Climax

"You are the grim, goal-oriented ones who will not believe that the joy is in the journey rather than the destination no matter how many times it has been proven to you. You are the unfortunate ones who still get the lovemaking all confused with the paltry squirt that comes to end the lovemaking (the orgasm is, after all, God's way of telling us we've finished, at least for the time being, and should go to sleep)...You say you want to know how it all comes out...For an ending, you only have to turn to the last page and see what is there writ upon...And so, my dear Constant Reader, I tell you this: You can stop here...Endings are heartless.

Ending is just another word for goodbye."

When I started Stephen King's seventh and final book of the Dark Tower series, The Dark Tower, I knew that I had to take the book slow. I knew that I had to savor each paragraph, each sentence, and enjoy the experience. Because I knew that the ending could never and would never live up to what I wanted.

I won't bother you too much with what I wanted. Suffice it to say, it was along the lines of a philosophical and psychological battle at the top of the Dark Tower between Roland and Randall Flagg. I was hoping for something along the lines of the climax of Michael Crichton's Sphere. But it would be silly for me to expect an ending like that out of King. He has his own style and voice, and that is why I like him.

I've come to the realization that my favorite writers are sort of like friends. There are many things I love about them, and then there are the human imperfections that they have. There are little ways of writing the odd sentence or expressing a specific emotion in a scene that bother me about the writers I love. But like a friend who has a quirk that can be annoying, I'm starting to learn to accept these little idiosyncrasies because they are part of how that writer writes.

So, the ending of The Dark Tower is a very horror/B-movie/pulpy kind of ending, but what more can be expected out of Stephen King? I finished the Epilogue of the book late at night, and vowed not to read the rest (the Coda and the complete Robert Browning poem "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came") until the next day. However, my curiosity got the better of me. I read the Coda, which includes the quote I have up above. I wish I hadn't read it.

At all. I mean, I wish that the novel ended with the Epilogue. The Epilogue is perfect, it resolves the subplot of the piece. The chapter before that SPOILERS START has Roland walking up to the Tower SPOILERS END. I honestly feel the piece could have ended there, with the rest of the story a mystery. I am sure King would have gotten tons of angry letters and death threats that way, but it would have been a better ending. It calls back to the endings of The Waste Lands and Song of Susannah, with their dramatic climax that sort of has an "Until next time!" feel to it. I would rather not have known what happens in the Dark Tower than have read what King gives us. The Coda, as King warned it would in a very Lemony Snicket Unfortunate Events sort of way, hurts and fails to satisfy.

When the anime Neon Genesis Evangelion ended, fans were disappointed and complained so much that Hideaki Anno presented an alternate ending in the movies where pretty much everyone dies and Anno gives the finger to his fans. I loved the series ending.

I've spoken more on the ending than I would have liked. The point is, that despite my feelings towards the ending, it is a great book. I have my beefs with the introduction of new characters and the exits of older characters, but for the most part I really liked it. In fact, as an ending to the Dark Tower series and to a lot of other loose ends in King's writing, it fits perfectly. All except the actual ending. In a way, that is kind of amusing. Parts of the book got me teary eyed. Parts of the book made me grin. Despite my attempt to enjoy the book slowly, I devoured it. But I still savored it, trying not to be the glutton at a fine cooked meal who fails to stop and taste what he's eating because he's too busy shoving it down his throat. If you read this book, savor it as much as you can. Enjoy the ride as much as you can. The lovemaking is in the pages leading up to the ending, not in the paltry squirt that follows.

Finish your business as soon as you can.

Stephen King's dedication at the beginning of Song of Susannah says, "For Tabby, who knew when it was done." If Tabitha King, Stephen King's wife, is responsible for the pacing and cliffhanger ending of Song, then I must say, "God bless you please, Mrs. King, Jesus loves you more than you will know. Oh oh oh."

There is so much right with the sixth book of The Dark Tower series. Many of the imperfections of the previous volumes (at least what I felt were imperfections) have been ditched here. This is just great storytelling.

It is one of the shortest books in the series (544 pages compared to the previous The Wolves of the Calla's 921), but it certainly doesn't feel too short. It escapes the long-windedness of some of the previous volumes. As a result, this book feels more like one story with one theme and central plot, unlike some of the others which were going in too many directions at once. And although the plot sidetracks us from the Dark Tower a little, it mainly functions to serve it. After all, all things serve the Tower. A quote, on page 12, summarizes this succinctness of this novel:

"Her eyes looked at him calmly. She still had hold of his left hand, touching it, culling out its secrets. 'Finish your business as soon as you can.'

'Is that your advice?'

'Aye, dearheart. Before your business finishes you.'"

I also love the way that the character who is the central focus of this story, Susannah, doesn't pop up for 60 pages or so. It is very much a detective story.

