THE BOOK REPORT: King's crowning achievement
I generally bash on big-name, blockbuster, series-writing authors. Nothing irritates me more than people who generate book after book, without artistic ability or talent, skating by on nothing more but their big name plastered across the brightly-stained covers. It’s disturbing how these people continue to sell books using the same tired plot characteristics, boring characters, and worn out vocabulary. Will no one call them out for their inability to generate anything new and creative? Yet this is the nature of the modern book market, what sells it not always what is best and it is left to the discerning reader to cull through the garbage and identify the gems.
One of these more famous writers, Stephen King, was once known for his novels of groundbreaking suspense and horror, page-turners that terrified and entertained, fresh takes on a tired genre. But as time and fame began to chip away at his craft, his books have become more and more predictable and boring. The pop and awe that so often accompanied his early works has been reduced to covers with catchy titles and his name in bold, leaving the reader with little enjoyment.
In 1982, he published one of his better books, The Gunslinger. The book focuses on the life of Roland Deschain, the last of a long line of gunslingers. In his world (an alternate to our own), the gunslingers are knights who seek justice and act as the governing force of his land. As his kind have died off, his world has deteriorated into chaos and despair. As things worsen, the very fabric of his world and our own begins to fray, allowing aspects of the two universes to connect and coexist. This combination of science fiction and western is made even stranger by the addition of magical elements. Roland’s enemies are often characters with super human powers, pressing him to the limit of his strength as a human.
And as The Gunslinger is only the first book of the series, the next six in the series follow the arc of Roland and his band of friends and their battle against the collapse of our two worlds. The story flows from book to book. It pauses only once, in Wizard and Glass (book 4) to look back on Roland’s life. It is an epic series with novels that are worthy of attention on their own, regardless of the others. The brightest of the series are books 1, 2, 4, and 7, though The Gunslinger (book 1) is the best.
Roland is the embodiment of good, tempted by evil, betrayed by those around him, standing against the encroachment of dark, without hope. Each of the books leads you to continue reading, to go on to the next. They function as books in a series should: building on each other towards the finale. The Dark Tower Series is definitely worth your time as a reader, it is a rare and well-written series from an author too often resting on his laurels.
