World Famous Comics: The Dark Tower (The Dark Tower, Book 7)
The Dark Tower (The Dark Tower, Book 7)
By: Stephen King Publisher: Pocket Average Rating: Binding: Mass Market Paperback Label: Pocket Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 1072 Publication Date: August 22, 2006 Release Date: August 29, 2006
Amazon.com: At one point in this final book of the Dark Tower series, the character Stephen King (added to the plot in Song of Susannah) looks back at the preceding pages and says "when this last book is published, the readers are going to be just wild." And he's not kidding.
After a journey through seven books and over 20 years, King's Constant Readers finally have the conclusion they've been both eagerly awaiting and silently dreading. The tension in the Dark Tower series has built steadily from the beginning and, like in the best of King's novels, explodes into a violent, heart-tugging climax as Roland and his ka-tet finally near their goal. The body count in The Dark Tower is high. The gunslingers come out shooting and face a host of enemies, including low men, mutants, vampires, Roland's hideous quasi-offspring Mordred, and the fearsome Crimson King himself. King pushes the gross-out factor at times--Roland's lesson on tanning (no, not sun tanning) is brutal--but the magic of the series remains strong and readers will feel the pull of the Tower as strongly as ever as the story draws to a close. During this sentimental journey, King ties up loose ends left hanging from the 15 non-series novels and stories that are deeply entwined in the fabric of Mid-World through characters like Randall Flagg (The Stand and others) or Father Callahan ('Salem's Lot). When it finally arrives, the long awaited conclusion will leave King's myriad fans satisfied but wishing there were still more to come.
In King's memoir On Writing, he tells of an old woman who wrote him after reading the early books in the Dark Tower series. She was dying, she said, and didn't expect to see the end of Roland's quest. Could King tell her? Does he reach the Tower? Does he save it? Sadly, King said he did not know himself, that the story was creating itself as it went along. Wherever that woman is now (the clearing at the end of the path, perhaps?), let's hope she has a copy of The Dark Tower. Surely she would agree it's been worth the wait. --Benjamin Reese
Product Description: Creating "true narrative magic" (The Washington Post) at every revelatory turn, Stephen King surpasses all expectation in the stunning final volume of his seven-part epic masterwork. Entwining stories and worlds from a vast and complex canvas, here is the conclusion readers have long awaited -- breath-takingly imaginative, boldly visionary, and wholly entertaining.
Roland Deschain and his ka-tet have journeyed together and apart, scattered far and wide across multilayered worlds of wheres and whens. The destinies of Roland, Susannah, Jake, Father Callahan, Oy, and Eddie are bound in the Dark Tower itself, which now pulls them ever closer to their own endings and beginnings . . . and into a maelstrom of emotion, violence, and discovery.
Download Description: "All good things must come to an end, Constant Reader, and not even Stephen King can make a story that goes on forever. The tale of Roland Deschain's relentless quest for the Dark Tower has, the author fears, sorely tried the patience of those who have followed it from its earliest chapters. But attend to it a while longer, if it pleases you, for this volume is the last, and often the last things are best. Roland's ka-tet remains intact, though scattered over wheres and whens. Susannah-Mia has been carried from the Dixie Pig (in the summer of 1999) to a birthing room -- really a chamber of horrors -- in Thunderclap's Fedic; Jake and Father Callahan, with Oy between them, have entered the restaurant on Lex and Sixty-first with weapons drawn, little knowing how numerous and noxious are their foes. Roland and Eddie are with John Cullum in Maine, in 1977, looking for the site on Turtleback Lane where ""walk-ins"" have been often seen. They want desperately to get back to the others, to Susannah especially, and yet they have come to realize that the world they need to escape is the only one that matters. Thus the book opens, like a door to the uttermost reaches of Stephen King's imagination. You've come this far. Come a little farther. Come all the way. The sound you hear may be the slamming of the door behind you. Welcome to The Dark Tower. "
The Low Water Mark DT7, for all the reasons already given in the other one-star reviews, is the low-water mark of King's career.
I thought he'd hit bottom with Dreamcatcher, the first King book I'd ever read with not a single character I gave a flying damn for, but DT7 is worse. It's even worse than DT6, which was worse than DT5.
I've long felt that IT, for all the book's many flaws, was the high water mark. So perhaps it's no accident that any real tie in with IT is pretty much absent from the Dark Tower series, despite the turtle talk.
Even though I cut the man some slack-- if I'd been shredded and pulped in a terrible accident and subjected to a year of incredibly painful rehab, I would certainly have been badly shaken and so preoccupied with my own mortality that I would have been in a rush to get the series over with too, and the pressure from his Constant Readers to finish it was obviously enormous. I've never been invested in this series the way many of King's fans are, so I didn't lose any sleep over the steady decline in quality that started to show its face after DT3.
