The Dark Tower Synopsis and General Badmouthing

For what it's worth, anyway...

Don't get too attached to that Tower, buddy.

Decades ago, one Stephen King published a little story called The Gunslinger and the Dark Man in a little periodical known as "The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction". This story appeared in the November issue in 1981. I was 2 months old. In 1982, the whole text was published under the name The Gunslinger. The story was the literary equivalent of choking down a glass of warm beer--in many ways better than the marketed majority but still almost an acquired taste. It was gritty, it was cruel, and it was sharp. Roland was a hard-ass par excellence--no one could out-gun him, no one could be more disconnected from affection, no one could match his sheer will and determination. He guns down an entire town at one point and the extent of his wounds he patches up with a strip of cloth and taking it easy for a few hours. At the end of the book, he comes to his climax--he sacrifices a young, wayward boy to achieve his nemesis--the Man in Black. Said Man explains something so mind-busting about the universe to the gunslinger that 10 years goes by in what feels like a single night. Roland, now in possession of one more bit of information regarding his life-long quest, continues on.

I'd be crying, too, Mr. Dean. Especially knowing how this ends up for you.

In 1987 the second volume of this tale, The Drawing of the Three, knocked the heads of readers around upon its release. Roland, within the opening 15 pages, is horribly mutilated by a sea-borne "lobstrocity" thing--kinda like a lobster-monster. Well, he stomps its ass and gets on his way. He lost the first two fingers on his good hand and a toe to this fuckin' Red Lobster plot device gone mad, but does he cry around and puss-out? Fuck no. He wraps more of his dirty shirt around the pulsing, mutilated members and keeps walking, little knowing nor caring that he's been doused with a lethal poison. Along the way up this beach (we'll leave the geographical inconsistencies out the door), Roland runs afoul a series of "magic" doors. Each door takes him inside someone occupying a different place in our world, Earth. Eddie Dean is a 21 year old heroin addict smuggling shit into New York from the 1980s. Odetta Walker is a schizophrenic crippled black woman from the 1960s. Its a laugh a minute </sarcasm> as he quickly kidnaps each of these people and hauls them into his emptied-out, vast, and impersonal landscape. In the third door he enters a serial killer, one who has affected Odetta twice in her life as well as being responsible for the boy (from the first book) having been around in the first place. Roland is forced to either kill Jake (that's the boy) with "his own" hands or let him live. He begins his long walk down the road to ineffectuality as he lets fate slide and creates a paradox in his mind by letting Jake live, in short meaning that Jake was never there for Roland to sacrifice in the first place.

Long story short, the gunslinger recruits two more people into his one-man death squad with the intention to turn them both (a crashing heroin addict and a legless cripple) into super-slaughterin' motherfuckers. There's a bit of dialogue at the end during which the gunslinger basically tells Eddie Dean that nothing will stand in the way of his quest for the Dark Tower, not loved ones, friends, those in need, nothing. Nice guy--doesn't give a shit what these two are here for so long as they're here to help him achieve this impossible quest.

In 1991 something amazing happened: The Wastelands was published. I (to this day) don't think I've read a story that embodied unreality and apocalyptic imagery as well as this tale. It was awesome. After Eddie finally kicks the monkey off his back and Susannah (Odetta, now cured of her schizm since the end of tDot3) learns how to shoot fairly well, the group (collectively called a "ka-tet", meaning one from many) is attacked by a gargantuan robotic bear! Well, they kick its ass, back-trail it to this lost-tech tunnel of absolution and darkness called by Roland "the Portal of the Bear", and then Roland explains the Dark Tower for all the readers at home. From the Portal of the Bear the ka-tet moves along the Beam--an invisible support for the Dark Tower itself. With the combined efforts of Eddie (intuitively carving a wooden key), Jake (on our side of the fence since he wasn't killed), Susannah (raped by a demon in the process), and this inescapable (and now highly attuned to) sense of destiny called "ka", young Jake is drawn once again into Roland's world. From here, the ka-tet moves on to the town of River Crossing where Roland receives a silver cross from Aunt Talia to lay at the base of the Dark Tower when he reaches it. The ka-tet moves on again and, coming upon a terrible and great abandoned city the three Earth-born members recognize the George Washington Bridge and the (somewhat) familiar skyline of New York City. Within this city called Lud, the gunslingers discover the remnants of a haggard and lost society. They do battle with both the Grey and the Pubes and, by the end of it all, have to outwit a pyschopathic A.I. monorail named 'Blaine'. This story has it all--fantasy, post-apocalypse sci-fi, gunfights, great characters, great imagery, all of it. In the closing scenes of Lud, the antagonist of this portion of the story (Tick-Tock Man, currently dying from a gunshot wound to the head) is met in his dying breaths by Randal Flagg. YES! The antagonist from the unbelievable story The Stand, published by King in 1978, reveals himself at last! But that's only a taste, excruciating as it might be, and we are left with the ka-tet having to play a riddle-game with a maniacal monorail. Here's where I come in. I read these books in the space of about a month and waited eagerly for the 4th volume to come out.

