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4.27 AVERAGE
4.27 AVERAGE
It’s taken me about a decade to get through the books, as I’ve taken my time with them, especially with this book, picking up the next book when it felt time to continue the story. It took me a while to get through this as the first half of the book didn’t pull me along like the others but eventually it picked up the pace and my Dark Tower journey is over. Like every reader of a series they loved, I have that empty grief for the story now complete.
What can I say about this series? For me this is as good as things get. This last edition made me cry with happiness and sorrow multiple times which no other book or series has done before. Great story. Great characters and I will miss it dearly.
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
medium-paced
adventurous
dark
mysterious
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:
Complicated
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
King finishes his deeply flawed but beautifully singular epic fantasy series in suitably sloppy yet gorgeous fashion. It’s quite a marvel all its own, isn’t it? This last volume is the most epic of the set, and while King isn’t neat about his plot, he gives it his all and that proves enough, say thankee.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Critical Score: B
Personal Score: A-
I’m super exhausted from reading this thing, and from reading this series, so let’s get this review done!
I read the first book, The Gunslinger, on, let me check…OH MY GOD ON JUNE 19TH OH MY GOD.
Um. Ok. So, according to Goodreads I read the first book on June 19th of 2021 (AND 21 MINUS 2 IS 19, ALSO THE DATE GOES 19 20 21), which is exactly 22 years (OH MY GOD 19 20 21 22) after King’s accident. In my Gunslinger review, I said I read it in a day and a half, but the start and end dates are both June 19, so I’m not sure which is the inaccurate one.
I read The Drawing of the Three in March of the next year. I read the terrible “Little Sisters of Eluria” in Everything’s Eventual one year later. I started The Waste Lands less than three months later, on the first of June. Two years after that, on the first of April, I started Wizard and Glass. Since then, I’ve been reading straight through to the end of the series—until today, 26 days later, April 26th, 2025. So, it took me almost four years to get around to reading this whole series, largely because I’ve never been in love with it.
Here’s a brief overview of my thoughts on each volume.
The Gunslinger: Kind of a hot mess, but fun and pleasantly episodic in retrospect.
The Drawing of the Three: Bad politics and my incorrect expectations ruined this book for me, but due to the rip-roaring adrenaline of the plot I can see why people love it.
The Waste Lands: The first success of the series. Full of adventure.
Wizard and Glass: Has a great frame story (following our ka-tet), but the Mejis flashback is steeped in horrible gender politics that sink the whole ship, which wasn’t that interesting to begin with.
The Wind Through the Keyhole: Underwhelming but not bad.
Wolves of the Calla: Flawed yet satisfying.
Song of Susannah: Minor yet brilliant, largely thanks to the meta element (I love it, even if many fans hate it).
The Dark Tower: Messy all over, but impressively sprawling, consistently gripping, and somberly rewarding.
Volume VII is maybe the most sloppily executed entry, or the issues are just the most obvious here because when you draw up all the totals and see what you’ve got in the final big picture, when the time for answers arrives, then all the flaws may be laid plain, with no more benefit of the doubt.
King does get the ending right. Halfway through the Coda I thought it was going all wrong, that he’d botched the ending quite badly. When I finished the Coda, I thought it could have gone better even if the point he was making hit true. But after some time to sit with it, I think it’s right. Saving the revelation inside the Tower for a Coda after the epilogue is right. The trick ending of the last chapter in Part V is right, too. It’s the ending for those who would set down their curiosity and turn back from the door of the Tower. To do so, to not finish the book, to not read the Coda, is as illogical as abandoning the Tower is to Roland. By choosing (how could we not?) to read the Coda and enter the Tower, we make the same fatal mistake as Roland and are therefore committed to the knowledge of his loop—and Roland to living the loop. The more I think about it, the more I agree with King’s comment in the Author’s Note that this ending is *right*. It makes a lot of things across the series make more sense. And it’s truly surprising because it makes Roland a tragic figure in a new way, yet in the same way as from the start. He cannot save himself. Why does the loop start at the beginning of The Gunslinger? It feels like King giving into the poetry of ending where he started rather than what would be most logical for the timeline of Roland’s life, but I don’t mind this last plot convenience. King’s earned this one, at least.
I love the ending line of the Coda matching the first line of The Gunslinger, not so much because it pulls out the gimmick of bringing us to the start (which is, to be fair, necessary here), but because King takes what is his most iconic and perhaps most beautiful opening sentence and turns it into a *sentencing*, Roland’s—the thud of a coffin lid closing, but the point at which all becomes circular and thus without close. It’s eerie and sort of horrifying to read the line in this new context. The gunslinger followed, indeed.
