The Dark Tower reactions

[Dream]

I finished reading The Gunslinger and The Drawing of the Three and thought that were good. I've been watching a bunch of westerns lately so this series seemed appealing.

The Gunslinger was good but felt really jumbled. I learned that it was first published over several years in a magazine so I guess that explains it. There really wasn't any very memorable characters besides Roland in it. It was mostly world building and the ending was a little anticlimatic. The best parts about it were Roland's flashbacks. 7/10

The Drawing of the Three was much better. We finally got some interesting characters besides Roland. The book starts out like a horror novel with Roland nearly getting killed. It was clever how King depowered Roland for most of the book by giving him several big injuries and having his guns not work half of the time. Eddie is cool and his chapters were some of my favorites. There were the two very cool shootouts in the middle of the book and near the end when King decides to showoff Roland's extreme badassness. The only bad thing I could say about it was that it was entirely about Roland's new sidekicks and the main plot about the Tower didn't move at all but the new characters were good additions. I hope they stay through the entire series. 8/10

When I started reading the books I pictured Roland looking exactly like Eastwood's bounty hunter character did in the Sergio Leone westerns. They even wear the same brown poncho in my head. I wished they had made The Gunslinger into a movie with Eastwood as Roland in the 80s.

Anyone else a fan of the series?

 

[S. Gomez]

I'm reading it myself, and I'm at practically the same point you are.

 

[john titor]

hoho, how partial are you to spoilers, no matter how minor???

Great idea, mediocre execution overall imo. I love the artwork though and I was obsessed with the books at the time. They constituted the literary companion to my college experience. Ah good times.

 

[DonIago]

Much like LOST, the series starts out appearing to be one thing and then it becomes a whole bunch of other things.

Wizard and Glass is probably my least favorite of the series due to its narrative form (this is me avoiding spoilers), but at the same time it has one of my favorite sections of the entire series, though I wish more had been done with it.

Enjoy your trip!

 

[Mr Light]

Enjoy the third book because after that it's all downhill. The third is actually my favorite, it's the most coherent and epic and action packed. The fourth one is a travesty, and 5-6-7 are an improvement but a very frustrating and anti-climactic conclusion. It's a shame because the first three books promise a very interesting story... but the last three veer off into a completely different direction. I think this is a mark of the number of years that passed between the first three books and the rest. A full twelve years passed between 3 and 5.

 

[DonIago]

Agreed on the direction change, but I don't know if I'd agree that 5-7 are generally downhill from 1-3. I mean to, one of these days, read them from the beginning, but that won't be happening anytime soon.
Really, even the lesser of the books have parts that are very good...at least as far as I can remember, it's been a while since I cracked them open.

 

[Mr Light]

Ending aside, my main complaint is that every single villain established as some terrifying otherworldly power in the first book (and the third to some extent) turned out to be completely ridiculous and weak. And thus the conflict of the story is undermined because the adversaries aren't the equal of the hero.

 

[Alpha_Geek]

I enjoyed the entire series.

Ka is a wheel.

 

[john titor]

Wizard and the Glass was ok, it was entertaining but it rudely disrupted the pace of the series. Book 5, well lets just say nothing happens in 5, in fact for the first 100 pages, its just about them walking waiting for Stephen King to actually come up with a plot. Book 6 and 7, I like the idea, but its executed in such a confused and messy way that it becomes nonsensical and annoying. Oh and the ending

 

[biotech]

When you get to the end of book four, you can pretty much stop right there.

 

[Akiraprise]

I enjoyed the entire series.

Ka is a wheel.

As did I.

I'm still hoping for a film adaptation, as long as King is involved with it.

 

[McCoy]

I don't think it could be a film. A mini-series probably.

 

[Admiral James Kirk]

When you get to book 7 and King warns you to quit there... I beg you.. For your father's sake... Cry off! Cry off and be happy! There are just some things man was not meant to know....

 

[Dream]

I read the next two books The Waste Lands and Wizard and Glass.

SPOILERS for the Waste Lands and Wizard and Glass obviously.



The Waste Lands: This book was awesome. I loved all the built up from in the first half with Jake, the creepy children's book Charlie the Choo-Choo, and the drawing of the fourth door. In the second part the journey through the city of Lud was fun and Blaine the crazy train is such a cool character. The ride through the Waste Lands was really intense. The book had one hell of a cliffhanger ending. I really didn't have any complaints. 9/10


Wizard and Glass: I liked the book but it went on for too long and felt like it could have been chopped in half. I loved The Stand and It and both were over 1000 pages long so it's not like I have a problem with very long books. The story could have been about anything since King was doing a flashback tale. I wanted to learn more about who John Farson was, a bigger idea about the civil war from the perspective of the gunslingers, and Roland's early life in Gilead. The story of the Civil War with Farson in Roland's world could have easily filled several books. Instead we got young Roland and his friends stuck in the small town for much of it.

We also got Roland screwing around with Susan. Susan herself wasn't that interesting to me. If a woman had written this book I would thought Susan was a complete Mary Sue. Susan was incredibly beautiful, had the tragic past, intense relationship with the main character, and sad ending. Also there was too much sex. We get it. Roland and Susan have the hots for each other. The Wizard of OZ stuff was really silly. It's cool when King uses character and settings he created but feels really out of place when he does stuff with works from other authors.

I liked the stuff with Blaine and visting the world of The Stand at the start of the book. Roland's friends Cuthbert and Alain were cool. 7/10

 

[Mr Light]

#3 is my favorite book in the series. #4 is my least favorite. It's nothing more than one huge flashback which isn't particularly important in any way and doesn't really show the main villains or show the important parts of Roland's backstory. I for one could care less about him falling in love as a teenager and dealing some unimportant thugs.

 

[CaptJimboJones]

I love, love, love this series. Every word of it. Even the ending, which I thought was utterly perfect and was absolutely in keeping with the spirit of the series. I'm in the minority, of course (DT readers are as bad as Trek and SW fans when it comes to picking the things apart) but I just don't have a lot of complaints about any of the books.

I'd also recommend the Gunslinger Born graphic novels for anyone who needs an additional "Dark Tower" fix. The first is basically a retelling of flashbacks from the first and fourth novels, but its beautifully done. And the second is a new story about what happened with Roland's Ka-tet after they left Mejis.

 

[Gojirob]

I second that emotion.

 

[Nardpuncher]

(we need a smiley with a shovel digging up old threads)


I just finished book 7 20 minutes ago and searched here to see what people thought.

I guess we'll keep it spoiler free.

I didn't mind the ending and I found the last 3 books to feel pretty much the same as the first 4, which is where many readers see a division in the quality.
I wonder if anyone out there has any better ideas on what could've happened at the end.

Maybe I had no problem as I started book one back in November 2009, and read them all in a row and finished today, February 2nd 2010 so I don't have any of that nostalgia for the first few (the first one came out over 20 years ago, the second book in 1987, the third in 1991) and if you're my age or close to it (I'm 36) then you may have read the first few books when you were 16 or 17 whatever and thus may have more nostalgia.

 

[LitmusDragon]

I like the ending. I'm not sure how else he was supposed to end it. I mean, the George Lucas type ending wouldn't really have worked in the context of this universe, would it?

Spoiler: certain character

I thought some of the chances he took in the last few books were really gutsy. I mean, writing himself into the story? wtf? I think it worked in the context of the books however.

The seventh book has one of my favorite sequences in the entire series in it-- the part where Roland and Susan take the underground passage beneath the ruined city. Wonderfully creepy.

I do tend to think that the third book in the series was my favorite, but you may very well be right about the nostalgia factor. I first read it when I was in high school.