Aunt Talia bequeathing upon Roland her silver cross. I guess such a gesture signifies "miserable sucker" among the old folks of River Crossing.

Two great images from The Wastelands. Too bad Stephen King forgot about the lower picture there.. yeah... the picture of the Wastelands.

Blaine the Mono racing at super-sonic speeds over the blasted landscape called only 'the Wastelands' by those who have seen it. If only they were still part of the geography of Mid-World...

Just because things are always getting worse doesn't mean they were better in the past.

Warning, this is seriously the last good story in the tale.

And then, in 1997, it happened. Keith and I raced to what was it...? Waldenbooks? Yeah. We raced there at different times in the day to get this book and I had the bitch read in a day-and-a-half. Fuckin' awesome for three reasons:

• The ka-tet manages to overcome Blaine's homicidal intentions thanks to Eddie's "unorthodox" jokes. The aftermath of this victory is swiftly soured after the ka-tet discovers that they've returned to a plague-ruined Earth. Randal Flagg, anyone? Here is the first connection between Flagg and the Crimson King (the antagonist from Insomnia, and presumably the "root" the the Beast, IT, from well... It).

• The proximity of a reality-wear called a "thinny" prompts Roland's gradual disclosure of the first motivations for his endless quest. We see Roland as a youth after his fight with Cort (see the first novel), we see his first love, and his first ka-tet. We see the beginning of his hard heart, the end of the Baronies (the last vestiges of civilization [Order]), and his long march towards the Dark Tower.

• We see the beginning of the last leg of the journey after a startling encounter in a great Emerald Palace in the midst of Interstate 70 in Kansas. Here, they run afoul the Tick-Tock Man again, and he is quickly dispatched. His rescuer, however, is not so easy a catch, and Roland's mis-draw costs him a possible kill on this being known as the Ageless Stranger.

At the end of this tale we are informed that the ka-tet nears a terrible-sounding land called "Thunderclap", the land before the Dark Tower. Well, here's the end of the story. From here on out it's all... I dunno... a different story. Anyway...

In 2003 the herald of the end of the epic was published. Don't get me wrong, Wolves of the Calla was a great story--still enough ties to the original ideas to only blink once or twice while reading it, a few too many "little" nods to modern cultural items (Dr. Doom and  sneetches) but whatever, we can get by. In this tale, the ka-tet runs across a small cluster of civilization (yeah, that thing that was supposed to have fallen with the demise of Gilead, Roland's home) known as the Callas. You figure out how to pronounce it. Long story short, the people of the Calla Bryn Sturgis are worried that the Wolves will soon be coming to rob them of their children. Their priest (the Pere) just so happens to be our old friend Don Callahan--the failed priest from 'Salem's Lot and for whatever reason his fate is intrinsically tied in with that of the ka-tet. Here's the deal--the Wolves steal one of any set of twins and rob them of their mental faculties in order to feed a group of psychics in Thunderclap known as 'the Breakers'. The Breakers are trying (by way of force) to use their psychic powers to destroy one of the last two Beams supporting the Dark Tower. The damaged children return "roont", or ruined, and grow to mongoloid size. Roland's arthritis is kicking in hard now, but he's got good people with him, strong people, and one of them is almost useless in her demon-pregnancy (a side-effect of Jake's return to Roland's world). So they save the day with a somewhat convoluted plan only to have Susannah take off for Earth to have her baby. Oh... did I... did I forget to mention a few things? Sorry... yeah, I forgot to mention that the people of Bryn Sturgis just so happen to have a magic door in their surrounding hillside. Oh! And they also have a group of mystic manni (a group of people who were supposed to be located thousands of miles backwards and away from the Tower, closer to the remains of the Baronies) who can open the door if they really want to. Oh!! They ALSO have the most powerful magic item in the whole of Mid- and End-World--Black Thirteen--a terrible black sphere capable of corrupting minds, sending people to death, opening gates from world to world, etc and so forth. So, by the end of the book you see the ka-tet in tight situations all around. The last fucking thing we needed was to find a copy of 'Salem's Lot with one of the main characters from that story sitting right there.

So many cool things happened in this story... it's just too bad it was the last even fairly decent part of the series...

One of the ancient race of the taheen, one of the many "ninth-inning whores" to befoul the pages of The Dark Tower.

When I picked up Song of Susannah, read it, finished it, and put it down, I was really fucking confused. Here, in the closing volumes of what could have been the most amazing fantasy epics ever written, we receive a complete turn-around from the story so far: now Susannah is not pregnant with a demon-child, no. She's pregnant with Roland's child, because the demon who fucked her also fucked Roland in The Gunslinger. Oh, but not only was the demon a hermaphrodite, it also seems to have represented a duality of the Beams...implying that the respective speaking circles wherein the demon(s) were encountered were on opposite sides of the Dark Tower. Did we miss it somehow? Wait, it gets even better. Not only is the child Roland's, but it's also the Crimson King's, because of some crap about... fuck it. Suffice to say, it's very stupid. In any event, the whole of this text was the illustrate the importance (suddenly, from out of nowhere) of the 'Keystone Earth', a place where time cannot be skipped around with, unlike any other Earth they've been to via going todash, using doors, etc. Suddenly, it's time that is all important, not size. Suddenly, it's (the dead) Walter we have to look out for, not Randal Flagg (more on this below). Suddenly, since the rose only exists in the same world that Jake Chambers and Odetta Walker come from we have to deal with the inconsistency that Stephen King also appears to inhabit this world. How can you "create" characters who actually live a few states away? We are also given a line from Stephen King himself while under Roland's "dancing bullet" hypnosis trick:

