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71 of 85 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
One 'Constant Reader' to another... NO SPOILERS, February 16, 2006
Technically this book is not low quality enough to merit one star, but if you've been with this series since Day One, and believe as I do that this book carries more with it than just itself as a story, to give it anything more than one star would understate the magnitude of its failure.
All of the problems with book six are extended and compounded here in book seven: the reliance on New York and Maine as settings for an adventure story that's supposed to be grander than any one time or place, the prominence of annoying and unwelcome new characters, King's overuse of unbelievable internal dialogue to cram exposition down our throats, his narcissistic inclusion of himself as an important element, (more on that later) and his lack of focus on any one element worth caring about. The bottom line is this: "The Dark Tower 7" is King at his laziest and least original, which is hard enough to sit through in his lower-quality stand-alone output, but shockingly unforgivable in what is supposed to be the center of all his literary creation (his words, not mine) and his bid for greatness in the eyes of posterity.
Perhaps writing the Dark Tower had become a burden not unlike the Tower quest itself. Unlike his character Roland, however, King jumps ship rather than stick it out. Consider the evidence: the books inexplicably marginalize Roland and the Quest the further they go. By contrast, pointless distractions and King himself (with a profound dislike for the burden of being author) appear and assume importance. Roland is relieved of many of his soul-testing responsibilities (sacrificing his friends, dealing with his foes) by cheap plot devices that cause them to disappear outside of any action of his-- even the Tower itself is made practically irrelevant by a series of contrived events and unimportant characters. Forgive me, but wasn't the great central tragedy of this series that he'd give up anything for the Quest, and has in the past? King spent quite a bit of books one, three, and almost all of four dealing with this-- why throw it out the window in the closing 300 pages?
In "Dark Tower 7" Roland sacrifices nothing-- he is LEFT BEHIND and made irrelevant; this is perhaps symbolic of what has happened to the Series on the whole. The final three books in this series have a lurching, breakneck pace and reach their end with all the subtlety of a dump truck hitting a brick wall. Is it coincidental that they were penned all at once, contrasting with the twenty or so years it took King to write the first four? Consider also the growing preoccupation with the Tower in his other works over the last few years. The overwhelming presence in the first four books was the slow decay of a many layered world, one like and yet unlike our own, with complex characters that were all just a little bit crazy from their own mental decay. In the final three books, this world gives way to the familiar rushing and business-like atmosphere of omnipresent New York. The characters we knew fade and are replaced by cardboard heroes or villains, doing what they have to do to bring the story to an end.
The Quest (and possibly King's concern for his own mortality) probably proved too much to bear and King wanted out. If so, that is his prerogative. I do not feel he owes me any duty to "finish the series right," although I can offer my opinion that it would have been better to leave it unfinished than to drop it off a literary skyscraper like he has. In a self-serving note at the end, King remarks that the problem with Constant Readers is that they never want to acknowledge that sooner or later they'll have to let go-- whether there's real closure or not, and that it's a tragic thing to be insistent on some kind of neatly resolved 'ending.' I would answer that he should have taken some of his own advice: in the rush to close and end this series he's given up its soul. Tragic, indeed, as the once-great "Dark Tower" books deserved better treatment than this. If you are (like I was) an enthusiastic reader of the series and began to smell a rat in places during Book Five, I advise you to stop and leave your impression of the books as intact as it can be. If you've already read book six and enjoyed it without any problems, you might want to continue. For everyone else: it only gets worse.
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70 of 84 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
what happened...?, July 12, 2005
Imagine if you had to wait ten years in between each book of the Lord of the Rings. Then imagine after being entranced by the first two books, surprising in their originality, wonder and realistic depth, you wait another decade, pick up The Return of the King, and halfway through, J.R.R Tolkien walks into Middle Earth, shakes Frodo's hand, and proceeds to explain to him how he conceived of the idea of hobbits as a bedtime story for his children.
