The following was composed in a white-hot frenzy of late-night writing fueled by a pot of coffee laced with Irish Crème and a boiling-hot temper. Such is the excuse of all who compose, then wish to assuage their prose and its mediocrity. Oh well.

 

Warning: Spoilers follow. No great loss.

 

I Finally Finished the Dark Tower series and I Want Those Fourteen Years Back

 

Oh, how I have come to hate Stephen King.

 

I hate him the way heroin addicts hate heroin. I hate him the way you hate an old girlfriend for breaking up with you and then dating some bohunk, or even becoming a prostitute who won’t take your money.

 

I hate him for going clean and sober. The least the guy could do is fail at marriage, or something. Turmoil breeds creative juices, and apparently, kicking drugs, almost dying in a roadside accident and watching his films tank at the box office isn’t enough.

 

I hate him for sucking me into countless hours finishing up The Dark Tower series and ending up muttering complaints much as I did after George Lucas started releasing the prequels. Complaints like:

1)      I waited for this?

2)      It could have been better.

 

It’s unworthy of me to even write those words—sometimes I think I wouldn’t be writing anything at all (paltry though such writing may be) if I hadn’t start devouring his novels in my freshman year of high school. When he was good, the man was on fire.

 

I think the first one I bought (it never occurred to me to pick the titles up from the library for free) was Pet Sematary, and after that, I was hooked. I went through five books in one agonizingly slow month in the summer, when I was laid up with a broken leg, and school only slowed my pace, without stopping it.

 

I picked up The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger more or less on a whim. It didn’t look much like my bag, but it was Stephen King, and more and more, a part of me was recognizing that I didn’t really give a damn whether he wrote horror, science fiction, westerns or romance novels. It was his writing I was hooked on. The guy put so much energy and so much of himself into his works that it was impossible for me not to get hooked, the way I suppose people can get hooked on a grandfather’s yarn about the old days. I read Gunslinger within the space of a day or two, or perhaps longer, I don’t remember. I remember shrugging at the end, figuring (as much of my generation usually did) that with more waiting and no resolution, the book was more or less pointless.

 

But when I picked it up again some years later, I changed my mind. The prose was blunt, sharp, elegant in a way his other books were not. I began to like the way he described the landscape, and I liked the way he went about sleeping with the town girl, Alice, the way you’d go to a dentist. I came to especially like his conversation with the Man in Black.

 

And when I got through The Drawing of the Three, I thought King had really hit his stride. The story was fast, dense enough to pore over, breezy enough to keep you turning pages impatiently. And I became more and more intrigued about the Tower itself. What was it? What was at the top of it? What was this Ageless Stranger and Beast Walter (the Man in Black) had been talking about?

 

And then…I tuned out.

 

For several reasons, as it were. One, I was a junior pretending to be busy. Two, I leafed through a few more novels by King and came to the quick conclusion that they were crap. The brisk, dense prose and singular voice I’d come to admire so much had degenerated into repetition, tiresome anecdotes, half-baked stories and just a mishmash of so much imaginative diareah that, about 150 pages into Insomnia, where the “I’ve got to sleep or I’ll go crazy” story turned into “Hey look at these little people unmaking the world!” story, I left a Stephen King book unfinished. And wouldn’t read any more for years.

 

Now that I can take summers off without fear of starvation, I allow myself literary indulgences. Michael Moorcock. Harlan Ellison. And eventually, Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. I was smart enough not to buy the books this time, but found myself a little curious about how the whole thing ended. I paced myself to one or two a year, and just finished the last one about an hour ago.

 

And oh how I hate that bastard now.

 

For the record: The Dark Tower is about a gunslinger, Roland, trying to reach a tower that’s the nexus of all worlds and existences. Eventually, through the series, we learn that the tower is falling because of evil sorcery, but in the beginning, it, as well as the protagonist, is clouded in mystery. Roland acquires help: a black, legless woman from the 60’s, an ex-heroin junkie from the eighties, and a kid Roland killed once, then rescued from 1970s New York. As the group travels, they talk extensively, and that’s how we learn about Roland’s past, the nature of the quest, and anything else King thinks up to throw into the story.

 

The story is quite good. King has lost none of his imagination, and when he finds his stride, it’s hard not to get hooked. I especially liked the fight scene in Wolves of the Calla (Book Five), where the men are blasting away robots with their guns and women are throwing sharpened dinner plates with the accuracy of martial arts stars. I liked the shootout with John Farson’s men in Wizard and Glass (Book IV). I even, grudgingly, became intrigued about how all the pieces from King’s other books fit into the puzzle (well Randall Flagg is the Man in Black? How about that!), but honest to God, there’s just too much garbage cluttering up the good stuff. And it’s the incredible badness of this garbage that makes it harder to acknowledge the series’ good points and just hate it altogether.