"I turned aside from Dis, I should be able to turn away from Gan, as well. I love my wife. I love my kids. I love to write stories, but I don't want to write your story, I'm always afraid. He looks for me. The Eye of the King...When I open my eye to your world, he sees me... It." --Stephen King, Song of Susannah, pp 295-296.

This line directly correlates the Crimson King to It, as if Insomnia didn't do so already. Regardless, the connection ends here. Susannah has her "chap" at a place that geographically should be right at the base of the Dark Tower but is not, Eddie is shot a few times to "soften him up" for an anticipated fall in the seventh book, Roland's arthritis is so strong he can barely move sometimes without wincing (another set up for a fall), and Jake begins to lose his cool (yet another set up for a fall). Stephen King goes on to "die" at the end of this installment, and with a few months I was waiting in line at Barnes and Noble Booksellers here in Orlando to finish off the series. Wow, I was disappointed.

In the last volume of this tale we have a conundrum--somehow, we have to see all these loopholes and loose ends closed up and tied. Well... tough shit. Not only do we not see this achieved, but we're dragged along (some might say kicking and screaming) along a crap-dialogue-driven character-inconsistency tour de force. I mean, if we gave out metals for screwing up great character dynamics and overall defamation, this piece would clean house. After the back-n-forths on Earth and the whole "finding Susannah" shtick (cause we care?), we find ourselves in a barren area overlooking this place called the "Devar-toi", or the "little heaven". Ha. Ha. Hahahahahahaha. Anyway. This place is the home of those people known as "the Breakers". Not only do the Breakers not need the help of the ka-tet, but they don't even need to worry about their situation. Ted Braughtigan from Hearts in Atlantis is more than capable of taking care of business. He's got a super 'mind spear' that can kill with a glance, he's got a cache of automatic weapons, munitions, rations, water, vehicles, and tactical nuclear bombs. Who... the fuck needs a pair of revolvers when you have a nuclear bomb? If, perchance, the ka-tet didn't want to suffer this "ka-shume" shit they could have just skipped saving the Breakers (cause Ted could have done it all on his own anyway) and not gone through the misery of watching Eddie Dean get shot in the face because no one thought to survey the field or make sure the twitchy ones weren't still armed. No, everyone was too busy having a hug to remember that they were surrounded by dying taheen and can-toi. They forgot their gunslinger instincts to enjoy a fucking Kodak moment. Assholes. Eddie's wounds from the previous novel had no part in his performance at the Devar-toi whatsoever. Wave a flag, drop the ball. It doesn't have to relate to his fall, but it's set up like that (sort of predictable), and then, instead of getting a good "didn't expect that" death (which would have been expected, at least by me) we get a plate of cud.

After the farce at the Devar-toi, Jake and Roland head back to Earth... oh... yeah. I have to bring this up: Sheemie, this retarded kid from Roland's past, is a Breaker who can teleport and open up doors to other worlds. Just thought I'd interject that as suddenly as Stephen King decided to. So, Jake and Roland head back to Earth (the one where Time is more important than Size... yeah) to save Stephen King's life. They meet up with a woman who is perhaps the only authentic character by this point. She knows something huge is happening around her and she's enthralled by it, eager to play her part and go on. Jake is only able to waylay the driver of the van who hits King by psychically making him have to take a piss. One would think that such is all one might need to throw off the time-tables of the universe and they could be off, back on the Path of the Beam... nope. Nothing changes thanks to Jake and, as Roland jumps from the vehicle to try to save King, his hip gives out and the gunslinger falls down like an old man. Jake leaps out over him, grabs King, and cushions the writer's body from the van with his own. This, of course, kills Jake. But no sweet death does he receive, and while Roland is busy hypnotizing everyone, Jake just passes out and dies. Jake doesn't die because of his temper, he doesn't die because of Oy, nor does he die to help his 'father'. He dies because Roland has some "twinner" shit going on with "sai King" that went away as soon as the van does its damage to the writer. He dies wordlessly (that shit he told Oy doesn't count) and Stephen King subtly blames any disdain we might have for the last three books on these incursions upon his life made by the ka-tet and how they affected his view of the tale and its priority in his work. Roland buries Jake in the woods off the side of the road, goes at talks to the Tet Corporation who give him the copy of Insomnia, ask to see the wingding on the side of Roland's pistol, and send him back to Thunderclap and Fedic to... complete the quest?