In some ways, The Dark Tower is an anti-epic fantasy series. The best thing about it are things unique to King and not to the genre, while its greatest flaws lie in those things unique (though not exclusive) to epic fantasy: grand-scale plotting, ambitious world-building, an abundance of subplots, the need for persistence of tone, pacing, style, and aesthetic across multiple long works. As a fantasy writer, King does not technically succeed, but he makes this series his own for better and worse, marking The Dark Tower as a truly signature take on the genre.
This series is a good example of what happens when you try to write epic fantasy making it up as you go along, writing in starts and stops, working off of hunches, riding in the moment, not planning ahead enough, not plotting things out logically. Just going off vibes, what “the muse” is telling you. It makes for a really creative, weird, pastiche series, but also a series that in many ways doesn’t make much sense and has a lot of structural and logical flaws. I won’t list out examples because most of them are micro, so I’d need to do a close reading analysis, and…yeah, I’m not doing that.
But an easy example to give is Marten’s death. He comes back into the story out of nowhere and makes the foolish decision of going to baby Mordred instead of pursuing Roland. He’s survived lifetimes, but his downfall is this obviously dumb decision to make allies with a demon? Does he even want to be allies? King himself isn’t clear. Marten’s motivations for talking to Mordred are all over the place, and that’s based on lines from the same scene! Then Mordred just up and kills him, quite easily. Doing this doesn’t even give Mordred an special boost of energy or special powers or something. So, what was the point of dragging Marten suddenly and awkwardly back into the story, to then uselessly kill him off? This is but one example of the book’s messy execution.
King’s often an undisciplined writer. For example, you can tell when he has figured out a surprising plot point up ahead, because he starts itching to leave foreshadowing that spoils the plot point, like when a character is going to die or betray someone or a certain plan is going to fall apart. King so rarely plans ahead, I think, that when he finally does, or just *realizes* what’s ahead (his muse, the voices, all that bs), he can’t shut his mouth and keep it to himself. He has to subtly or sometimes loudly spoil it for the readers ahead of time. This is one of the many ways in which writing in the genre of epic fantasy reveals perhaps more of King’s flaws as a writer than his strengths.
Other consistent flaws are muddled character motivations, contradictory world-building, characters figuring things out or taking certain actions “just because,” despite not knowing why they’re thinking that way or doing what they’re doing (see my notes on spirituality a few paragraphs down). This series is rife with lazy editing, clearly the product of getting carried away in the moment or else hastily addressing narrative flaws, and it’s clear that no one challenged King enough in making this series neater. “It’s going to sell a million copies, so sure, send it to print, who cares?”
You can tell he gets a lot of his ideas from his dreams, because story elements oftentimes don’t make sense or don’t fit the scene, and King gets overly emotional towards certain lines or ideas the same way dreams make us feel about what we dream. Then the reader is at a much different emotional stance than King, creating a feeling of dissonance in the scene you’re reading.
Because of all the above flaws, the Dark Tower series is an essential part of King’s career: it shows his weaknesses quite starkly, and they are as fascinating to witness as his strengths. To me, at least.
Now, about how deeply spiritual this series is. As an atheist, I particularly dislike the use of Ka and Gan as an easy out for when things don’t make sense: “oh, it’s just ka”; “ka works in mysterious ways”; “all things serve the beam”. Of course, what we’re talking about is God and fate, the same things that in our reality people use to explain things they don’t understand. And if reality appears to contradict the existence of God and fate, they say, “Well, that’s just God working in mysterious ways” and “all things happen for a reason”. It’s these lies about reality—about the nature of reality—that’s been toxic to society for millennia. So, seeing King create a fantasy series that operates heavily on these lies is frustrating, especially when he goes the extra step to use a fate-led universe as an easy fix when he can’t get his own story to make sense: it’s just Ka working mysteriously, not a plot convenience! He does this because he refuses to plan his stories out and ends up at narrative dead-ends. He refuses to plan stories out because he views those stories not as things he makes, but as being fed to him from the universe. Not only is that a pretentious idea, but it’s delusional. I get that this delusion stimulates the imagination, but you have to be pragmatic at some point if you want your stories to make sense. Otherwise, you just write from artsy subconscious vibes, and the result is creative but illogical, like dreams.
What else?