Then read on for a bit more, and find that Sauron, Lord of Mordor, is in actuality not evil incarnate, but just some pissed off guy, yelling on the balcony of his tower.
Then, just as Frodo walks into the tunnel leading to the Cracks of Doom, there's an interjection BY THE AUTHOR, telling you that it's time to stop reading now.
Imagine all this, and then you begin to get a good idea of how what began as a truly unique and genere shattering epic and potential genuine magnum opus can go out with a groan instead of a bang.
Anybody who loved this series in its entirety, I cannot fault you. But I can say that you were not as dedicated and engulfed in the world of the gunslinger and his new friends as the rest of us were. You are the guys who never watch the ballgames until it's on the news that your team's made the playoffs for the first time in 30 years, and then you go out and buy their hat to wear at the sports bar.
You liked it because you don't care. You liked it because you were expecting just another decent story, and that's what you got. For you it was never real.
The rest of us were expecting a revolutionary epic, because all those years ago when we first found ourselves in the strange world of the gunslinger, we saw all the makings of one.
We saw the potential for something truly magnificent, and we're sad and disillusioned and pissed off as we contrast what could have been with what has come to be. We wonder how something that started so good could end so badly.
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28 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Absolutely lame, August 21, 2006
This review is not written by a Steven King fanatic, but just a reader who has enjoyed a number of his books and considers him a gifted, if inconsistent, writer. If you are a Steven King fanatic, I would ask you please don't read this upsetting and inflamatory review if you think it might bother you.
Steven King overreached himself in these books, or at least, didn't write as well as he is capable of. The first three were extremely original and captured the imagination (well, #2 and #3 were brilliant and #1 was an acceptable start to it all).. But apparently he had no idea where to go with all these themes he had started out. In the first three books, the characters were pretty much established, all he had to do was make them GROW. But instead, by the time of the last few books, he seemed to stop caring about what they were doing, they started acting in very uncharacteristic ways, and by the end of it, I wondered if they just hired someone else to finish the book. The deaths are all pointless, and add nothing to the depth of the series. It becomes just a monotonous shuttling back and forth between worlds, doors just open up the minute the plot needs to advance.
There's lots of threads he left hanging too - the whole thing feels like a rush job. In this 7th book of the series, things get too stupid for words. The company created to protect the rose? The over-the-top coincidences that get so irritating and repetitive? Getting rid of a unique force of evil by leaving it in a storage locker? Himself as a character in the book, but not in any interesting way? The kid that has godlike powers with his eraser? Flagg, the magic man, killed outright, like he can be killed at all? OMG. He hurried to finish this series, he shoulda told them book company executives to go take a flying leap. Maybe he didn't have that choice (or even desire). I can be so cutting without considering others' motives and opportunities, I suppose. I apologize.
The ending is hardly original - I can't understand calling it that. How's about this, Roland suddenly wakes up and it's all a dream. Is that original or what? For a really good "ending in a tower of rebirth", try reading 'A Voyage To Arcturus'. And King tries to apologize for it, face it, he knew the ending was a cop-out. "I don't write these things, I just record them" or something like that. Sorry, but I feel that Steven King DOES write the books, he isn't an oracle, maybe the force flows through him when he writes his best books, but it wasn't particularly flowing through him for this one. I really wish he had taken time before writing such a lame ending as this. Even if he never completed the series, it would have been better than such a slap-in-the-face ending. After reading all this way, you expect a REAL ending. My recommendation to whoever's read books 1-6. Stop right there. Actually, stop at #3. When Eddie talks the computer to death in #4, I thought, that's how Captain Kirk always did it. And then the downhill slide begins...
"Blasting King for a lack of imagination or some other lunacy seems pretty dumb to me." Really? So it's IMPOSSIBLE for any writer to show lack of imagination, that never EVER happens huh. ALL books are brilliant! We must get rid of the rating system and just issue 5+ stars for every book written!
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