So, wait... despite the fact that the Dark Tower is safe, Eddie and Jake are irrevocably dead, Susannah practically hates Roland, Oy won't speak anymore, the ka-tet is ruined utterly, and the whole story has effectively gone down the crapper, we still have another 300 fucking pages! Roland and Susannah are determined, it would seem, to see the Dark Tower. Who cares? The last two books have changed the goal of the story from reaching the Tower to saving it from the Breakers. This book itself has changed the antagonists from the Walkin' Dude and the Crimson King to a mutant spider-baby and a retired comedian bug-man-vampire (see below). But I digress...

In order to leave Fedic, Roland and Susannah make their way along the bottoms of the Castle Discordia, a place that so strikingly emits the feel of what the Dark Tower ought to be that one might feel inclined to believe that both Roland and Susannah had been duped into walking away from their goal for the next 300 pages. Anyway, the tatters of the once awesome ka-tet escape Castle Discordia and make their way across weeks of tundra... for some reason. Mordred follows a few hundred yards behind and... get this... no one thinks to just go and shoot him. Roland--perhaps the deadliest man ever to walk the many worlds of Stephen King's macroverse--doesn't think his mutant spider-baby son might be enough of a threat to deal with. No, he just lets him go and always with the subtle comments like "I'm his father". Insert sarcastic and callous remark. After a while of this sort of tripe and deer-skinning Roland and Susannah run across the Castle of the Crimson King... yeah. While you might expect to find the Crimson King here, instead we're given three "Stephen Kings" who turn out to be an ancient shape-changing race that Roland has already heard of somehow. These guys are another example of the "ninth inning whores." Not five minutes after Roland and Susannah make tracks from this creature's paltry (paaaaaltry) attempt to entrap the two of them, Mordred comes along and destroys the poor ancient shape-changer with a flock of birds, picks up a basket of dismembered human limbs, and heads off to follow his flesh-parents. Suspension of disbelief... falling...

Anyway, long story short: the two of them cross the White Lands and meet this vampire-bug-guy named Joe who dupes them both into believing he's just this ex-comedian guy living out on the road to the Dark Tower. As if. What, I ask you, would be the first clue to you that something is amiss?: that Roland is laughing like a loon at this guy's "take my wife" shtick? That the guy even lives out there in the first place? Or.. oh! Maybe the note that Stephen King leaves in the fucker's bath towels for Susannah to find would tip you off!? Well, King only says it's a deus ex machina in the note! I mean... that is the note! Thanks a lot, asshole! Nice fucking build-up/let-down! We were warned of this "Dandelo" guy by Eddie's dying words, Jake's dying words, and here he is--an misspelled anagram for the street he lives on: "Odd's Lane." That's it, folks. That's what "Dandelo" meant--a misspelled anagram of the road where this jerk-off lived. He's a cheap, emotional-vampire thing who's probably one-ten-thousandth what Pennywise was, nigh mortal, and worthless! It gets better. Not only is he killing Roland with shitty pub jokes, but Susannah kills him with two rounds from Roland's gun. Two shots. Bang. Bang. Dead. If Pennywise were half as cheap, IT wouldn't have been worth the paper it was printed on. This is the guy who Eddie warned us of with his dying words? This is the closest Roland ever came to dying this whole time? A bug disguised as a human that tells crappy jokes?! What. The. FUCK?! From here on out, it gets even more ludicrous. In this jackass' basement, living in a cage like a fucking veal cow, we have... the penultimate... unbelievable... ninth-inning piece of shit: Patrick Danville. Let me explain the significance of this walking kick in the nuts...

What the fuck ever, dude.

Yeah, um... about that Tower...

Perhaps one of the most important texts regarding the Dark Tower ever written. Moreso, in my opinion, than either Dark Tower V, VI, or VII.

When I read Insomnia, I realized that Stephen King had a greater plan here in literature than I've ever seen in an author. It exposed some of the inner workings of the Tower itself, revealed a smidge of Roland's place in the scheme of things, and established three things:

• The Crimson King is related to IT. I personally think that the Crimson King is the strongest manifestation of the force behind the deadlights. It was in Derry during a "down-time" for Pennywise, it used shape-changing, it fed off your fears. Come on... how much more do you need?

• Roland will encounter this Crimson King at the Dark Tower. This will supposedly occur after Roland's confrontation with the Ageless Stranger.

• A small boy named Patrick Danville will save two men on their way to the Dark Tower just before he dies. In a prophetic picture being drawn by a young Danville, Roland is described as being "a king, too."

Wow. Fantastic book. It's too bad when Roland actually receives a copy of this book and then leaves it with that woman on Earth, fearing that it might be too confusing. If it's to be disregarded by both the author and the protagonist, why have Danville show up at all? Oooh, that's right, to defame Roland some more. The no-tongue, no-erasers, artistic savant steals all the goddamn thunder from everyone and anyone in the group. He sends Susannah to an alternate Earth where Jake and Eddie are brothers from Iowa or some inane shit. He falls asleep on the watch and Oy dies as a result. He strips the balls right off Roland at the footsteps of the gunslinger's great destiny by being the only way for Roland to have any sort of chance against the Crimson King (since King systematically eliminated all of his good companions and the Crimson King has a big box of grenades... Roland has fought off entire towns, gangs of hard-cases, firefights on top of firefights... and he's wary of some grenades...). And, to top all that off, Danville saves no one and doesn't die thereafter. This is perhaps the greatest failing of internal consistency I have ever seen in literature or any other medium, for that matter... save for that shitty movie Shark Attack 3. God, that movie sucked. But it was not nearly as disappointing as Dark Tower VII: the Dark Tower.

