"The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed."
Stephen King's The Dark Tower series is considered to be his magnum opus. It is an epic fantasy tale that stretches across the span of seven novels and tells the tale of Roland Deschain, the last of the gunslingers (an order of knights of sorts who also work as diplomats who utilize special Sandalwood Revolvers) and his journey to the Dark Tower, a massive spire that stands at the centre of all creation and supported by six beams; if the Tower collapses, so does the universe. The main concept is very fascinating and the world is extraordinarily well built; everything has a long and complicated history and king even invented his own language known as "High Speech", which is mainly English but there is an entire vocabulary of words and phrases to go along with it (it's nowhere near complex as Tolkien's Elvish, but still extremely impressive).
Stephen King really created an entirely mythology of gods and monsters for his universe and even though they only feature prominently (as the main setting and background), it does seep into other universes and more or less every King novel seems to take place in the same universe or are very much interconnected; for example, Derry (the setting for IT) and Castle Rock (the setting for Needful Things) are in the same universe as Shawshank Prison. But there are alternate universes; for example, in one universe 11/22/63 happens while in another universe The Stand happens and Reagan and Bush Sr. are dead. And because Randall Flagg AKA the Dark Man AKA Walter o'Dim is in a lot of these books, he kind of connects them all in a weird way. There are also a ton of references to different books. For example, Father Callahan is a character from Salem's Lot, but Salem's Lot is also a book in another world (that world is meant to be "our" world). Pennywise isn't in the books but his arch nemesis the Turtle (AKA Maturin) is a pretty important figure, and we get a monster named Dandelo who is very similar to Pennywise in many ways.
One thing I really love about this book is that there really isn't a single genre attached to it. Yes, the main genre is epic high fantasy, but King will also tell you himself that it's a Western as well (well duh considering the main character is inspired by Clint Eastwood). But on top of that, it's definitely science fiction to some degree, it's definitely horror, mystery, action, adventure, cyberpunk (I'm not familiar with the actual genre at all but from my understanding it's basically futuristic machinery in a weird apocalyptic setting), definitely dystopian, and even romance. It's all fused together extremely well, so it was a lot of fun reading all the different genres.
So now I've given you the basic point of The Dark Tower novels, here is how I would personally rank the Dark Tower books.
My Dark Tower Ranking:
- The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands
- The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three
- The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah
- The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger
- The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower
- The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla
- The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass
While I understand why so many people love the Dark Tower series, I wasn't the biggest fan of it. It's still great since it's written by King, but towards the end I think things get too complex and intertwined that as a reader you begin to lose focus on the direction of the story. It's a very compelling story overall, but I personally found (like I do with many of Stephen King's books) that it does drag often in places. That being said, despite the drags, the well-written scenes are REALLY well-written in my opinion. So overall, it shares the same strengths and flaws of any king story; well-written characters and an interesting plot but the narrative tends to drag in places and can be overly descriptive, but the well-written scenes are brilliant and it's a masterful blend of multitudes of genres overall.
So now, I'm going to go over each of the books very briefly and just talk about the strong points and weak points of each entry and what I personally felt about it.
The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger is an alright book. It serves mainly as an introduction to everything, so it's not the most exciting book and is more basic (the universe is not built up much and the characters still aren't fully developed). It's also one of the two shortest books in the series so there is a limited amount of time you can technically tell the story in. That being said, it does have a very good action in it where Roland kills an entire town of people and the Man in Black (Walter) just being delightfully malicious. This is also where we begin to see that Roland is not your usual hero; he's not a very nice person in general and he actually lets a child DIE because of how obsessed he is with finding the Tower. It's not badly written or anything but there's nothing too special about it.
The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three is my second favourite book of the series. The book never drags and it's paced extremely well. We are introduced to the amazing character of Eddie Dean, who is definitely my favourite character in the Dark Tower series. King also has some really great tense, exciting action scenes throughout the book. Eddie also goes through this entire process of recovering from his cocaine addiction (something that King also dealt with) and the readers are treated to his agonizing fight against withdrawal and we eventually get the transformation of Eddie from this annoying jackass to this wise-cracking guy. There's also a really out-of-nowhere romance thrown in between Eddie and Odetta/Susannah (and they get married like right away) and I honestly didn't like it too much cause it felt a little out of nowhere. But overall, a great book with some great action and great characters.
