I’m not very big on fantasy or horror fiction. The novels I read tend to reside in the contemporary mystery, thriller, crime and young adult genres. I like to read stuff that’s heavily based in reality and has very little to do with the supernatural. I went through a big Stephen King phase in my twenties though. That’s what eventually brought me to his magnum opus.
The Dark Tower series is about as realistic as Star Wars. The characters travel between alternate realities and time lines the way Luke, Han, and Leia bounce from planet to planet. The seven-book series is populated with wizards, witches, androids, vampires, giant lobsters, psychics, human-rodent hybrids, an omnipotent turtle, and a were-spider.
Oh yeah, and the final boss is a psychotic, apocalypse-crazed god dressed like Santa Claus.
It’s Stephen King’s epic poem of sorts. A tribute to everything he loves about fiction and all the themes and elements he played with throughout his career, which is likely the most successful career any novelist has ever enjoyed.
Many of the settings, themes, and secondary characters of The Dark Tower are pulled straight from other King novels like Salem’s Lot, The Stand, Eyes of the Dragon, It, Insomnia, Hearts in Atlantis, The Mist, and many others. While it would probably be classified by most readers in the fantasy/horror section, the series truly spans all literary genres, from adventure to western to suspense to mystery to romance to historical fiction. Hard emphasis on the word fiction.
I spent close to six months of long commuter rail rides and lunch breaks devouring these seven books. I can’t say it was the greatest reading experience of my entire life, but I’ll freely admit that I was engrossed in this series as much as virtually anything I’ve ever read. I started it on a whim, keen on the idea of launching a grand-scale reading adventure. Committing to it led me to sampling several types of fiction that I had no interest in exploring. Some of them I liked, while others were just as lame as I had always expected them to be. But I persevered through it all out of determination to finish what I started.
Here is my series breakdown of Stephen King’s crazy as fudge series, The Dark Tower.
The Gunslinger
Considering all of the lunacy that takes place over the course of these books, it’s pretty amazing to think that the first entry is mostly a creepy western with a modest handful of supernatural elements.
Roland Deschain pursues a maniacal villain in a black cloak named Walter across an apocalyptic wasteland that the world “moved on” from years ago. Roland is the last of the gunslingers, cowboy-knights of a feudal society that collapsed before he set out on his journey to find and defend the Dark Tower, the centerpiece that holds all of time, space, and reality together.
Why does Roland seek the Dark Tower? What does Walter have to do with it? Not even the gunslinger completely understands at first.
Roland is really good at shooting people, and he gets a whole bunch of practice in a town he passes through during the first installment of the series. Walter lays traps along Roland’s path, and the means Roland uses to evade those traps get more and more cuckoo as the saga continues.
This is a great way to start an epic series of novels, and I vividly remember starving to get into the second book once I completed this one.
The Drawing of the Three (Light Spoilers)
This ain’t a western anymore. The second book is a full-on acid trip that features Roland plodding along a beach discovering magical doorways that reveal his fated traveling companions for this quest. These companions are a heroin addict, a black female civil rights activist with multiple personality disorder, and an 11-year-old boy that actually “died” in the first book. Oh, and there are giant lobsters on the beach trying to eat everybody.
Did I mention that the only way Roland can recruit his teammates from their separate times and worlds (it’s like that show Sliders, but a lot sillier than that show Sliders) is to co-occupy their consciousnesses, save them all from murderous psychopaths (not just one murderous psychopath, but several) and convince them all to join him on his death-defying journey to save the universe from obliteration?
You know, that old chestnut.
The Waste Lands (Light Spoilers)
Roland’s avengers have been assembled, so it’s time to find the Tower.
First task: survive an encounter with an insane gigantic cyborg bear. A gigantic cyborg bear is pretty manageable, if you ask me. But a gigantic cyborg bear who has gone crazy? Check, please. Am I right?
Roland and Jake (the boy who died in book one but then un-died in book two) each suffer mental divides where their minds exist simultaneously in two different realities even though their bodies only exist in one, which just sucks. Then Roland’s friend Susannah is raped by a demon-ghost. Not just any demon-ghost, mind you, but the very same demon-ghost who raped Roland in book one! Pardon me while I burst, but that demon-ghost is the second worst Incubus ever.
On the bright side, the gunslingers find a cute pet dog/raccoon/badger thingy to keep them company as they maneuver through a dead city occupied by warring gangs of thugs who suffer from radiation poisoning.
But then there’s the down side. Have you ever boarded a monorail to escape the destruction of a city, only for that monorail to turn out to be a sentient, suicidal being who intends to kill itself and everyone on board by intentionally derailing at the next stop? In my personal experience, that’s always been a huge pain.
