Krishna
This is the final chapter in the long Dark Tower saga. The series consists of the following previous books (in the story order not the chronological order of publication : The Gunslinger, The Drawing of the Three, The Waste Lands, The Wizard and Glass, The Wind Through the Keyhole , Wolves of The Calla. and Song of Susannah.
Takes off right from page 1. Callahan, Jake and Oy enter the den of the evil low men and bird creatures, ready to die and kill, and the excitement goes up right from something like page 2.
When Callahan and Jake enter, Callahan mermerizes the low men with the turtle and then with the cross. Oye keeps the bugs in check – they emerged from under the table. Then the Class 1 Vampires with teeth all over their body emerge from the feasting room, where they were dining on human flesh and blood and Jake is ordered to move and leave Callahan in Roland’s voice emanating from Callahan. Callahan finally blows off a couple of them and then makes the ultimate sacrifice before they get him while Jake slips inside.
Roland and Eddie are hit by a wave where they witness the birth of Mia from a disembodied state. Then they go witness Callahan dying and Jake running inside the vampires’ den. Mia’s baby turns into a giant spider.
Beautiful tie ups. As Jake hears Roland’s voice coming from Callahan, you hear how that happened after. As Susannah hears a word sent telepathically by Jake, we learn how that happened later. This is vintage Stephen King, beautifully written, tense sequences following one after the other.
Jake barely escapes the vampires and runs with Oy to find Susannah, and finds that the tunnel has suddenly turned into a forest. It is a mind trap and interestingly, he escapes by switching his mind into Oy’s body and vice versa. They almost get him before Oy and Jake escape through a door with Susannah’s help on the other side. The mind bending illusions are also great. (The jungle, the dark woods, the dinosaur and the dragon, all are fascinating. )
Meanwhile Eddie and Roland meet John Cullum the man they met in the beginning of their visit, again. He hears their story and believes it all.
They send him to Deepneau and go to find Susannah. Find her they do, with a treacherous robot very reminiscent of Andy in the previous book. The boy/ spider kills Walter (or Randall Flagg) through a mental string that immobilizes him, drinks his guts and blood and leaving his desiccated corpse, follows the ka-tet of Roland and company.
Meanwhile Roland and co walk through a painful (makes them vomit and dizzy) portal and meet Ted (who features in the Hearts on Atlantis book and mistakes Jake for the Garfield boy in that story) with his companions Stanley and Dinky. They explain how the breakers are kidnapped and fed by pills from the brains of the kids, and also explain how the people wasted by radioactivity wander, lost, till they die. Roland asks that one of them be brought to him.
Meanwhile Pimliss and his assistant (a half man half rat thing) are surveying the place to find what the disturbance was about. They are going to investigate the disturbances in the telemetry when the ka tet is brought in by teleportation by Sheemie, the same bar servant that Roland saved in Mejlis in another earlier episode.
They go into the compound at the time of change of guards and there is a spectacular, chaotic war that is described brilliantly.
When Eddie is shot by a dying Primliss, the group is devastated. He dies and in an attempt to save Stephen King from the accident that would kill him and not let him complete the story, another member of the ka-tet is killed too. It is narrated with feeling and verve, though I still hate King placing himself into the story, however self deprecatingly.
Roland, Susanne and Oy go to the Crimson King’s castle where they meet an entity assuming human form (three of them come to Roland as the human Stephen King). They escape the trap, killing two of them and leaving the third to his fate with an infuriated Mordred.
They meet an erstwhile stand up comic who is an old man and though they like him Susanna’s antenna buzzes, and she realizes that he is lying to them.
More Stephen King intrusions, equally pointless and annoying. The Odd’s Lane and the funny comic and how they overcome his devious hidden plans are well told. They rescue Patrick, kept prisoner.
They discover the unique gift Patrick has and the clues that the author drops are brilliant, and the slow exposition of his true powers is exhilarating, in the best of King’s style. More yucky intrusions from the author himself again jars, as they meet the stand up comic and foil his evil plans. The slow break up of the ka-tet is heartbreaking but the killing of the two villains, Mordred and the Red King seems a little bit forced, in order to get the book to end. In fact, once you think about it at the end, Mordred was killed with painful effort when they had an easier way (which they employed against the main villain the Crimson King) to get rid of him as well.
However, after the epilog, there is another section of the book (Coda or in my parlance, epi-epilog) that surprises and stuns you.
All in all, you are sorry to have the series end and part with a lot of characters you have grown to love.
Due to the numerous and painful Stephen King intrusions into his own story, I give it a 7/10
– – Krishna