The action sequences in this book are just what I've been longing for in this series. There is a shootout with Eddie and Roland in Maine that involves a storefront and an overturned log truck that had me flipping to the next page almost before I finished the previous. This is the sort of high octane, Western inspired material I wanted but didn't get from Wolves and even Wizard and Glass.

King's explanation of how technology has become a poor replacement for magic, and the machines are failing, is something I think few other authors address. In this society, we assume magic and science are the same, but King asserts, much the same way I do, that they are far from the same. One is a weak imitation of the other that eventually runs down as mandated by the rules of Entropy.

If there's one criticism I have of the book, it's the scene in the hotel lobby full of Asian tourists described as having yellow skin, cameras, and King even notes they all look the same! The way they talk, as written in the dialog, is almost as uncomfortable as Mickey Rooney's role in Blake Edwards' Breakfast at Tiffany's starring Audrey Hepburn.



I admit, that those sort of 1960s stereotypes work sometimes, like Peter Sellers in Murder by Death, but not often. Often they're the sort of bad jokes a friend might declare loudly in front of a giant group of people, only to be met with dead silence. Who feels more awkward in that situation? You, or the friend?

There's a lot more of King working himself into the story, and I am still out on whether or not that actually works. I'll have to read the last book to know for sure.

This book ends with a cliffhanger much like The Waste Lands did. There's mention in Song about readers getting angry over the ending of Waste Lands, but I loved it, and I loved this ending. Maybe it's because I don't have to wait for the next volume. It's already been written; I just have to pick it up.

Bring on The Dark Tower!

Repetitively Redundant

"'...the shooting will happen so fast and be over so quick that you'll wonder what all the planning and palaver was for, when in the end it always comes down to the same five minutes' worth of blood, pain, and stupidity.' He paused, then said: 'I always feel sick afterward.'"

I would say that quote sums up Stephen King's fifth Dark Tower book Wolves of the Calla, but that would be too harsh. I never feel sick after reading his books.

However, I do wonder what all the planning and palaver (important conversation) was for. In my Wizard and Glass review I mentioned that much of the book was flashbacks, and that King is attempting to tie all his works together. Wolves of the Calla is the same way, but I'm afraid that all the flaws of Wizard are more pronounced in Wolves.

Without giving away too much, King brings back Father Callahan, the priest who mysteriously vanishes at the end of 'Salem's Lot. A lot of Wolves is Callahan recounting what happened to him after he left 'Salem's Lot, all the while Roland twirling his fingers in a "hurry up and get to the point" fashion. I found myself twirling my fingers in much the same way.

See, Wolves is set against a town where most of the children are twins, and where monsters known as Wolves show up every so many years and take one child out of every pair of twins. The children are returned later, mentally and physically ruined and doomed to a short life. Roland and his ka-tet are meant to fight the Wolves in a Knights of the Roundtable meets Western sort of way, but this makes up very little of the actual story, and it shows. This part of the tale is filled with undeveloped characters and painfully obvious and simple plots.

But man oh man did I love finding out what happened to Callahan! The only annoying part (besides it having relatively little to do with the book) was Roland's constant finger twirling. Stephen King repeated it so many times. He repeated it so many times. He repeated it so many times.

Added to that, the number 19 or 99 or 1999 gets used to death as well.

A final criticism: tying everything together. King is starting to tie together not only his own works, but Harry Potter, Marvel Comics, and Star Wars. I've often said that King could write about a killer stapler that could talk and it would convince me, but there are moments in Wolves that are stretching it, even for King's great talents. I can cut him a little slack, though, because this idea fit into my own philosophy about writing. In On Writing, King compared writing to digging for fossils. A large part of me has always believed that what is written, by King, or myself, or other writers, is true is some strange sense. An alternate world? I don't know. But there are stories that are always there, waiting for us to find them.

Despite this book's flaw, I want to read the rest of the series. I want to know what happens to Roland and his ka-tet, and I want to see the connections that King will make. He's managed to write a book with a thin plot and a LOT of exposition that kept me interested the whole time.

I don't know how he does it.

We're off to see the Wizard...

Not only does every story Stephen King has written seem to tie into the Dark Tower series, but even L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz seems to be a part of the tale.

There's no use explaining it here in a blog, you'll just have to read the books to get what I'm talking about. King pulls it off, but of course that's what makes King so good: the fact that he can pull it off. He is one of those writers who could put a passage in a book where a grown man and a pencil engage in a frightening conversation where the pencil threatens to kill the man's wife, and it would be completely believable. That's talent.

Wizard and Glass, the fourth novel of King's Dark Tower series, is really two books. The beginning continues the adventures of Roland and his ka-tet (group joined by destiny), but soon the novel goes into a lengthy flashback about Roland's true love and what happened to her oh so many years ago. This flashback comprises most of the novel's 700 pages. Due to it's length, this book took me a little while to read, and there were times where I had forgotten the first 30 or so pages about what happened with the ka-tet and Blaine the Mono. In fact, I got confused and started thinking that was a part of the third book.

