1: I’m an English Major.
2: I’m a failed novelist.
3: I’m a huge fucking nerd.
Reading had become more of a chore than a past time. Plots became all too predictable and characters unsympathetic. I’d forgotten what had turned me off to reading in general, when I picked up an old book I’d left at my parent’s house.
It was, of course, Steven King. I rarely had picked up a book without finishing it, but in this case, I had made an exception. I’d gone about four hundred or so pages into the novel and then given up with three hundred to go. Considering this was book four, that was quite the commitment to make and then back out.
The book was The Dark Tower Book IV: Wizard and Glass. After three novels depicting the journey of the main character Roland to the titular Dark Tower, Steven King finally delves into his elusive past through a framework story. It is the retelling of Roland’s life through Roland himself. Only: instead of using a first person narrative, it uses a third person perspective. Essentially, it’s two novels in one, as the one does not co-mingle with the framework due to this ham-fisted neglect of narration. The novel itself could have been edited and placed as a prologue to the series proper instead of being injected in the middle like a mockery of Kurt Vonnegut, except that I doubt the series would have made it far were this the case, for Steven King is an author of horror and suspense: this is a western romance.
It starts off promising as the younger Roland has to train for what will become a lifetime of gunslinging murder, then, as soon as it develops the romantic plot, falls apart. We know how each character in the book is destined, as it foreshadows endlessly. The word, “ka,” meaning a kind of cruel fate is used on almost every page. Roland: first off, is fourteen at the time this is all unfurling. I don’t remember quite what it was like when I was fourteen, but it didn’t involve getting laid and shooting people’s heads off. It’s like a kind of adolescent fantasy reserved for comic books smuggled inside of mainstream paperbacks. I’ll read a Batman comic featuring a fourteen-year-old Robin taking down a three-hundred-pound man, and think to myself, “This is retarded,” even for a comic directed mainly at teenagers. Now change this to a novel with a broad age-range demographic. I couldn’t even bring myself to think of Roland as a scrawny Harry Potter-esque fourteen-year-old. It was disrespectful.
The book is fraught with the fault of all fantasy novels, which is to say: cutting away to the supporting cast. If you’re reading a series like Lord of the Rings, you’ll know what I’m talking about. The series begins with a single group of characters, who split into separate groups, and the story will break away to follow each group. Two chapters will be dedicated to Frodo and Sam, then two to Merry and Pippin, then two to Aragon, then one for Gandalf, and so on and so forth, until you forget what the hell Frodo’s supposed to be doing: which is throwing a ring in a volcano. The story here is supposed to be Roland’s exclusively, but every few pages it skips away to another character in the book. While most of this relates to the main character and his story, some of it has no bearing at all. For instance, there’s several pages devoted to a bartender investigating the sounds of screams only to discover a blood-like swath of dust blowing over the moon. I couldn’t even find a reference to the main character or secondaries ever having even encountered this man. The story could therefore have been whittled down from seven hundred pages of tripe to a modest and average three hundred or so.
The “love” story in this book is of a puppy-dog teenage variety, and therefore of the worse kind, and it’s being handled by a man who typically writes about alien sewer clowns murdering children. The pair pine for each other longingly, then meet up and have under-aged sexual congress. It’s basically kiddie porn, unless you’re of a like mind to myself, imagining an older Roland in his place.
I can scarcely recall the rest, as nearly five years or more spanned the time I picked up the book, put it down, and then picked it back up again. It had yellowed with age and took upon that library scent. If it wasn’t for the creases I’d never known where I had left off. I think I could have picked any point in the story itself without missing overly much. As I said, the book is a fantasy novel, and it’s in the quest variety. Quests are typically adventures, where the meat of the story is between point A and B. In this book, everything before the climax is just empty filler. You want to get to B without having to make any stops, and not because the story is so gripping. It’s like driving through cornfields on the way to the outlet mall: it’s boring along the way and disappointing when you get there.
Then the story snaps back to “reality,” where the older Roland is telling the story to his ka-tet. At this point, you should have forgotten their names, who they are, and what they’re doing. It clumsily explains that a magic ball made the telling of al perspectives in the story possible, and that the story itself which would have taken about a week solid to tell someone had only lasted a few short hours. Then it gets into some Wizard of Oz rip-off shit. You’re reminded that the characters are still nowhere close to their destination: the Dark Tower, and sent on your way.
It’s not a terrible book, nor unreadable, although for the longest time I refused to read it. I think it reminded me too much of the Wheel of Time saga by Robert “I’m Dead Now” Jordan. I think that’s really what killed my love of books and all things living.
For those of you who don’t know, The Wheel of Time saga is a never ending series of books. The author himself has died about halfway through writing them, and passed on his work to some poor schmuck who now has to salvage this debacle. Each book in the series is about 1000 pages long, monotonous, and sexist. The entire premise is that the main character is super-magic and must defeat the proverbial devil. My complaints about fantasy novels tarrying too long on supporting characters is taken to absolute extreme in this series. There’s a cast of thousands, with each nearly identical character receiving a garish amount of attention and detail. The details are nearly all the same. Robert Jordan is accused of having only two kinds of women in his books. Both are catty, manipulative, ear-pulling bitches, so there’s not reason to even make that distinction. The men are all dumb as fuck and lead around blindly by these Sarah Palin types.
The worst part in the drawn-out series was when at the end of one book, the main character had successfully expunged a problem which prevented the men from becoming sane, full-fledged magicians in a world ruled by literal witches. It was the prefect starting point for an escalation and acceleration towards a climax involving magical Armageddon. It could have been like the Matrix meets tits in 3-D, and everyone gets free slurpees. The next book, taking place directly after these events, makes no mention of it. 1000+ pages, and nothing progresses. It’s like American politics. Seriously: IT’S LIKE AMERICAN POLITICS.
In short: it killed my very spiritual essence. I could almost see it escape by body like a misty breath on a cold morning. Robert Jordan is in hell now, but as it’s chief mechanic. His books are like WoW. Endless grinding, characters searing for allies and artifacts in preparation for a final battle that never comes.
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