I loved Wolves but Gunslinger is still the best. I liked the detour that Wolves took. We learned some new things about the characters and opened up a whole bunch of questions.
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I loved Wolves but Gunslinger is still the best. I liked the detour that Wolves took. We learned some new things about the characters and opened up a whole bunch of questions.
All right, I'll take the bait, although I think I've spoken about this before.
Wolves is my least favorite of the Dark Tower series. It's the follow-up to what might be my favorite, Wizard and Glass, so maybe I was set up to be disappointed no matter what.
I still remember reading the first sixty pages of Wolves on a floppy-disc my friend had brought to school before the book was published. I read it that night, and was uber-excited. It was awesome. A fantastic beginning, hinting at an awesome climax when the ka-tet would confront these "wolves".
Turns out it was a shaggy dog story. The wolves were not some awesome new enemy the gunslingers must face, but instead robots made of tinfoil that could be downed by a weaponized plate. Yeah, a plate. As in...something you eat off of. And it's been several years since I last read it (I've actually read it twice, thinking maybe I was wrong in my first evaluation), but if memory serves me, in this climactic showdown only one person is actually killed (I could be wrong about that, but I'm thinking of Jake's pal there, the one whose father was a traitor).
The Dark Tower always had little cross-overs to our own pop culture (the cop seeing Roland in Drawing of the Three and is reminded of the Terminator, the Green Palace and ruby slippers from Oz, etc.), but in this book it was overkill. The wolves use explosive snitches and lightsabers, and are copies of Dr. Doom. Andy is described as resembling C-3PO. I'm sure there are many more that don't come to mind. The point is, this was too much for me to handle, and pulled me out of the story.
It's revealed that Susannah has another personality emerging, Mia, the mother. This felt repetitive to me, something I thought we'd resolved at the end of Drawing.
Too many archaic Thee's and Thou's. I don't recall Roland every talking this way previously, even in flashbacks to In-World, to Gilead, even when he uses the high speech. Why is he talking like this now? And why does he seem to be crying all the time, or on the brink of crying? I understand the need for development, and the fact that he's bonding more deeply with the ka-tet, opening up to people, but this robs him of much that made him such a badass character in the first place. Since when did we replace those blue bombardier eyes with blue teary eyes?
The introduction of Father Callahan. This was cool, I could dig this. But at the end we find a copy of 'Salem's Lot. This completely ripped me out of the world King had so expertly crafted. This is basically breaking the third wall (for example, when an actor in a movie addresses the camera and viewer directly). It's not that I mind linking all the books together (I loved the Stand links that had already been inserted), it's that the actual book physically manifests itself, with all details pertaining to a character inside, and written by the very author (this only gets worse and worse for me as the series progresses, with the eventual). No, I didn't dig this at all. It was a constant reminder that I was reading a book, it robbed me of the imersion factor of experiencing the world I'd come to love. King has placed little easter eggs before in books, little nods and references to himself and his works, and I greatly enjoyed these, it was like an inside-joke. But they were never integral to the plot, they were just one-line shout-outs.
Anyway, just my two cents, but that's the way I feel. Currently I'm reading Wind Through the Keyhole, started last night and am only about fifty pages into it, but I'm definitely digging it so far.
wow, sam...quite spot on !!
so...for the record...i consider DT2, 3 & 4 to be among the very best writing king has ever done..with 2-3-4 being at the pinnacle, bested only by SL and, possibly, the mist
and, also for the record...i find 5, 6, and 7 to among the very worst...eclipsed only by 'the tommyknockers' and 'insomnia'
and there is a great distance, in my mind, between those 5 books and all the rest...a wide, deep gap
king has said that often times when he writes, he sets down and gets whisked away, ...dt 2, 3 and 4 feel like they were written magically..they breath an effervescent glow of words/thought/ideas/happenings that float along on a storytelling arc that is unrivaled
dt 5. 6 and 7 feel like a guy who, having just had a scary run-in with fate, feels he ought to crank out the last chapter before the big one hits...all that passion: gone...all that sheer inventiveness: gone...all the wonder and mystery of what might lie ahead: gone
they feel like a guy who keeps looking up from the typewriter to check his outline on the wall so that he doen't lose track of just 'getting there'
when the lead up to dt4 was going, king often would mention that he wanted to start out his story back in the past...but that the publisher (and maybe others) thought he should finish up the tale of blaine...but he kept maintaining that that was not in the cards...that is not what the book was about...not the tale his heart could tell yet...he wouldn't go there
and he went there...and it felt tacked on..it felt, for the first time, unreal...
