Books!

So, The Dark Tower. I can't really talk about the series without sounding ridiculously fangirlish- this is mostly because the description of the Dark Tower at the end of the first book sort of parallels my own quasi religious/spiritual beliefs...and I'm a dork. A huge, screaming dork.

Stephen King's The Dark Tower series is an ongoing epic saga sort of thing- you know, the world's gone to hell in a handbasket, it's up to the last gunslinger to save it, yadda yadda...It sounds like a stock sci-fi/fantasy plot.

But oh, is it ever so much more. I suppose the genre is technically sci-fi, as there are occasional robots running about. But it's much more than a bunch of gimicks and bright lights- the story takes place in a world that has "moved on"- your not-so-standard post-apocalyptic setting.

There's no telling how long the series will run- the sixth book just came out, and as far as I can tell, it's in no danger of ending any time soon. King will probably die before he finishes it, the bastard- but those are his estimates, not mine; the world of the Dark Tower sort of encompasses every world, and while I'm sure that the current main characters are all going to die at some point, it's difficult to say if they'll stay dead. One of them has already died twice...or not at all.

The first book follows Roland as he tracks the Man in Black across the desert; the Man in Black was indirectly responsible for the civil war that destroyed his homeland, and Roland, of course, runs into trouble while following him. He runs into Jake Chambers, an eleven year old boy who ends up being responsible for a remarkable amount of temporal doom (kid just won't stop dying...) and brings him along for the ride. Eventually Roland catches up to the Man in Black and gets a glimpse of the Dark Tower before the book ends. It's a good introduction to the main character and the world he's traveling in- Roland grows on you a bit like foot rot- I adore him in all in unimaginative, pragmatic, gunslinging glory. (He's a bit like Shadow in American Gods, only not as dense, not as irritating, and with a bit more personality. So really, nothing at all like Shadow, but they're the same type of character- stoic and impossible to kill.)

The second book introduces the lobstrosities (gad, I love that word) that chew off bits of Roland's hand and foot and do their damndest to get the rest of him- so Roland hops through one of the doors standing in the middle of the sand (doors, like roses, towers, and keys, tend to pop out of nowhere and lead to strange places in these books) and ends up in New York in 1989 in the body of Eddie Dean, your neighborhood crack mule. Eddie is irritating and abrasive and very, very angry, and probably a reflection of King himself in his heroin days. There's a lot of whining in the second book- it's excusable, of course; I mean, heroin withdrawl and giant lobster monsters and a crazy-as-fuck guy with a gun are enough to make even the most rational of people a bit cranky. And, of course, when Detta/Odetta/Susannah shows up and tries to kill them both, it gets to be a little bit much. The time Roland spends behind the doors is the best part of the story, in my opinion; after he brings Eddie out, it gets to be a little monotonous, since they're all fucked sideways with a spoon and about to die horrible, horrible deaths. The ending's a bit uplifting, though, and it bridges nicely into the third book.

My real problem with King is that I don't trust him. At all. Against my better judgement, I really like all of these characters- I love Roland (I dunno, I have a thing for super hero characters, and Roland's just fucked up enough to make it cool- and his past is twisty and full of vaguely chivalrous knight errant things, and I'm also something of a sucker for knights errant.) and Eddie manages to be incredibly sympathetic and human with all of his insecurities. Susannah is hardcore, almost the same way that Roland is, and is sensible where Eddie is neurotic. Jake (damn kid needs to quit it with the trains and the temporal doom) is actually interesting in a way most eleven year olds are not- but I just don't trust King to not kill them all off in one fell swoop. These books aren't happy books, and they aren't, for the most part, pleasant books- they're gritty and desperate and really, really good- and I don't trust King to not rip my heart out and feed it to the lobstrosities.

It took me forever to read The Drawing of the Three (book 2) for much the same reason that I haven't finished American Psycho; it was just that disturbing at times. The Waste Lands, with its T S Eliot quotes (Because you just can't name a book that and not quote Eliot, it'd be blasphemous or something- though I do wish he'd left out the Prufrock quotes towards the end. That was disturbing.) and swirly temporal doom and dying robots, is a bit less dark- though I don't think I'm ever going to look at trains or old houses the same way again.

Book three is my favorite so far, because I like sane Susannah and insane Roland, and all of Roland's lessons are quite nifty. Also, it was a very quick read- it took me maybe three or four hours in one sitting, possibly less. I only meant to read half of it, but then I did what I used to do with all my books and flipped to the last few pages...since the damn thing ends on a cliffhanger, I realized that I wouldn't be able to sleep if I didn't find out what was up with the damned train, so I just finished the whole thing. My copy of the book is the special edition one with color illustrations, which is why I'm surprised my dreams had more Harry Potter and less mutated nuclear doom than they did.

I love the way King makes little references to things- there's the Eliot and Browning, of course, and Led Zeppelin, the Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Lord of the Rings, ZZ Top, Oz...Crazy references. It's great. In a way, they date the books, but you can forgive that since there's so much temporal doom. (I keep using that phrase, and I apologize- it's just such a great phrase, though. Doom! Temporal doom! Temporal lobstrosity doom! *cough* Sorry. Got carried away.)

And now I need to find the fourth book, since the third ended so abruptly. Fucking cliffhangers. Whee books.