Honestly, I haven’t read a lot of Stephen King, and I’m afraid to admit that’s because I’m a snob. Because I am a snob! I sometimes suffer for my tendency to think that I won’t like things that are popular just because they’re popular. It can lead me to miss out on things I otherwise would enjoy a great deal.
And honestly, that’s exactly how I feel having read the entire Dark Tower series, all 5,000 or so pages, in the last two weeks. I feel a bit silly for letting myself miss out on it so long, because I absolutely loved this weird and wonderful fantasy. It is an intriguing criss-cross of different speculative genres, feeling at once extremely classic (full of references to medieval literature, for instance) and hyper-modern. It even delves into postmodernity, with the author appearing as a character.
It’s hard to know exactly what to say about something as long and complex as this series. I think where I’ll leave it is with the fact that the Dark Tower series is both a great book and a good one. It is intelligent, complex, and literary. It is also lots of fun to read and easy to keep turning the pages. I’ll be picking up my own copies of the series and hopefully returning to it many times in the future.
Anya Josephs 