it, in fact, sucked...good thing the main story, the one he said was the only one he had any intention of telling, was so very, very good..it kinda made up for the lameness at the beginning and the end
imho...the blaine stuff in dt 4is as bad as dt5, 6 and 7...
sam is quite right...too much perfunctualness'...too much retread like it means something...too much same-old-same-old, dried on characterization, rather than exuberant character developement that 1, 2, 3, and 4 had on every page
with 1, 2, 3, and 4...you never knoew what what happen next...with 5,6 and 7...you'd have to be a dolt not to have it all figure out well inadvance
and the injection of king and his works into all this ?
just as sam said...brought me right out of the DT reality of great writing and into the mundane world of WTF???
DT 1, 2, 3, and 4 were written by someone who loved to write and was out to tell a most astonishing tale, indeed
DT5, 6 and 7 were written by someone who just wanted to get it over with
one of these days,...i hope to go back and reread 'em all...but i know i'll come up on the last three with more than a little trepidation deep in my heart..
but if i do...i hope i perservere and find something magical within those three that i just flatout missed the first time...but i do not hold out that much hope
every king book i've reread ? i felt the same way about the second time
no reason to expect that the magic was there and i just missed it
Finally finished it a few days ago. It was good. The story flowed well, kept me interested. The ending (what occured with the Wolves and to Suz) was no surprise, but then again I don't think it needed to be. Makes me want to pick up Song to find out what's going to happen next.
Wolves was my least favorite of the series but I still enjoyed it. I liked Father Callahan being introduced into the story.
The part that stands out as being stinky is how Roland kept motioning his hand when someone was talking, like "Go on, go on.." He did that a lot. I got the idea Stephen King was getting impatient with the process and it showed up in Roland who seemed pretty bored in Wolves.
But what the hell: We can't all be Tolkien.
All-in-all, the writer-reader connection is one of mutual consent where all parties concerned ultimately get what they deserve. But I sometimes ask myself, "How might SK have written this without being under the yoke of deadlines, agents, publishers, readers...
on your spoiler...i don't know, ZM...i've always thought that the write-in was just...grasping at straws...it certainly didn't seem to be evident in 1-4...i always thought it was a shortcut thru stephens woods...a way to bring together quickly that which he suddenly thought might need a quick resolution...
if so...then it is lazy...if not, then, for me at least, it was not handled well at all..and further drove me from what was once a sparklingly great narrative
on his endings...y'know..some work well for me (the mist, slames lot, the dead zone)..some don't (DT, it, duma key) ...the one thing in common for all the ones that didn't is that they all 'feel' rushed...more like he pondered amd podered at where to go...what to do...and just threw up his hands and grasped at the first straw
but you're quite right...a 'bad' ending never spoiled a great read...
I thought wolves was the second most western book in the series. I thought it was okay, not the best " Susannah Delgado and Roland deschains romance has to be the best" say thankee...
Yeah, he does seem to be a great fan of the 'Deus ex Machina' Some endings remind me of endings like in the Matrix trilogy. Whaaaaa??? Rickin racken, frikken frackin!!! Got me again, SK!! :ah:Quote:
Originally Posted by guido tkp
Everyone has their own taste, I found the Gunslinger tough, but really enjoyed the rest of the series, including Wolves.
i get that :biggrin2: ...it can be perturbing to read such a massively wonderous tome...only to get.........that
1000 pages of greatness...and 10 or 20 of...oh well