I’d prefer that King hadn’t marked our world as the keystone one; it feels a bit self-centered for a fantasy story about how “there are other worlds than these”.
Callahan’s death should have been in the climax of Song of Susannah, and Susannah’s plotline should have picked up from where the last book left off, instead of recapping the birth in a weird, sort of alternate scene.
In terms of structure, each “part” of the book gets a little better than the last. I kept feeling surprised by how much story is packed into this novel. The first part, “The Little Red King,” is fast-paced and exciting. As for the second, I love the setting of the Devar-Toi, I love bringing in Ted, and the finale is super sad (I did cry a couple tears for Eddie, and then maybe one for Jake). The third part, about King’s accident and New York, is so riveting. The fourth part, which leads into and through Empathica, is such a vibe, and the whole Dandelo twist was maybe the highlight of the book in terms of thrill-factor. Then comes the fifth part, which I couldn’t put down for the life of me—not because it’s super great, but because it’s the most important stretch of pages in the whole series; it’s magnetic. The standoff with the Crimson King is so-so, but Patrick’s defeat of him via erasure feels fittingly meta, and those remaining red eyes is genius. It all ends with the Tower’s door slamming shut behind Roland. Pretty much what I feared would happen, that the subversion would be total. But it made sense. And I was happy with it.
Susannah’s epilogue is sort of confusing, sort of beautiful, and sort of creepy. I’ll need to go online and see how people interpreted that scene. Was it basically the clearing at the end of the path? I do think Susannah’s character is dealt with pretty beautifully in this book. Kudos to King for that. I love how she’s the last of the ka-tet to go and ultimately knows (senses) that to pursue the Tower is wrong.
The coda is brilliant because of where it lands. I have embraced it after sitting with it.
The inclusion of the full poem by Robert Browning is sweet, but I have to admit I skimmed most of it.
The Author’s Note is mildly off-putting and unnecessary. I think ending with the “read it if you want” poem would have been cleaner…and ending with the Coda would have been cleanest of all. Scrap the scraps, know what I mean?
The illustrations are gorgeous, though some are a little inaccurate. I like the addition of little black and white illustrations at the end of each chapter. The jacket design is beautiful, too, even if the scene it depicts doesn’t exactly play out that way; I’ll look at it as an artistic rendering of the book’s spirit.
I can’t say I identify as a particular fan of this series, but I am a fan of King’s, which means I have (possibly *have* to have) a level of respect and awe for this series. That’s enough for me.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Critical Score: B
Personal Score: A-
I’m super exhausted from reading this thing, and from reading this series, so let’s get this review done!
I read the first book, The Gunslinger, on, let me check…OH MY GOD ON JUNE 19TH OH MY GOD.
Um. Ok. So, according to Goodreads I read the first book on June 19th of 2021 (AND 21 MINUS 2 IS 19, ALSO THE DATE GOES 19 20 21), which is exactly 22 years (OH MY GOD 19 20 21 22) after King’s accident. In my Gunslinger review, I said I read it in a day and a half, but the start and end dates are both June 19, so I’m not sure which is the inaccurate one.
I read The Drawing of the Three in March of the next year. I read the terrible “Little Sisters of Eluria” in Everything’s Eventual one year later. I started The Waste Lands less than three months later, on the first of June. Two years after that, on the first of April, I started Wizard and Glass. Since then, I’ve been reading straight through to the end of the series—until today, 26 days later, April 26th, 2025. So, it took me almost four years to get around to reading this whole series, largely because I’ve never been in love with it.
Here’s a brief overview of my thoughts on each volume.
The Gunslinger: Kind of a hot mess, but fun and pleasantly episodic in retrospect.
The Drawing of the Three: Bad politics and my incorrect expectations ruined this book for me, but due to the rip-roaring adrenaline of the plot I can see why people love it.
The Waste Lands: The first success of the series. Full of adventure.
Wizard and Glass: Has a great frame story (following our ka-tet), but the Mejis flashback is steeped in horrible gender politics that sink the whole ship, which wasn’t that interesting to begin with.
The Wind Through the Keyhole: Underwhelming but not bad.
Wolves of the Calla: Flawed yet satisfying.
Song of Susannah: Minor yet brilliant, largely thanks to the meta element (I love it, even if many fans hate it).
The Dark Tower: Messy all over, but impressively sprawling, consistently gripping, and somberly rewarding.
Volume VII is maybe the most sloppily executed entry, or the issues are just the most obvious here because when you draw up all the totals and see what you’ve got in the final big picture, when the time for answers arrives, then all the flaws may be laid plain, with no more benefit of the doubt.