The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands is probably my favourite book out of them all. It has a lot of great character development and it provides a lot of great world-building. The villains in this book are so creatively done, there are some great action, and this is really the first time I really think the reader gets to see how big and complicated the universe King's built. Overall, I really have nothing bad to say about this book; the characters really begin to feel like real people by this point and the plot moves on at a pretty good pace. The world really feels real with his complex history, language and culture; it's nowhere near anything that Tolkien created of course, but it's still a really well-built world. Overall, just a great book in the series that did a lot of things well for me.
The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass is the weakest book in the series in my opinion. I know a lot of people like it because of the well-written romance they say is in the book, but I honestly really hated the romance. I liked that it made connections to The Stand, but that's about it. The characters and the worldbuilding are still very good, but the plot I find to be really boring, ESPECIALLY the romance plot. A lot of people say this is their favourite, but I personally don't see it.
The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla is another weak book for me. The action scenes during the battle are really great and the characters are also good, but the buildup to the battle does drag on for quite a while and gets boring fast. One great thing I will say are the wolf-faced Doctor Doom robots with lightsabers and Snitch grenades, which are a thing in this book, so that was pretty cool. But the buildup to the battle personally dragged on too much for me.
The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah is fast-paced, has a lot of action, has a lot of plot revelations, and is just weird. I liked it. It's very short in comparison to the other books but starts right off with a great action scene. It also has a really interesting character that I won't mention right now but down in the character sections that make this book incredibly metafictional. But overall, really great book.
The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower is not a bad book, but it's one of the weaker Dark Tower books. There are a lot of great moments, with my favourite being Dandelo and the crazy ending. But once again, the book does drag on in quite few places and King has jam packed so much stuff into his lore at this point that things get hard to keep track. This book also just has a lot of disappointing deaths with the villains; my favourite character Randall Flagg goes down with no fight, the ever-present threat Mordred dies of... food poisoning, and the Crimson King is well... I'll talk more about him later. That being said, I LOVED the ending. It's a frustrating ending that a lot of people won't like, but I personally really liked it.
Now, I will be talking a bit about the main characters of the series and other characters that I really liked or found interesting.
Roland Deschain is a great character and a hero simply because he's not a hero. Sure, he's the protagonist and we're more or less always rooting for him to win and reach the Dark Tower, but he's not particularly a good person. He's not exactly the nicest even to his fellow travellers and he makes a lot of morally ambiguous and even downright evil decisions (like letting a young boy die to chase after Flagg). Roland isn't your traditional chivalric knight who does what's good and beats out the darkness within him; as a matter of fact, he does the opposite quite a lot. And that's the beauty of his character: he could easily have been an Aragorn, but he's more of a Boromir than anything; he still does good things, but he's deeply flawed and he lets his flaws take over him. It's a brilliant characterization of a protagonist on the part of King; his hunt for the Dark Tower is nothing but an addiction that he can't shake and he becomes destructive as a result.
Eddie Dean is 100% my favourite character of the series. I always lot wise-cracking characters in books and movies, so it was a no-brainer I would like him. Eddie really has a lot going for him; he's an underdog who really beats his drug addiction to become a hero in his own right. He balances Roland out well as a character too; Roland is constantly serious and a bit grumpy, so Eddie's jokes and moments of levity not only balances out the scenes but even makes Roland a more social person as a result.
Susannah Dean/Holmes was an interesting character too. I personally didn't get any of her split personality stuff and why she went from being Odetta to Susannah, but she has a very interesting character. She almost feels like a plot device to a degree to get Mordred become a non-threat in the final book, but I can't really remember anything particularly great about her. that stood out.