 

Oh Mr. King, you broke my heart. You are a hundred times the writer I could ever hope to be. I defended you against the tyranny of Harold Bloom when you received your Lifetime Achievement Award. You have an eye that sees things I can only wish to see. But you blew it. You blew it big time. You saw an ending and you took it—had you done this right, you’d have spent some more time writing and even more time editing. You can’t claim you wrote a series of books over seventeen years when the last three came in a year and a half, and you can’t knock the deus ex machina on page 100 only to use it six times over by page 500. 

 

What do I hate about this series? Let me count the ways.

 

I hate its length. I hate its complexity. I hate popular literature masking itself as bona fide literature.

 

I hate how King sneers at metafiction…and then uses it.

 

I hate how King has to have a million tertiary characters running around, cluttering up the story, spouting wisdom and epigrams as empty and meaningless as a Chinese fortune cookie.

 

I hate how he inserts side comments in dialogue. As in: “Well I was walking down the road that leads into town—for town was a place where I haven’t been for years and years—and then I decided I wanted a drink—because a drink, after all, is a good thing—so I stopped off at the nearest bar—or as my old daddy would say, the non-thirstin’ place—when all of the sudden…” blah blah blah, my god, nobody talks that way! You’d need a steno pad to keep track in a conversation!

 

I hate his goddamned phrases: come commala, do it please ya, thankee sai, blah blah blah. How many times while reading these books did I yell at the pages, “Quit with all this palaver crap and do something! Shoot someone! Yeesh!”

 

I hate how his characters laugh at their own jokes…which aren’t funny. Come to think of it, I hate how his characters laugh at nothing.

 

I hate how he makes his characters “just know” something in order for him to get them to do what he wants, as opposed to using creative plot points. “Susan, are you sure you can walk through that valley full of monsters and disease and come out okay so we don’t have to read about you any more and I can go be the sole hero like it was foretold on page 66?” “Yes.” “How?” “I don’t know, but I do.” (I know how you know, Susan…it’s called Bad Writing.)

 

I hate how his characters always have to connect the dots for you so you’ll remember what x has to do with y, which showed up two books and two thousand pages ago. If it were good writing, we’d remember ourselves, thanks very much. 

 

I hate how his characters are always finishing thoughts out loud, at which point someone nearby will ask, “What?” only to have the first character say “Nothing.” It’s like fingerprints, this technique of King’s. I wonder if he even knows he does it, on average, every ten pages or so.

 

I hate how every twenty pages there’s a new term, or a new villain, or a new something that changes everything that happened before. “All right, everyone, remember Flagg, the bad guy? Well now it’s a spider-baby following us, who’s son to another bad guy who was originally the first bad guy only that didn’t make sense, so forget all the stuff that happened before our forty-second palaver.” Internet critics call this retconning. King calls it “hearing the song of the Turtle.” I call it self-pandering.

 

I hate how I sludged through almost four thousand pages, meeting new bad guys, only to find them so lame. Oooh, Mordred is a spider-baby. Gosh, he’s really scary, watch him…follow the good guys for about a thousand miles. Oh, look, there’s going to be a battle…nope, he got shot. Good-bye bad guy. Oh, but wait, there’s the other bad guy, the Crimson King…nope, they erased him out of existence. Good bye other bad guy.

 

I hate how King isn’t satisfied describing a day unless he tells you what they had to eat, where they slept, what new story Roland told everyone , what the temperature was, and how many BMs everyone had after eating native fauna.

 

I hate how King put himself in the books, claiming that everything he’s ever written goes back to this magnum schlopus. Nice way to boost sales, Steve-o, but I think a story works best when the author is invisible. And I thought you did too. For a guy who claims “it is not the teller, but the tale,” you devote more chapters to the teller than any popular fiction writer I’ve seen. In some ways, you’ve even got Philip Roth beat.

 

And oh, but I especially hate how, after so many pages, so many miles, so many lame bad guys and even lamer deaths, we get to the Tower, and the dramatic, nail-biting ending is…Roland walks in. Wow. I’m completely underwhelmed.

 

King must have anticipated complaints (either that, or he couldn’t stop himself), and so he put in an ending that I found both abysmally cannibalistic (Roland starts over again on page one! Only this time he has a horn! Zzzzzz) and oddly intriguing. It does, after all, hearken back to the series’ undoubtedly more powerful beginning, and I like beginning and ending the series with the same line.

 

But one swallow does not a summer make, and the only reason I’m not whining about getting my hours and hours of wasted time reading back is because, truth to tell, I’d probably just waste it all over again on the very same books.  Fortunately, I live in a linear world. I can return the book. Forget about it. And not have to fool myself that I’ve just scaled the literary Mount Everest.