King does get the ending right. Halfway through the Coda I thought it was going all wrong, that he’d botched the ending quite badly. When I finished the Coda, I thought it could have gone better even if the point he was making hit true. But after some time to sit with it, I think it’s right. Saving the revelation inside the Tower for a Coda after the epilogue is right. The trick ending of the last chapter in Part V is right, too. It’s the ending for those who would set down their curiosity and turn back from the door of the Tower. To do so, to not finish the book, to not read the Coda, is as illogical as abandoning the Tower is to Roland. By choosing (how could we not?) to read the Coda and enter the Tower, we make the same fatal mistake as Roland and are therefore committed to the knowledge of his loop—and Roland to living the loop. The more I think about it, the more I agree with King’s comment in the Author’s Note that this ending is *right*. It makes a lot of things across the series make more sense. And it’s truly surprising because it makes Roland a tragic figure in a new way, yet in the same way as from the start. He cannot save himself. Why does the loop start at the beginning of The Gunslinger? It feels like King giving into the poetry of ending where he started rather than what would be most logical for the timeline of Roland’s life, but I don’t mind this last plot convenience. King’s earned this one, at least.
I love the ending line of the Coda matching the first line of The Gunslinger, not so much because it pulls out the gimmick of bringing us to the start (which is, to be fair, necessary here), but because King takes what is his most iconic and perhaps most beautiful opening sentence and turns it into a *sentencing*, Roland’s—the thud of a coffin lid closing, but the point at which all becomes circular and thus without close. It’s eerie and sort of horrifying to read the line in this new context. The gunslinger followed, indeed.
In some ways, The Dark Tower is an anti-epic fantasy series. The best thing about it are things unique to King and not to the genre, while its greatest flaws lie in those things unique (though not exclusive) to epic fantasy: grand-scale plotting, ambitious world-building, an abundance of subplots, the need for persistence of tone, pacing, style, and aesthetic across multiple long works. As a fantasy writer, King does not technically succeed, but he makes this series his own for better and worse, marking The Dark Tower as a truly signature take on the genre.
This series is a good example of what happens when you try to write epic fantasy making it up as you go along, writing in starts and stops, working off of hunches, riding in the moment, not planning ahead enough, not plotting things out logically. Just going off vibes, what “the muse” is telling you. It makes for a really creative, weird, pastiche series, but also a series that in many ways doesn’t make much sense and has a lot of structural and logical flaws. I won’t list out examples because most of them are micro, so I’d need to do a close reading analysis, and…yeah, I’m not doing that.
But an easy example to give is Marten’s death. He comes back into the story out of nowhere and makes the foolish decision of going to baby Mordred instead of pursuing Roland. He’s survived lifetimes, but his downfall is this obviously dumb decision to make allies with a demon? Does he even want to be allies? King himself isn’t clear. Marten’s motivations for talking to Mordred are all over the place, and that’s based on lines from the same scene! Then Mordred just up and kills him, quite easily. Doing this doesn’t even give Mordred an special boost of energy or special powers or something. So, what was the point of dragging Marten suddenly and awkwardly back into the story, to then uselessly kill him off? This is but one example of the book’s messy execution.
King’s often an undisciplined writer. For example, you can tell when he has figured out a surprising plot point up ahead, because he starts itching to leave foreshadowing that spoils the plot point, like when a character is going to die or betray someone or a certain plan is going to fall apart. King so rarely plans ahead, I think, that when he finally does, or just *realizes* what’s ahead (his muse, the voices, all that bs), he can’t shut his mouth and keep it to himself. He has to subtly or sometimes loudly spoil it for the readers ahead of time. This is one of the many ways in which writing in the genre of epic fantasy reveals perhaps more of King’s flaws as a writer than his strengths.
Other consistent flaws are muddled character motivations, contradictory world-building, characters figuring things out or taking certain actions “just because,” despite not knowing why they’re thinking that way or doing what they’re doing (see my notes on spirituality a few paragraphs down). This series is rife with lazy editing, clearly the product of getting carried away in the moment or else hastily addressing narrative flaws, and it’s clear that no one challenged King enough in making this series neater. “It’s going to sell a million copies, so sure, send it to print, who cares?”
You can tell he gets a lot of his ideas from his dreams, because story elements oftentimes don’t make sense or don’t fit the scene, and King gets overly emotional towards certain lines or ideas the same way dreams make us feel about what we dream. Then the reader is at a much different emotional stance than King, creating a feeling of dissonance in the scene you’re reading.
