Happy birthday, Stephen King!

Slogged through all 800 pages of this freshly released doorstop today, just to find out how the almost fractally complex story I started in my early teens finally ends.

The Dark Tower is the kind of book that the thirteen- or fourteen- year old who started reading it would have been proud to write. It will probably make little or no sense to anyone who hasn't read most or all of King's other books. I have. Some tried my patience more than others. It's hard to reconcile the fabulously lucid prose of On Writing or The Dead Zone (or, for that matter, the terrific stories in the recent collection Everything's Eventual) with groaning, plot-driven wrecks like Insomnia or Gerald's Game. The Dark Tower novels up the patience-trying quotient by juxtaposing huge deserts of slobbery exposition and backstory with individually striking sentences and paragraphs.

So, for every surreally comic paragraph like this:

"'I mean, my wife is in bad trouble somewhere up the line, for all I know she's being eaten alive by vampires or vampire bugs, and here I sit beside a country road with a guy whose most basic skill is shooting people, trying to work out how I'm going to start a fucking corporation!'"

you get a paragraph of plain clear writing:

"He climbed on without looking into any more of the rooms, without bothering to smell their aromas of the past. The stairwell narrowed until his shoulders nearly touched its curved stone sides. No songs now, unless the wind was a song, for he heard it soughing."

I like that second sentence a lot; it reminds me of the simplicity of a Shaker box. The sibillance of the repeated s-sounds, and the interplay of the hard c-sounds -- touched, curved -- forming a kind of counterpoint, or backbeat.

I'm glad I got to read these books, as uneven and overwritten as they mostly are. I don't know if I'll ever reread them, but I'm glad I made it all the way through once. And the last book's final pages really are cruel, and appropriate.


- posted by cjb @ 8:55 PM