(no subject)
So after reading Stephen King’s The Stand, I finally decided to read through his “Dark Tower” series, not only because my mom bought me Wizard and Glass when it first came out years ago. Anyway, I was enjoying the series, even though it started getting really cartoony and hard to take serious (as serious as you can take fantasy novels), after the 4th installment.
I kept reading not really for the quest for the dark tower, which was secondary to me, but for Roland’s pursuit of Walter O’Dim, who is not only the prime antagonist in the Dark Tower series, but an antagonist in other King novels, anyway. It’s fitting, considering how the series is kicked off with “The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”
I really wanted to see what would happen, if Roland could catch Walter O’Dim/Randall Flagg/whatever you may call him, and finally deal that justice that has been built up throughout not just the entire series, but other King works, too.
So I get to the 7th and last novel, and I’m not even halfway through it, and out of nowhere King just casually kills off Randall Flagg with some retarded spider baby thing. OK, so it’s the son of Roland and the Crimson King (not as homosexual as it sound), but still. It’s lame and I hate it. I’m so angry about it all. It’s not even one of those clever controversial things that make you think, it’s just... annoying! I don’t even feel like finishing the last book now, because of how completely stupid that whole thing was. It’s like in a television series, when the actor of a really important role leaves or dies or gets fired or something, so the character just disappears or is killed off in a lame-ass fashion.
It’s like Stephen King doesn’t really know how to resolve situations. It’s like in Under the Dome, which was building up through the whole novel and abruptly ends in the last few pages. And I don’t just mean it cuts off and leaves you to think if they will still be living under the dome, I mean that the entirety of the novel is pretty much wiped clean by killing 99% of everyone and then having some anti-climatic survival scene where the hero has to hold his breath.
That novel sucked anyway, but what I liked about it was that King had crafted a human antagonist who was not the epitome of all evil, didn’t have super powers, or any of that stuff. Just a regular human, looking out for #1 and being despicable. I liked that, and at least it seemed like he would be getting justice at the end, even when everyone else was dying. But nope, he dies in a stupid way, too.
I probably will finish reading The Dark Tower, though, but only because Ted Brautigan was introduced a few pages after the horrible incident.