Book III picks up essentially where Book II leaves off, plus
an intro by Mr. King really recaps everything that has happened in the first
two books well. We start out with Eddie Dean, Detta/Odetta-now-Susannah/Mrs.
Eddie Dean, and the hero Roland as they reach the forest and have moved away
from the coast lines with giant evil fucking lobsters. Now their diet consists
of deer meat rather than lobster meat. So good for them.
The pace of this book is entertaining for me. It starts out
with a brief “here we are now, moved on from the lobstrocities,” and then
enters the “Holy shit, a hostile giant grizzly robot bear with a parasitic
disease, headed right for Eddie!” This happens, of course when Susannah is
learning to Gunsling (I’ll note here that both her and Eddie learn the craft)
and she ends up being able to shoot the fucker right in its fucking robot
antenna. Cool shit.
From here the book continues with Roland being haunted by a
new take on alternate realities, which can sort of be compared to time travel
paradoxes. Being a huge, huge nerd for time travel paradoxes, it’s cool to see
how this variant unfolds. Roland met the boy Jake in Book I, and he and Jake
bonded a close relationship up until the kid, terrified of being left for dead
in that world, basically said “ah fuck it, I can tell the Tower means more to
you than this. Go on.” Since then Roland had felt very guilty. But the moment
Jake left his current world (which is essentially our world circa 1987) for whatever fucked up place he met Roland,
he was dead. Dead because the Man in Black or Jack Mort pushed him into a car
on the streets of New York and he came to, post-mortem, alive and well
(somehow), to meet the Gunslinger and hunt down The Man in Black. Confusing, I
know, but when you are reading Book III it all makes sense.
Anyway, what’s cool is how haunted and mind-blowingly
mind-fucked Roland now is. He explains that when he was in control of Jack Mort
(in Book II), he saw him about to commit the act of pushing Jake in front of
the car and thus, killing him, which sends him to meet Roland back in Book I.
But since Roland saved him from this fate, meaning he did not die there, he
never technically got sent to Roland’s world; meaning they technically never
met. So his mind splits between a reality that says “the boy was saved, of
course he never died and went to your world” and another that says “but you met
him, he was there.”
Roland tripping balls on this helps add to the nightmare
landscape King creates in this book. Dreams, both crazy nightmarish and
important event-foreshadowing-signals dreams, are involved in making the book
read like a scene from a Freddy Kruger nightmare world in which the landscapes
and monsters seem just as impossible as the notion of escape. I was really
digging it. Then Jake came into the story, as he suffers from not only the same
paradox as Roland, but much worse because his involves himself being killed,
blood and trauma and all. This not only makes things interesting for me, but
the pace continues, all the way up until we all cheer Jake onto the gate that
brings him into the Gunglingers’ world; every one antsy, giddy and hollering
for the little fucker to escape the monster made of plaster (I also had trouble
envisioning it, don’t worry) and Susannah fucking a demon.
The demon fucking is actually what I use as the turning
point. That is about where things got weird. Once they are all together, things
get a little slower paced. The city and the bridge and the people and villains
they stumble upon, from here on out, are not really from the genre the story
seemed to be carrying me. There are post-apocalyptic settings, with worlds and
universes mixed together like Jake mixing in with Roland in Book I, and that’s
all great, don’t get me wrong. But something about the sophisticated fallout
shelter and the hyper advanced train co-mingling with idiots who murder each
other every hour and our Clint Eastwood figure gunslinging seemed to branch out
in too many directions. Plus I wasn’t as excited to see Roland with a
six-shooter blasting people in a fallout shelter and running for a monorail as
it electrocutes people in front of him as I thought I was.
The book ends with them headed through the real Waste Lands, which are one of the
most nightmarish environments ever imagined. I really respect the way he
creates the world that is passing underneath the gang as they travel on a super
evil, badass monorail.
What I liked most about this book is not just his ability to
talk about nightmares and nightmarish worlds, though. It was two other
important things:
- The ability to relate to characters that are kids, and make you feel the same emotions you felt when you were a kid, whether it be petrified fear of something that scared the bajesus out of you, or that awkward feeling of being near people who are complete assholes and you were unable to understand a world of such blatant assholery.
- The snark, the comic relief, the King-humour. It is that little, tiny bit of dirty charm he offers and it works really well in this story.
Sometimes it is too cheesy, sometimes it adds nothing to his
novels, but in this book it just works. The subtle humour that is worthy of a
reader’s smirk is a good quality, and it makes him a great, cynical ass. As
opposed to a cynical assHOLE, like me.
Interestingly enough, Stephen King’s Dark Tower series seems
to coincide with shit that happens in real life that makes me think, “if Ibelieved in coincidences, this wouldn’t mean shit, but since I don’t, this is
pretty weird.” So as the book concludes with Blane the Mono taking them over
some weird ass freaky world, a friend (not a reader, I might add, and certainly
I don’t keep people up on what I’m reading, so this is out of the blue) posted
this on my Fbook wall:
Creepy? Yup.
I would say overall it was very good until things went
downhill from the point they brought the other
one into the world. The Demon fucking, which I later told a friend I referred
to as the gift that keeps on giving,
since it happened in the first one and also since Susanna was certain she was
pregnant around the same time (weird, isn’t it?), was difficult. Not difficult
in terms of “handling it,” – which it was, that demon was packing – but difficult
to follow in a world that worked.
This just did not seem like something that belonged. Seemed more like the
Stephen King I have come to know and like only a little bit.
The book generally had a downhill cheesiness from there for
me; but again, because I enjoyed the first half so much, I would still say it
is a very enjoyable read. Just don’t get your hopes up after the first half. The
momentum and general awesomeness does not maintain its thrilling pace.