Stephen. If you ever read this page for some reason I just have one question...what the fuck, man? Did you just not give a shit anymore? Did it not make enough of a difference to maintain at least a modicum of consistency? If you were going to just throw away the book in the first place, why bother with bringing Danville in at all? I mean, by this point in book VII , most of the good stuff that had tied into this story had become unraveled or unimportant. Suddenly (and poorly) resurrecting the old "prophetic nature" of Insomnia in this "last-ditch effort" sort of way only serves to hurt the greater story more.

The Specifics of My Disdain

God damn it. I don't have to be a fucking literary genius to know this is a turn for the worse.

As if Stephen King putting himself in the story wasn't a sure sign of the decay of the tale overall, I'd also like to illustrate that the last three books in this 7-book epic all hit the shelves within a year. That's a bad sign and I didn't immediately appreciate it for what it was. I was so enamored with the idea of getting the books that I didn't take the time to consider how hard it must be to write three books in such short time while maintaining the level of editorial and literary eloquence previously achieved by the former four books. Suffice to say, this standard of excellence, consistency, and development was discarded in favor of introducing a plethora of new terms (the Prim, the taheen, the Devar-toi, the can-toi, ka-shume, ka-mai, etc. Stephen King, late in the seventh inning, has suddenly found a Mid-World Dictionary that does more harm than good). It was also discarded in favor of characters brought about in the same fashion. All of a sudden, for instance, there is an ancient spirit-made-mortal who lives inside Susannah (Christ, bitch, get a fucking deadbolt on that mind of yours) and who wants nothing more than the fostering of Susannahs's pregnancy--her "chap", as they say. Not only does this character propagate the crappy "pregnancy" bit (something which fails because of another crappy character, see below), but she also introduces the bulk of those new terms and words, as well as a new slant on the Creation mythos we were given by Roland in The Wastelands. Susannah's kid, Mordred, borrows his name from Arthurian legend. Mordred is, in those tales, the illegitimate son of Arthur and his half-sister. Mordred and Arthur fight, and they both die. Well, in a fashion popular to these last two books (Song of Susannah and The Dark Tower), Stephen King waves a flag and then drops the ball. Mordred in Mid-World is a malicious were-spider who successfully defames almost every character in the book during his short time alive. Let me now dive into the specific disdain for every character. Unfortunately, I mean just that-- nigh every major character in this tale got kneecapped. This "kneecapping" as I call it is a popular trend in the last installation of this tale--take a character that has a good role, defame them, and kill or otherwise cripple or waylay them. It was nasty. Let's start at the top and work down.

Too bad it's just a very cool picture. The real Crimson King is a goofy-looking Santa Claus motherfucker with a box of grenades and no glammer whatsoever.

DEFAMED! The Crimson King was defamed with the swiftest of pen-strokes. Sonovabitch only ever hit paper in Insomnia before, and I can counter any argument against the creature calling himself the Crimson King in Insomnia and the creature known as the Crimson King from The Dark Tower being the same entity.

Think of it this way--even if these two creatures aren't the same, the one from Derry was far more powerful than the one that was stuck on a balcony aside the Dark Tower. Given that, why (if they're not the same entity) wouldn't the Crimson King from Insomnia (being the more powerful of the two appearances) be the one capable of reaching the Dark Tower and not the geriatric crackpot we get in The Dark Tower? Of course you have to remember that by the time the Crimson King arrives in the last installment of this tale, Roland has already repudiated the Insomnia novel, fearing it to be "confusing" or a "mind-trap". So, under the assumption that Insomnia is truly moot and no longer integral to the Dark Tower story as a whole, why is Patrick Danville here? See? They have to be the same character, and Insomnia, consequentially, must matter. Given that, the Crimson King is unbelievably defamed by the author.

The Crimson King uses mind-affecting illusions--glammer, you might say--to cripple his foes. He's not terribly canny or intelligent, but his ability to bend reality and scale the Tower's levels seem to make up for those shortcomings... at least that's the case in Insomnia. In The Dark Tower, the Crimson King is a madman. He's stuck on a balcony on the side of the Dark Tower with his box of grenades. He has no real power, he's completely cracked, and somehow we're to believe that this loon is the progenitor of the creature from IT, Insomnia, and the master of the character Randal Flagg. How did this guy participate as one of Mordred's four parents? How was this guy supposed to be at the top of Dark Tower when he's really only at the bottom... stuck on a balcony. How, were it not for his grenades, was he supposed to oppose Roland's advance upon the Tower? He was too high up to try to punch Roland if the gunslinger went to the front door!