Jake Chambers was a great character. He's a child who has a lot of responsibility thrust on him at a young age, but he takes the responsibility well. One gripe I do have with him is that he just accepts that he's meant to be part of Roland's group a little TOO easily. He doesn't even care much that he's leaving home or that he might even die, and I kind of thought that was a little too unrealistic.
Oy the Billy-Bumbler is literally a pet dog-racoon thing that follows Jake around but he becomes a memorable character in his own right. He doesn't really do much in terms of plot important but he's so well characterized that I really liked him.
Father Don Callahan is another interesting character who I don't remember much of. He has a great backstory, but I can't for the life of me remembering him that much very well. He's always very serious and takes his job seriously, but that's about it from what I can remember.
Walter o'Dim/Walter Padick/Randall Flagg is such a great character still. He is malicious, he's charismatic, and he's even likable to some degree. Interestingly enough, Flagg is set up as a big threat in the Dark Tower books in the first one, but he's not in it all that much. He still causes troubles for Roland and the group here and there, but his presence is weirdly restrained for a lot of it. As much as I didn't like the Dark Tower movie, the way they portrayed Flagg there as a constant threat in Roland's life I thought was better done. I was also very disappointed at the lack of a final showdown between him and Roland, but that's another way King subverts expectations; you're not going to get a proper "final confrontation" like you want. But still, Flagg dies so unceremoniously that it's just sad.
The Crimson King is a great example of the biggest weakness of King villains; they work the best when they're an unknown threat. The way his presence constantly looms over everyone really built his character up great as this Sauron-type Dark Lord (I mean his symbol is a giant red eye for crying out loud). But when he's revealed, he's this really underwhelming senile old man. I don't know if King writes his villains this way on purpose to show you that "true evil isn't real" or whatever, but the villains come out disappointing so much of the time. The Crimson King is built up so well as this feared figure, but when he's revealed, it's just really disappointing and ruined what could've been a really good "final battle".
Stephen King (yes, THAT Stephen King) is an actual character in the book. Yep, King inserted himself into his own books where he apparently has to write the Dark Tower books for Roland to survive (don't ask, it's really weird). That being said, I really liked King in the book and his addition was really weird but kind of brilliant in a weird way.
Mordred Deschain is an extremely pointless character. A good chunk of the final book is dedicated to Mordred killing Roland, but he just doesn't cut a very intimidating figure. He doesn't really have a great build-up and he doesn't do anything that significant; yes, he kills Flagg and a few other characters, but his overall role felt so pointless to the story and he was a pointless character.
Dandelo is only in the final book for a very short amount of time but I thought he was a great villain and he could've been the main villain of an entire King book. He's this Pennywise-like vampire that drains people's life away while he makes them laugh and the whole section of the book that he's in is absolutely terrifying and creepy. He's probably the best antagonist in the entire series and it's a shame he's only in the book for such a short amount of time.
SUMMATIVE THOUGHTS:
Overall, I thought it was a very well-written series. It dragged on often in places and I didn't enjoy every book, but the ending (which I will NOT be touching in this review with a 10-foot-pole) was SO worth it even thought it still frustrates me to this day. King really shows his versatility as an author here; his worldbuilding is impeccably well done, his action scenes are fantastic, and every single character he writes are so full of depth and complex. That being said, it's not his strongest work. Maybe it's because I'm not the biggest fan of fantasy (and I especially don't like a series with long books) but I found that this was one of his weaker works; his villains are surprisingly lacklustre and it drags on in a lot of places. Like I always say in my King reviews; I think he's at his best when he writes short books, so my enjoyment of these books were... minimal. That being said, it's still Stephen King so it's full of really great moments and I did enjoy them for the most part.
I doubt I'm going to revisit these books again for a while, but I'm sure I'll get to them again eventually. Overall, they're still pretty good books that I think a fantasy fan can enjoy and any Stephen King fan will definitely enjoy them.
For my next review, I'm going back to Doctor Who with David Tennant and the Tenth Doctor. As always, thank you for reading my blog, and I always will enjoy hearing from all of you, so if you have any comments, feedbacks, opinions, suggestions, etc., please feel free to comment, and I WILL respond to ALL comments!
