traceyk wrote:A friend recommended the Dark Tower books to me and I finished the first one and tossed it aside. I had the same problem with it that I always have with Stephen King--gratuitous nastiness. For example--the kid that the gunslinger meets. Who saves his life. I liked the relationship they have. It made the gunslinger seem more human--let him show some sort of emotion besides obssession. Then he goes and lets the kid fall to his death because saving the kid might make him miss the bad guy. And I don't know why King did that. It was like hitting us over the head with a hammer--this guy is OBSSESSED. Geez. We get it already.
Ah, but you see, Tracy, the Kid ("Jack")
didn't die; he re-enters King's Dark Tower story-arc in the third Tower novel:
The Waste Lands, and stays on as a pivotal character right through to the finale.
I think it really helps to bear in mind that King never intended
Dark Tower1: The Gunslinger to be a stand-alone novel, but rather designed it from the get-go to be an introduction to the evolving saga of his Dark Tower mythos.
But, far be it from me to hawk Stephen King like some train-depot snake oil drummer; if his overall style & plotting doesn't work for you, then he's probably the last writer you should waste your time on.
I feel much the same way about John Grisham - I'm attracted to the subject matter and plot scenarios of a great deal of his work, but his page-by-page authorship just leaves me annoyed & frustrated.
Different strokes, huh?
Klondike