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| Tuesday, July 11, 2006 11:15 AM |
| In the court of the crimson king |
 by Fëanor |
I'm reading Stephen King's final Dark Tower book. Complaints follow, with perhaps a few minor spoilers.
I think what's bugging me about some of these later books is that, earlier on in the series, in The Gunslinger and Drawing of the Three, there was a sense of there being a set of rules underlying everything that was happening. And maybe sometimes you didn't know the rules, or quite why they were the way they were, but you felt like they were there and they were firm and unwavering and made their own kind of internal sense. When the Gunslinger caught up with Walter, he had defeated him in a sense, so Walter was forced to tell him his fortune. Okay. That makes a kind of sense. It's like a fairy tale rule.
But now, in these final books, it doesn't feel that way anymore. It just feels like King is flailing desperately about, trying to make his story work, and ridiculously unbelievable things happen randomly so he can force the plot along. In one sequence, he has his characters suddenly float up in the air while they're driving along in a truck, and then they teleport to two other locations in two other worlds and intervene at important moments to help their friends (while floating naked and incorporeal above their heads). The main character explains all of this by pulling some new term out of thin air and coming up with a flashback where it's defined. Um, lame! That makes no sense, and it's just weak writing.
I also really felt King flailing at the beginning of this book. At the end of the last one, he'd carefully set Roland and Eddie on their way, seemingly having taken care of the rather silly Tet Corporation plotline, and he'd apparently finished working with the character named John Cullum (although admittedly he did leave a hint or two that Cullum might return). In the beginning of this book, he has Eddie suddenly realize that they're not done after all with the Tet Corporation, and drags Cullum back into the story. It just feels like a desperate attempt by King to wrap up something he'd forgotten to really close off completely in the previous book.
King can make unbelievable things believable, but for me he's failing at it more and more as the series goes on. One of the plotlines I had a particularly hard time swallowing is the Tet Corporation plotline. Here we're supposed to believe that a couple of crazy looking guys claiming they're from another world can convince some other guys to help them create a huge corporation, buy a vacant lot with a flower in it, and then protect the vacant lot, the flower, and the corporation from other huge multi-national corporations. Um, yeah, okay.
I also don't like that Randall Flagg, who has reappeared throughout King's books, including this series, as pretty much an ultimately evil and incredibly powerful being, has suddenly become clumsy, stupid, and afraid. WTF? You just ruined The Stand, King. You ruined the whole book. |
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