, so I listened to the following last year:
The Waste Lands
Wizard and Glass
Wolves of the Calla
Song of Susannah
The Dark Tower
Of these seven books, I think I liked Wizard and Glass the most, followed closely by Wolves of the Calla. Overall, I loved the series. At first, I didn’t think I would.
Roland Deschain – the last gunslinger and, arguably, our main protagonist – is not, at first, a very likable hero. He is singularly focused on his quest for the Dark Tower (it’s a place that holds all the worlds of the universe together), and it doesn’t matter who gets hurt on the way as long as Roland is successful in his quest. It was going to be a very long series if Roland was going to be a dick the whole time.
Roland is in a different world than ours, but he can travel to ours. In his quest for the tower, he pulls Eddie, Susannah, and Jake from different times in New York into his own world and timeline. Eddie is from the 1980s, Susannah is from the 1960s, and Jake is from the 1970s. Together, along with the billybumbler Oy, the ka-tet travels through MidWorld towards the Dark Tower. The Tower is the center of all creation, and Roland wants to question whatever god or being is there. So, the ka-tet tries to prevent it from being destroyed by The Crimson King.
It’s not a simple story, but it is a compelling one. There’s also plenty of room to add to it, should King so choose.
By the end, as Roland comes to care more and more about the members of his ka-tet rather than just his quest, he is quite the lovable hero – at least to me. His capacity to change was his best quality.
The only part of this series I was less than floored by was the part where King inserted a fictionalized version of himself as a plot element. Yes. He. Did. King had been in a near fatal accident not long before writing the events of the final two (three?) books and the series takes a couple of weird twists (I think) because of it.
For those who don’t know where to start with Stephen King, this series is probably the best place. There are references to this series in King’s other works (including IT, Salem’s Lot, and Hearts in Atlantis among others) and the series serves as the pinnacle of his multiverse.
In spite of some twists I didn’t particularly like, including the self-insert, the series was a great way to spend the summer. I listened to a lot of this series during marathon efforts at the gym. The only book of this series I didn’t do in 2018 was Wind Through the Keyhole, but I’ll listen that one eventually too.
“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”
words in scarlet ink 