Since the end of Wizard and Glass all references to the Crimson King have gotten shadier and shadier. At first he's just this ubiquitous red eye, this evil entity who manifested once in Derry but was drawn back into the deadlights when he failed to stop Ralph Roberts from keeping Patrick Danville alive. Then, it's revealed that he had 6 of the 13 pieces of the Wizard's Rainbow... and then he broke them... because he's "cRaZY!!" Later on, he decides to leave his posh castle in the middle of B.F.E. to try to climb up the Dark Tower. Well, he's still "cRaZY!!", but at least he brought some grenades in case he ran into a gunslinger or something silly. Let's take a look at Insomnia really quick:

At the very top of the tower, a man in a red robe was looking down at the gunfighter with an expression of mingled hate and fear.

..."Who's that?" she asked, tapping the tiny figure peering jealously down from the top of the dark tower."

"Hims the Red King," Patrick said.

"Oh, the Red King, I see. And who's the man with the guns?"

..."Him's name is Roland, Mama. I dream about him sometimes. Him's a King, too."--Stephen King, Insomnia, p 728.

So, as you can see we have a complete derailment of the prophetic nature (and subsequently of the entire story) of Insomnia. Not only is the Crimson King not at the "very top" of the Dark Tower, Patrick Danville doesn't save anyone on their way to the Dark Tower (deus ex machina, like I said before and will probably say again, does not count), doesn't die afterwards (probably because his fate wasn't properly observed and fulfilled), and Roland is far, far from a King, by any stretch of the word (and that includes any bullshit twinner hypothesis anyone might have). Oh, we also have a total disregard for this "green man" thing that arose in Insomnia. As a color that stands opposed to red, this seemed to be going somewhere, but unfortunately all we ended up with that plate of cud from before. But then again, I probably shouldn't have expected much more, especially considering that Roland himself got rid of Insomnia when he had it. I guess that made it easier for Stephen King to just take a shit all over the story in general. The sad thing is that it's not like King couldn't have written a phenomenal tale. We know he could have, and it's a serious disappointment to read what he settled for--a hacked-out and character-less anticlimax.

Mordred... what a waste. Just keep walking, bitch.

DEFAMED! Mordred defames even himself! What a jackass! Here's a creature who's capable of (as an infant) destroying the Ageless Stranger just to bolster his waning strength! Here's a creature who usurps the place of any enemy the ka-tet or Roland has ever had! Here's a character who can track Roland across blistering white wastelands (I thought we had passed the Wastelands already, but what do I know?)... and what does he end up doing? Swallow this, tell me how it tastes: this final bad guy, this bottom-line villain grows hungry over his trek through the aforementioned tundra and eats that jackass Joe's diseases nag! Not only does he make such a crucial cock-up, but he gets so sick after doing so that he's practically dead when he makes the half-baked attempt on Roland's camp. The only reason Mordred didn't fail utterly and just get blasted to hell was because Roland was so exhausted he asked Patrick to take the watch (bad idea) and, when Mordred was fighting Oy, Roland forgot he wasn't wearing a gun at the time. This gave Mordred the time necessary to impale Oy on a branch and then get shot in the face. What a miserable waste.

DEFAMED! Mordred defames Randal Flagg by eating him. Not only does he eat the Ageless Stranger (thereby defying and denying the character's "destiny" to battle Roland over the Dark Tower), but he also exposes the "fact" that ol' Randy, the Walkin' Dude, has his origins in the simple life of old Mid-World. The character who supposedly brought about the ruin of dozens of worlds with a massive pandemic, who was able to usurp kingdoms with his power, who lived backwards in time, was the son of Sam the Miller from Delain. What, may I ask, the FUCK?! He ran away at 13, got raped in the ass, and then went on to become the Ageless Stranger? He then goes on to make a stupid mistake against a stupid character and gets eaten like a fucking chalupa?! HOW? HOW is this the same character from The Stand?! I'll tell you--it's NOT! Stephen King had to account for him, so he greased him in the way most inconsistent with Flagg's character and representation in all the other "related" texts.

Oh, you have got to be FUCKING KIDDING ME!!

'Poster childe to the Defamation Came'

The "Man in Black" is horribly deconstructed by not only The Dark Tower, but also by Stephen King's "revision" to The Gunslinger. How such a book needs to be retooled is a question for the ages, and it is a case par excellence of a cure being far worse than a disease. Thanks to the re-write, Walter (i.e. the Man in Black) has his character merged with that of Flagg, the Ageless Stranger. What does this do, you might ask? It ruins everything by tying Walter's mortal origins to Randal Flagg. It also ruins the impact of Walter's final play in The Gunslinger. Now, instead of having died and turned to bones while Roland was having his physically aging vision, Walter/Flagg merely covered up some bones in his clothes and took off, presumably naked, down the beach. No worries about the lobstrosities for Walter/Flagg, no no. That would be too consistent.  

--it's an insult to Roland to think something as inept and crappy as Mordred came from his nuts. What a kick therein.

--it completely ruins Roland to "forget he wasn't wearing a gun" when Mordred attacked his camp while he was asleep. Keep in mind (this is important) that Roland's camp was otherwise occupied by Oy and a retarded mute kid. Yeah, go figure. Oy fucking died because of this "oversight."