There's no way to know how it would have turned out if the accident had never happened, but personally I think he simply over reached himself with the series. Character-driven fiction will only take you so far. It was enough to carry him through IT for over a thousand pages. But not enough to carry through seven volumes, even if every volume was not a doorstop.
He may not be through just yet. Dumas Key is not a great King book, but its a helluva lot better than a travesty like this.
What a ride. In reading this entire series, I could write a 10 page essay. I will spare you all that. This book is a greating ending to the series. It will explain just about everything and even tug on your heart-strings. So be prepared for the final roller coaster that is The Dark Tower Series.
Superb! I started reading the series 3 months ago, and have since not been able to put down any of the books. I read some of the reviews before every book (but not enough to spoil anything for me), and was starting to get nervous with some of the critisism I encountered. By the time I got to book 7, I was terrified it might suck. Fortunately, I was blown away with nothing but positive vibes for the ending.
SPOILER ALERT!!!!! Part of me wishes I had never read Coda (then my ending would have been the Tower door slamming shut behind Roland-which in my opinion would have been sweet enough). But, one has to finsh what they start, and so I read on (after 4000 plus pages, I wasn't going to stop so close to the end). It's kind of what I expected. That is, a bit of a downer with a possible positive (the horn). But WTF, that's a King novel. The ending had to be dark. Remember folks, its a Dark Tower, not a White Tower.
A big, big disappointment I finished the book Sunday evening, and today, Wednesday, I'm still upset about it. I hated a lot of things about this book, but three stand out: - Announcing Deus ex Machina in advance doesn't make it any better, and the large number of them is just mindboggling. - Many reviewers have complained about how easily the villains get dispatched that there's no need to go deeply into it. But Mordred somehow forgetting about the mental powers he used so efficiently to dispose of Flagg is beyond belief. - But what really bummed me out was the Dark Tower itself. The Dark Tower, the center of the universe, the thing that holds all the worlds together, turns out to be ... a freaking museum, dedicated to Roland Deschain by Stephen King! Unbelievable! Talk about lack of imagination. It's no surprise that Mr. King doesn't like endings, if he can't do better than that in the most important book of his career, his magnum opus.
Finally, I'm just mystified about the large number of five star reviews. I can't help but wonder how many of these originate from the publisher. I appeal to Amazon.com to either remove these reviews or mark them as biased if possible, even though it may reduce sales. It's only fair to the readers.
THE DARK TOWER by Stephen King The Dark Tower is the seventh and final novel in Stephen King's eponymous series. This is the longest book in the series by far, and it needs to be, after a bunch of nothing happened in Song of Susannah. After something of a slow start, the book picks up nicely, with a pace and urgency this series hasn't seen in quite a long time. For the first time in a long time, the Dark Tower is suspenseful.
The Dark Tower also marks the expected appearances of a cavalcade of characters from King's other works, as King (as he has stated) tries to tie practically his entire writing career together under the Dark Tower umbrella, and in that respect he does a fairly good job.
But The Dark Tower is far from perfect. This book is over the top in many ways - gruesome deaths and dismemberments, disgusting eating habits described in detail, and so forth. The "climaxes" at the end of the book are rather anticlimactic, as the resolution of the fates of three villains (Flagg, Mordred, and the Crimson King) are varying degrees of underwhelming. Many inexplicable and convenient developments occur, including but not limited to the handy teleportation seemingly available whenever needed. Deus ex machina is through the roof. King at one point even references his own use of it - and no, Mr. King, you don't "hide it well."
For the first time in the series, King shifts into first person narration here and there, and it's extremely jarring. He mostly uses it to comment on or excuse what's happening in the story: "Okay, someone's about to die, it's really sad, get ready, no, I don't really want them to die either, but it's out of my control, see?" In his author's note, he again refuses to take responsibility, saying the story goes where it wants to. This is true to an extent, but King has always run down the field with it.
Many readers were no doubt upset by the fates of many long-running characters. But the fate of a character always remains completely within the author's purview. If King says that's what happened to Character A, then that's what happened, and that's the breaks. How a character meets his or her fate (and how it is portrayed) has a lot more to do with whether the writer did a good job than whether or not the author killed such-and-such a character
As King himself says of this series in his author's note: "I know that not been entirely successful." This is quite true. But it has been successful more often than not, but not down the stretch, and not always when it counted.
All in all, The Dark Tower marks the end of an uneven, long-winded but worthwhile series that does not in any way compare to the classic epics like Tolkein's Lord of the Rings (which King the character compares the Dark Tower series to at one point).
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