Pig and elephant DNA just don’t splice, but mental illness is transmissible between cyborg bears and talking monorails.
The more you know.
Wizard and Glass
If you didn’t know that insane, suicidal monorails couldn’t be neutralized by reciting childish riddles that don’t compute, I don’t know how you’ve made it this far in life. For no reason at all, surviving near-death experience 861 of this adventure encourages Roland to finally explain his lengthy backstory to his companions.
And thank God it did, because young Roland’s experiences as a spy looking to thwart a coup d’état of his father’s kingdom is a fascinating look at how politics, class relations, and revolution would look in a quasi-feudal society where knights shoot pistols and witches plot with elected officials. Yes, there’s witchcraft, dimensional holes, and other absurdities. But there’s also compelling strategy, a tragic love story, and many other hallmarks of truly entertaining literature.
This is by far the best book of the seven, but you can’t ignore the first three if you only want to read this one. The various payoffs that are gleaned from reading this entry are only made possible by trudging through all the craziness that has come before it.
Wolves of the Calla (Spoilers)
The circus comes back to town for the fifth novel, but I have to admit that I was pretty riveted to this edition. Maybe Wizard and Glass was so enjoyable that I carried all that good will through this book. There’s dream-walking and land deal negotiations with New York City mobsters intermingled with the defense of a farming village in a different dimension. Guess who Roland’s crew is defending the village from. No, seriously. Guess. I’ll wait.
If you guessed vampires … you’re right! Except they’re not really vampires. They’re actually robots. Robots who work for vampires.
The heroine with multiple personalities has a serious conflict with yet another new personality (that’s four total; two good and two evil), and then some of the characters from this book discover (to their horror) that they are actually characters! From books!
Song of Susannah (Spoilers)
I’m not gonna lie. Things get pretty weird here.
Remember the incubus that raped Roland in the first book and then raped Susannah (multiple personality lady) in the third book? Well, those two rapes resulted in Susannah being impregnated with Roland’s seed (because ghost science). Of all the demon-babies you could ever be impregnated with, Susannah is impregnated with the worst possible demon-baby.
We also have Stephen King making an appearance (because why the f*** not at this point?) as a lazy writer who has to finish writing The Dark Tower so Roland can actually save the Dark Tower. Can you imagine the fate of the actual universe hanging on George R. R. Martin’s ability to complete a story? We’d all be knee-deep in opiates and buffalo wings because the curtain on this show would be dropping soon.
The Dark Tower (Spoilers)
Mia, Susannah’s newest and evil-est personality, is actually amped to give birth to this demon-baby (because evil). Her consciousness is physically separated from Susannah’s and she is issued a body of her own (because vampire science). So at least Susannah doesn’t need an epidural.
The series finale gives us a vampire genocide by like page 10 and a newborn baby turning into a spider and eating its human mother by page 20. King was at full DGAF status here.
We find out why all the dimensions are falling apart (enslaved psychics, obviously), the man in black finally answers for all his crimes (which span about 60 of King’s 45,000 novels), there’s a shootout between the gunslingers and some mutant rodent henchmen, and the ending is arguably the lamest copout in literary history. We’ve read seven books to find out how this thing ends, and then we’re rewarded with the biggest kick to the wiener since Maggie shot Mr. Burns.
I swear this was originally intended to be a serious breakdown of The Dark Tower series. My memories of reading it are actually pretty enjoyable. But thinking back now and re-reading the summaries to refresh my memory have put into perspective just how screwy these books really are.
As King says in his coda before the final chapter, reading isn’t about seeing what happens at the end of the story. It’s about the journey you take to get there. I think that credo is one of the main themes of The Dark Tower. Then again, maybe King just understood that he’d never be able to end his magnum opus in a manner that would satisfy his readers. Maybe he just added that coda to give himself an out and try to make us feel stupid for expecting some grandiose ending that wrapped everything up perfectly.
All in all, I enjoyed reading The Dark Tower two decades ago. I felt a sense of accomplishment in completing the series, as a few of these books are really freaking long. But it’s not the kind of epic story that you can describe to others and strongly recommend without feeling a little silly. It’s one of those “You had to be there” scenarios.
The Gunslinger had me fiending for more, but then everything cascaded into WTF territory until Wizard and Glass, the true powerhouse of the series. Wolves of the Calla followed that up pretty decently, but I was ready for this thing to be over by the the time Song of Susannah came along. The Dark Tower ends things with a whimper, and the only real satisfaction you’re left with is akin to what you feel when you finish the Star Wars prequel trilogy.
Sure, you got through the whole thing. But was the juice really worth the squeeze?
