Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Technically this book is not low quality enough to merit one star, but if you've been with this series since Day One, and believe as I do that this book carries more with it than just itself as a story, to give it anything more than one star would understate the magnitude of its failure. All of the problems with book six are extended and compounded here in book seven: the reliance on New York and Maine as settings for an adventure story that's supposed to be grander than any one time or place, the prominence of annoying and unwelcome new characters, King's overuse of unbelievable internal dialogue to cram exposition down our throats, his narcissistic inclusion of himself as an important element, (more on that later) and his lack of focus on any one element worth caring about. The bottom line is this: "The Dark Tower 7" is King at his laziest and least original, which is hard enough to sit through in his lower-quality stand-alone output, but shockingly unforgivable in what is supposed to be the center of all his literary creation (his words, not mine) and his bid for greatness in the eyes of posterity. Perhaps writing the Dark Tower had become a burden not unlike the Tower quest itself. Unlike his character Roland, however, King jumps ship rather than stick it out. Consider the evidence: the books inexplicably marginalize Roland and the Quest the further they go. By contrast, pointless distractions and King himself (with a profound dislike for the burden of being author) appear and assume importance. Roland is relieved of many of his soul-testing responsibilities (sacrificing his friends, dealing with his foes) by cheap plot devices that cause them to disappear outside of any action of his-- even the Tower itself is made practically irrelevant by a series of contrived events and unimportant characters. Forgive me, but wasn't the great central tragedy of this series that he'd give up anything for the Quest, and has in the past? King spent quite a bit of books one, three, and almost all of four dealing with this-- why throw it out the window in the closing 300 pages? In "Dark Tower 7" Roland sacrifices nothing-- he is LEFT BEHIND and made irrelevant; this is perhaps symbolic of what has happened to the Series on the whole. The final three books in this series have a lurching, breakneck pace and reach their end with all the subtlety of a dump truck hitting a brick wall. Is it coincidental that they were penned all at once, contrasting with the twenty or so years it took King to write the first four? Consider also the growing preoccupation with the Tower in his other works over the last few years. The overwhelming presence in the first four books was the slow decay of a many layered world, one like and yet unlike our own, with complex characters that were all just a little bit crazy from their own mental decay. In the final three books, this world gives way to the familiar rushing and business-like atmosphere of omnipresent New York. The characters we knew fade and are replaced by cardboard heroes or villains, doing what they have to do to bring the story to an end. The Quest (and possibly King's concern for his own mortality) probably proved too much to bear and King wanted out. If so, that is his prerogative. I do not feel he owes me any duty to "finish the series right," although I can offer my opinion that it would have been better to leave it unfinished than to drop it off a literary skyscraper like he has. In a self-serving note at the end, King remarks that the problem with Constant Readers is that they never want to acknowledge that sooner or later they'll have to let go-- whether there's real closure or not, and that it's a tragic thing to be insistent on some kind of neatly resolved 'ending.' I would answer that he should have taken some of his own advice: in the rush to close and end this series he's given up its soul. Tragic, indeed, as the once-great "Dark Tower" books deserved better treatment than this. If you are (like I was) an enthusiastic reader of the series and began to smell a rat in places during Book Five, I advise you to stop and leave your impression of the books as intact as it can be. If you've already read book six and enjoyed it without any problems, you might want to continue. For everyone else: it only gets worse.