Either way, the book is mostly good. Part of me was hoping for a big western shoot-out in the flashback between Roland and his old ka-tet and a group of wannabe gunslingers who call themselves the Big Coffin Hunters. What we get isn't bad, but since these books are fantasy and western, I really wanted that shootout in the streets.

I'm also not sure I was as moved by Roland and Susan's tragedy as I was supposed to be, but I got the idea. Either way, this book kept me entertained the whole time, and I long to see the other ways the series connects to King's other writings, and possibly to the writings of other authors.

On King's On Writing

"When a simile or a metaphor doesn't work, the results are sometimes funny and sometimes embarrassing. Recently I read this sentence in a forthcoming novel I prefer not to name: 'He sat stolidly beside the corpse, waiting for the medical examiner as patiently as a man waiting for a turkey sandwich.' If there is a clarifying connection here, I wasn't able to make it. I consequently closed the book without reading further. If a writer knows what he or she is doing, I'll go along for the ride. If he or she doesn't...well, I'm in my fifties now, and there are a lot of books out there. I don't have time to waste with the poorly written ones."

Stephen King's On Writing is just as the cover states: "A memoir of the craft." I became a fan of King's writing in college, when I read a paperback copy of Carrie, which to this day is still my favorite of his books. On Writing is a tip book for emerging writers. King gives insight into the writing world by giving insight into his writing world. But, how else could anyone talk about writing?

King talks of writing as an art and as a job, a 9-5er complete with a toolbox full of all the necessary style instruments. He begins the book with a 98 page bio, where he shows us how writing has woven itself into his life so completely that without it he could not be whole. The final section of the book, detailing his accident in 1999 when he was struck by a careless driver and nearly killed, reiterates this idea of life and writing tied together.

King describes writing as telepathy, magic, but most memorably to me as digging for a fossil. There's something already there, and we have to use the right tools to uncover it. A fossil indicates a suggestion of another world, a suggestion of story. I agree with King that writing is an act of discovering something already there, though I would argue on the detail of whether one is discovering a fossil or something more whole as in a woolly mammoth frozen in an ice block.

On Writing is touching, very funny, and very informative. If you're super stuffy, and refuse to acknowledge that King is truly a great writer, then you might see it as trash. But the truth of the matter is that no matter his subject matter, King is a writer. To quote Roger Ebert: "A lot of people were outraged that he (King) was honored at the National Book Awards, as if a popular writer could not be taken seriously. But after finding that his book On Writing had more useful and observant things to say about the craft than any book since Strunk and White's The Elements of Style, I have gotten over my own snobbery." Author Cynthia Ozick said of King: "It dawned on me as I listened to him that, never mind all the best sellers and all the stereotypes - this man is a genuine, true-born writer, and that was a revelation." Who can argue with a man when his advice to writers is to read a lot and write a lot?

On that same note, I recommend this book to anyone who loves to write, or to anyone who loves to read. Finally, to give you an idea of the tone of On Writing, I leave you with this clip of Stephen King giving advice to beginning writers at Yale.

An Odyssey through Literature

Could you imagine being a part of a journey so astounding, so memorable, that your name would forever be associated with adventure? The story of Odysseus as told to us by Homer is a hero story that has it all: monsters, wars, murder, treachery, miracles, love, sex, and a hero that is "never without a loss." This work is so important, its impact so profound, that it has become acceptable to call any great journey an Odyssey.

OK, so I like this book. I'm not particularly fond of the translation I have by W.H.D. Rouse (not the translation pictured here). I first read this book back in Middle School, but we read a version called Ulysses which was the basic story simplified with a focus on the adventure part and less on the Telemachus and revenge parts. When I sat down to read the Odyssey, I discovered that the adventure section with the Cyclops and Sirens, Calypso and Circe, was barely a third of the book. I'll admit that I read that third, placed at the center of the story, the fastest, and am still cruising through the last 100 pages or so of the book. But the story is still great. Homer makes Odysseus a likable character, and despite his liaisons with a few immortal women, we can tell that Odysseus truly misses his wife and longs to see her again.

Before this book, I read The Wastelands by Stephen King, which is part of his Dark Tower series. I've been interspersing the Dark Tower with more classic works, to make myself feel better King. Although, I think King doesn't get as much credit as he deserves for being a decent writer, not just a decent horror writer. No matter what his critics may say about his subject material, he has literary skill.

I read the Iliad before that, and that was a difficult book for me to get through. Again, I think that might have had a lot to do with the translation. Whereas my version of the Odyssey is written in way too simple language, the version of the Iliad I read was too stuffy. I get the significance of the story, the fact that Hector is really the character we feel sorry for, and Achilles is pretty self-centered until the end. I also appreciate the way Homer examines the gods in the Iliad, showing them as petty and irresponsible. Homer shows us what makes a man a hero. I think a different translation would have sat with me better.