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3.88 AVERAGE
3.88 AVERAGE
Moved through this one at a nice pace! More information about Randall Flagg and Stephen King is a main character! Yes. That happened! Moves at a great speed and the last section has a lot of cool behind the scenes info from King and it's in canon of the story! Definitely worth the read.
adventurous
emotional
mysterious
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I took like an 8 year break from reading this series because I was so turned off by the idea of King writing himself into the books as implied by the ending of Book 5 and it turned out that was the highlight of this whole entry.
It does drag a little at times, but in the end it won me over.
It does drag a little at times, but in the end it won me over.
This one was ROUGH to get through. The beginning started out okay, but it just devolved from there. I always find these books a little tough to understand, but it feels like King totally lost the thread on this one. The magic system made no sense, things just happened with no real explanation, and all it felt like was one palaver after another. Not even to mention the whole writing himself into the story thing. What the heck was he thinking with that? It totally broke the immersion (maybe mentioning himself is one thing, having a full on conversation with multiple appearances is another). Really makes me happy there is only one book after this if THIS is the direction it is headed.
adventurous
dark
mysterious
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
This one is a set-up book: setting the stage for the final Dark Tower book. But as set-ups go, this is a pretty damn good one: grand in its scope, with the key characters on different and engaging trajectories. That's especially true (as the title suggests) of Susannah.
Without giving too much aways, one particular aspect of the plot is especially 'meta' and will make you wonder just how much of a self-aggrandising streak Stephen King might have (or is he more self-deprecating?). Yet I think, all in all, it adds an intriguing quality to the story.
Without giving too much aways, one particular aspect of the plot is especially 'meta' and will make you wonder just how much of a self-aggrandising streak Stephen King might have (or is he more self-deprecating?). Yet I think, all in all, it adds an intriguing quality to the story.
Wolves of the Calla did not feel particularly rushed, abruptly resolved climactic battle notwithstanding. (I actually think King's swift resolution for the fight teased for hundreds of pages is a rare case of his weakness with endings paying off in an unintended way by de-romanticizing violence into a short, brutal culling.) But this slender filler text feels completely superfluous, adding nothing to the multiverse King cemented in The Waste Lands and Wolves and really accomplishing nothing other than to mildly reposition the characters and, mostly, to introduce King himself into his own magnum opus. There's an obvious sentimentality to this, King clearly rattled by the collision that had nearly killed him and inspired him to make sure he finished this series in particular, but even the meeting of author and creation doesn't do much other than give King a chance to chide his younger self for his past substance abuse. That the entire coda is given over to a writer's diary tracing both his struggle toward sobriety and his attempts to finish The Dark Tower just compounds this navel-gazing. Wolves has a minor reputation but I found it engaging and endearing in its cavalcade of internal and external references, but this is by far the most superfluous, water-treading novel of King's I've yet read.
Gets kind of meta weird.
Cruised through it though, easy to stay hooked
Cruised through it though, easy to stay hooked
adventurous
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Holy shit....to the one part in particular
i can’t believe this is thought of as the worst book in the series… i fucking loved it. it was so meta and a book that only stephen king could get away with writing