--it's a seriously crappy thing to do to any number of characters, especially guys like Roland: introduce another figure in the story who is leagues and leagues beyond the protagonists in power or agency, then use this new character as little and as poorly as possible before sweeping them off to the wayside with a shitty play like food poisoning from bad horsemeat. It gives Roland no time to prove he could do better than this spider-freak, that he could gun him down or resist his mental powers or anything. Hell, the fact that Randal Flagg dropped in a heartbeat to Mordred's power attests to how out-of-place and ill-conceived the little bastard is. For Roland, Mordred was the worst arch-foe I could ever imagine. He was destined to get a bad-ass enemy like Flagg (pre- volume VII) and instead all he got was... well, nothing. He got screwed and got nothing, but more on that later.

Patrick Danville defames Roland by completely winning the entire fight for the gunslinger. When the chips are down and Roland can't shoot his way past a few grenades, what does the resourceful, resilient, hard-ass gunslinger go for help? Yes, that's right, the mute artsy kid. Did... did I say Roland went to Danville for help? Sorry. I meant he went to Danville to end the story for him. Danville draws a picture of the Dark Tower and erases the Crimson King from its balconies.

And that's it. That's the final confrontation before the gates of the Dark Tower. Roland does nothing but piss and moan about the voices in his head, gets another one of his fingers lopped off by a thorn, takes no real part in the "victory" over the Crimson King, and then gets cluster-fucked by the Dark Tower for his countless years of tireless service.

He's upset at how crappy this whole thing turns out. Look at him. Sorry bastard.

What happened, Jake? Where did it all go wrong?

'AKE! What could have been worse than the final hand that Jake Chambers was dealt? I'll admit it (and I'll touch on this with Eddie Dean), his death looks good on the surface. He dies sacrificing his life so that Stephen King might live to finish the Dark Tower series (if only he knew...), but what are we dealing with here, really? Jake dies wordlessly (save those pathetic "Watch out for Dandelo" words that Eddie was stuck with, too) after throwing himself between Stephen King and the van that (actually) hit him (in real life). Prior to this farce, Jake was in a serious funk--he knew someone was going to die. So, what does the boy do? He uses his shine-like powers to make the driver of the van (not even going to look up his name now) stop to take a piss. Well, seeing as that probably didn't happen on the day that our Stephen King got hit by a van, one might think that the situation (being based on accidental timing and all) was resolved and that Roland, Oy, and Jake could get back to the Devar-toi, but... no. They (with the aid of that one lady--the only good character in the whole book) drive out to where the accident is now still bound to happen. Roland jumps out of the truck to resolve the situation (most likely with a gun) and his hip gives out and he falls on his ass. Let that sink in for a second, but consider this: he had arthritis/sympathy pains for the wounds Stephen King was about to receive... insert admonishing emoticon here. That's... that's about it. Jake leaps over his impotent ass and American Gladiators Stephen King away from the van while taking the brunt of the impact to himself. The van drives over Jake Chambers, Stephen King is still plowed down, and Roland has to hypnotize everyone because things got so fucked that he can't even try to be there for Jake when the kid (his self-proclaimed son) dies for a second time in pursuit of Roland's damned Tower. Jake dies wordlessly, passing only the information of Dandelo (that whore) onto Oy before doing so. Roland carries him out into the forest off the highway and buries him. If Stephen King hadn't still fucked the story up, it would have been a noble death. Rather, we have all that crap at the end about grenades, bad horsemeat, and Patrick Danville. The next we see Jake is in a dream of Susannah's. She sees Jake and Eddie in Times Square at Christmas time, blah blah blah. More on this particular farce later.

Eddie Dean... words are almost incapable of attacking the treatment he received.

Eddie Dean. There are no words to describe the loss of... wait...hold up... I'm coming up with one now... how's "melodramatic" sound? Yeah. That's good.

It was sad, but the whole thing was very tiring. It was played off well enough, but his last words conveyed a sense of dire meaning to Eddie's death which, as we find out upon the revealing of "Dandelo", is sorely not the case. In truth, Eddie got greased making a dumb move and by not being careful. I hold every member of the ka-tet responsible for this "ka-shume" crap, and the blood of Eddie Dean rests mainly on the hands of anyone who could have told Stephen King to not write such a shitty story for their old pal Eddie in the first place. There's really not a lot to say about Eddie aside from the fact that King glossed over the whole portion of the story relating to his death with over-exaggerated grief brought on by a mixture of incompetence and King himself.

I mean, once you introduce the author as a character in a tale as one who can be influenced by the main characters (very easily, at that. All you need to do is hypnotize him) there's no reason for mishandled characters, shitty deaths, or bad endings. After Stephen King got introduced, the story took a turn for the worse and our Stephen King uses his fictional self's interaction with the ka-tet as justification for the seemingly rushed completion of his life's work. Let's not mention how he (our King) could still have done a good job writing the last three books, but I digress... 

Odetta, Detta, Susannah, Mia, etc. Of all the ka-tet, she seemed to me to be the most expendable. Since her impregnation in The Wastelands, she's slowly become more of a drag on the ka-tet until, at the end of Wolves of the Calla, she clusterfucks everyone by using the magic cave of the simple Calla folk to have her baby in the Keystone Earth... sheesh. Why couldn't she have just died fighting the Wolves?

