Roland at the Tower

I do not aim with my hand. He who aims with his hand has forgotten the face of his father.
I aim with my eye.

I do not shoot with my hand. He who shoots with his hand has forgotten the face of his father.
I shoot with my mind.

I do not kill with my weapon. He who kills with his weapon has forgotten the face of his father.
I kill with my heart.

At long last, I've completed Stephen King's Dark Tower series. The 7 books run about 4500 pages all told, and are a serious undertaking. I would advise you to know what you're committing to prior to deciding to take on this much volume. Is it worth it? It's hard to say, frankly. The series has it's ups and downs, and doesn't end as strongly as one would wish. However, if you're a King fan, he views this as the story that connects all of his stories into a larger thread, and is probably required reading for a full understanding of his work.

It's hard for me to be too critical of the series. After you have spent this much time committed to any endevour, I think it's natural to want to find worth in what you've engaged in. Looking back and surveying my feelings about the books as I read them, I generally felt entertained, but that the stories were not the amazing literary gems that some online would contend. I can pretty much extrapolate this opinion from each individual book to the series as a whole. I will defend it as an enjoyable and complex epic, but I will not make the case that it is more than the sum of it's parts. It's not.

Two points specific to the final book in the series, entitled simply The Dark Tower. I agree with other critics that the villains that have been up throughout the over 1000 pages of this novel are dispatched of with almost ridiculous ease. The Man in Black, Mordred, and the Crimson King all given long mytholgies (the Man in Black extending all the way back to The Stand, before the Dark Tower series even began) but are written out of the story in the course of a few paragraphs. An inadequate demise, I felt. There are also those who complain about the actual ending and what Roland finds in the Tower. I won't give it away, but I will say that I found the conclusion to be satisfactory. Like many others, I was antipating, but also dreading, what Roland might find in the last room at the top of the Tower; King's ending feels right to me. If you don't like it, you should have taken his advice, where he says plainly that readers may not like what is coming and pleads with us not to continue, and quite reading before the last 20 pages of the book.

The series has plenty to recommend it: tension, fun characters, good action sequences, and a meticulously imagined alternative world that is fascinating. But it is also full of unlikely coincidence, unexplainable intuition, and deus ex machina. Take it for what it is. Ka is a wheel; time is a face on the water.

I am glad that I am done with this, and will have a little more freedom to read other authors now, though I do intend to go on reading King's other stand alone works. I still think the haters out there are terribly unfair to King, an author that is undeniably fun to read and sometimes achieves greatness. He certainly is unafraid to take risks, as this series proves.