Because of all the above flaws, the Dark Tower series is an essential part of King’s career: it shows his weaknesses quite starkly, and they are as fascinating to witness as his strengths. To me, at least.
Now, about how deeply spiritual this series is. As an atheist, I particularly dislike the use of Ka and Gan as an easy out for when things don’t make sense: “oh, it’s just ka”; “ka works in mysterious ways”; “all things serve the beam”. Of course, what we’re talking about is God and fate, the same things that in our reality people use to explain things they don’t understand. And if reality appears to contradict the existence of God and fate, they say, “Well, that’s just God working in mysterious ways” and “all things happen for a reason”. It’s these lies about reality—about the nature of reality—that’s been toxic to society for millennia. So, seeing King create a fantasy series that operates heavily on these lies is frustrating, especially when he goes the extra step to use a fate-led universe as an easy fix when he can’t get his own story to make sense: it’s just Ka working mysteriously, not a plot convenience! He does this because he refuses to plan his stories out and ends up at narrative dead-ends. He refuses to plan stories out because he views those stories not as things he makes, but as being fed to him from the universe. Not only is that a pretentious idea, but it’s delusional. I get that this delusion stimulates the imagination, but you have to be pragmatic at some point if you want your stories to make sense. Otherwise, you just write from artsy subconscious vibes, and the result is creative but illogical, like dreams.
What else?
I’d prefer that King hadn’t marked our world as the keystone one; it feels a bit self-centered for a fantasy story about how “there are other worlds than these”.
Callahan’s death should have been in the climax of Song of Susannah, and Susannah’s plotline should have picked up from where the last book left off, instead of recapping the birth in a weird, sort of alternate scene.
In terms of structure, each “part” of the book gets a little better than the last. I kept feeling surprised by how much story is packed into this novel. The first part, “The Little Red King,” is fast-paced and exciting. As for the second, I love the setting of the Devar-Toi, I love bringing in Ted, and the finale is super sad (I did cry a couple tears for Eddie, and then maybe one for Jake). The third part, about King’s accident and New York, is so riveting. The fourth part, which leads into and through Empathica, is such a vibe, and the whole Dandelo twist was maybe the highlight of the book in terms of thrill-factor. Then comes the fifth part, which I couldn’t put down for the life of me—not because it’s super great, but because it’s the most important stretch of pages in the whole series; it’s magnetic. The standoff with the Crimson King is so-so, but Patrick’s defeat of him via erasure feels fittingly meta, and those remaining red eyes is genius. It all ends with the Tower’s door slamming shut behind Roland. Pretty much what I feared would happen, that the subversion would be total. But it made sense. And I was happy with it.
Susannah’s epilogue is sort of confusing, sort of beautiful, and sort of creepy. I’ll need to go online and see how people interpreted that scene. Was it basically the clearing at the end of the path? I do think Susannah’s character is dealt with pretty beautifully in this book. Kudos to King for that. I love how she’s the last of the ka-tet to go and ultimately knows (senses) that to pursue the Tower is wrong.
The coda is brilliant because of where it lands. I have embraced it after sitting with it.
The inclusion of the full poem by Robert Browning is sweet, but I have to admit I skimmed most of it.
The Author’s Note is mildly off-putting and unnecessary. I think ending with the “read it if you want” poem would have been cleaner…and ending with the Coda would have been cleanest of all. Scrap the scraps, know what I mean?
The illustrations are gorgeous, though some are a little inaccurate. I like the addition of little black and white illustrations at the end of each chapter. The jacket design is beautiful, too, even if the scene it depicts doesn’t exactly play out that way; I’ll look at it as an artistic rendering of the book’s spirit.
I can’t say I identify as a particular fan of this series, but I am a fan of King’s, which means I have (possibly *have* to have) a level of respect and awe for this series. That’s enough for me.
adventurous
dark
emotional
reflective
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:
No
Didn’t like the journey of this book as much but the ending of the series was the most Stephen King ending it could’ve been.
The “ending” of happily ever after is nice but unsatisfying if you want answers.
The First ending shows you can’t skip the journey and go straight to the end because you’ll waste your life. The second ending shows the entire book is Roland growing old in this tower going in a cycle because he was casted away as a child.
adventurous
dark
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Content Warnings
Graphic: Gun violence, Violence
Moderate: Rape, Cannibalism