Anyway, Susannah's destruction as a good character begins in The Wastelands and ends, completed, after her "epiphany" regarding Danville. She has him draw the wart off her face (cause she... I dunno.. experimenting?) and then draw a door to New York so she can get the fuck out of dodge. So, where does she end up? In the arms of an alternative Eddie Dean, born in the mid-west and not the Big Apple, who has a younger brother named Jake! Wow! And she was so happy about it, too. It's just a damned shame that these are not the two people with whom she traversed the closing regions of Mid-World, battled the warriors in Lud, survived the madness of Blaine the Mono, ventured through the ruins of Topeka, or fought the Wolves of the Calla. No, these are completely different people, and Stephen King even admits that she doesn't stay happy. Nice reward, nice fate... asshole.

The final kick in nuts comes when Susannah, after having braved the todash darkness to rejoin her "friends" in New York, finds the gun that she was given by Roland to be plugged... for some reason. This exalted, Excaliber-allegory weapon has been what? Plugged? What the fuck? Anyway, that's not the kicker, this is: Susannah then proceeds to throw the gun into a trash can. Just... plop! in the trash. It's no good anymore... this isn't a defamation... no, it's fucking sacrilege. It completely steps on the hitherto respected order of gunslinger/knights who have, to date, given all their lives to defending order and civilization from all things set in motion against them. These guns symbolized all that which Roland held sacred and revered, all that he aspired to, and Susannah just... throws it in the trash. No good anymore. 

I think the first sign of trouble was that she was FUCKING INSANE!!

OY! Yes, even poor Oy was dismantled by the events in this story. The only exception here is that I think Oy (of all the characters) remained closest to his original characterization, and a lot of people expected Oy to die in some way or another. The fact that Mordred was his killer only leaves a grease-stain where a noble or meaningful death could have been. lifts a beer in salute. Here's to Oy. I loved that little bumbler what got stuck on a branch like a worm on a hook. Poor little bastard. 

Callahan. Not that I'm complaining, but why does Callahan get to have the only significant and well-wrought death among the whole fucking cast? He regains the power of his faith through years of humility, poverty,  meekness, and vampire-hunting. He's no Van Helsing, but at the end of his days he becomes the priest of the church of the Man-Jesus in Calla Bryn Sturgis, saddles up with the last gunslingers, and gets to replay his moments against true evil. He dies like a man, he dies selflessly, and he dies to let Jake get ahead. His character was consistent as can be expected of someone who's been through his story--he wasn't really the same character from 'Salem's Lot, but I didn't think he would be. Another toast, this one to Pere Callahan, the proverbial fifth Beatle, the ballast of the ka-tet thrown over in a storm like he was born to be. Cheers! 

Displeasure Overall

I think the bulk of my displeasure, aside from the specific treatment of the characters I had known and loved for years, is the lack of creativity, inspiration, and closure that the ending put forth. I understand from reading the forums at Stephen King's website that a lot of people "appreciate" the bullshit ending. This means that these people don't mind the final situation for any of the ka-tet, the anticlimax with Danville, or the steaming pile that was the result of Roland's entering the Dark Tower itself. I think such people feel like maybe they "don't get it", or that there was "something more" to the ending, and they're just saying this appreciative drivel to try to pick up the slack.

Well, let me clear the air--there is no greater meaning to this story. It was great, fantastic, and then it started to sag until it was left empty, withering and desiccated like a dead spider's ass. Why this occurred is beyond me as I have no doubt in my mind that Stephen King could have made this the story, the literary work, of the century. Of all the people capable of such things, I had put my stock in King to do so. Anne Rice is looking better now, as is George R.R. Martin (not that I dislike either of these authors. I had just previously ranked King above them due to immensity, scope, and execution).

What the ending of this tale lacked was, as a result of the waning inspiration, was a sense of accomplishment. The ka-tet (Eddie, Jake, Susannah, specifically) were afforded  no real chance to flex the power they had accrued as a ka-tet. In fact, thanks to the bullshit ka-shume, the ka-tet was destroyed like it had only been held together by bits of string and dried Pepsi. There was no great confrontation that the ka-tet had to face--no climactic encounter with Flagg nor Mordred his usurper, no great encounter with the Crimson King, no final stand as gunslingers facing whatever-sized hoards of taheen or low-men or whatever the fuck you want to use, nothing. Just a shitty fight against a few dozen worthless taheen--a fight that Ted Braughtigan didn't even need their help to win. The group, and all the characters outside the ka-tet as well, suffered poorly implemented disassembly from the get-go as if Stephen King was tired of writing about the characters and just wanted to whittle them away so he could shove Roland into the Dark Tower and be done with it. There was no climax and that's the biggest flaw in the whole story. Forget what King says in his author's notes about the story being about the journey. That's just a paper-thin attempt to placate people like me, who knew to expect better of "sai King". If the story only started to suck once we got inside the Dark Tower, I might not have spent days on this web page, but it did suck and I did write this page and Stephen King did let us all down with the last two (three, if you're really specific) books in the series.