The Dark Tower

The Dark Tower, movie based on Stephen King's Dark Tower series, is coming out next year and I see a lot of excitement from fans.  I have no such excitement.  When I was in Europe a little over 10 years ago, the choice of English books was limited so I took what there was.  The first book was weird but interesting.  However, there were aspects that drove me nuts.  Roland, the titular gunslinger, fired scores of bullets in a place where he had no way of replacing them.  Nor did he collect his brass, which is a pretty common practice.  No surprise, at the beginning of the next book he is desperate for ammo.  By the third book, the setting is still unclear and, worse, what there is makes no sense.  Knights armed with six shooters but living in castles?  King apparently doesn't realize that gunpowder made castles obsolete.  A monorail that is evil and can only be destroyed by offering it a riddle it cannot solve?  Shortly after Roland and his party escaped the evil monorail than the series lost me.

 

Sitting around a fire somewhere in an alternate Kansas, Roland finally offered some insights to his past.  He begins telling the tale about the girl he loved and yet those events are told in third person omniscient.  Who is telling this again?  Certainly not Roland, especially since he isn't even present for the events the all-knowing narrator offers.  This failure to switch to a first person voice combined with the crazy nonsensical setting finally drove me away.  It also didn't help that the adventure that we had been following for three and a half books was suddenly put on hold to explore the silly world of the feudal gunfighters of the Middle Ages.

 

A few years after I abandoned the series, I was convinced the read The Talisman.  Reminded me a lot of the Dark Tower series.  Though Stephen King is a hugely successful author and much of his work translates brilliantly to film, I am not a fan of his writing.  His settings have no rulebook so what works in one chapter doesn't work in the next.  What was true here is not true there.  The bullet-fest of the first book is a perfect example.  Roland blazes away with abandon but, in the next book, he is suddenly stingy with bullets because they are precious.  Also, he is extremely lazy about his world building.  The Territories of The Talisman are an alternate America with primitive, yet pristine, versions of the same places found in the US.  Ditto for Gunslinger.  The evil monorail took them across an irradiated alternate America, very similar to the one seen in The Talisman.  Heck, maybe the two tie together.  However, the series was pitched as Lord of the Rings meets The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.  King's got nothing on Tolkien as far as building a believable world.  Heck, Harry Potter is more coherent than King's setting.

 

Granted, I read less than half of the series.  Perhaps it got really good just after I put it down.  I suspect the forthcoming movie will just be the first of a trilogy or series or such.  I will certainly see it but I do not recommend the books.