Reviews for Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower, Vol. 7

The average rating for Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower, Vol. 7 based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2007-09-22 00:00:00 Michael Cusimano [ The Flaws The biggest let down to me in this was that the whole Modred thing was so anti-climatic. His birth was a huge focus in the final three books, yet in the end all he managed to do was send poor Oy to a grisly death. In fact, there's precious little satisfaction to be found in any the endings of the major villains. Modred was dying of food poisoning anyhow. Oy spoils his attack and Roland dispatches him with ease. The Crimson King is just crazy old man on a balcony throwing bombs around, and he gets taken out by a pencil eraser wielded by a kid with no tongue. Maybe worst of all was the ending of Randall Flagg a/k/a Walter a/k/a Martin. This one was especially galling because not only had he been Roland's nemesis, he'd been a boogeyman in King's books for years. Yet he gets eaten by Modred the baby. That sucked. I'm still not sure about King writing himself into the story either. I don't think he did it out of ego because he made himself look pretty awful overall, but at some point after his accident, I think he couldn't separate what he'd gone through from the story it inspired him to finally finish. It didn't ruin the series for me, but I kind of wish he'd come up with something else. Having gotten that out of my system, let's proceed to: The Masterpiece I loved the whole concept of the Tet Corporation, and I continue to hope that someday King will give us a book detailing its war against N. Central Positronics and Sombra. I could have read several more chapters regarding that piece. The character deaths were incredibly well done and still painful the third time through this. We've known since Roland let Jake fall into the abyss in The Gunslinger that this quest to find the Dark Tower would cost Roland dearly, but I was not prepared for how high the price turned out to be. Which brings us to my favorite part, the ending. The idea that Roland has been stuck in an endless cycle of climbing the Tower only to find himself back at the beginning of the series seems kind of obvious in retrospect, but caught me completely by surprise. As King noted in the afterword, it's not a happy ending, but it's the right ending. I agree with that. Roland's ultimate damanation wasn't that he sacrificed his friends to get to the Tower, it's that he risked the Tower again by pressing on to satisfy his own obsession to see it after it had already been saved that puts him in his own personal hell. I also like how that sneaky bastard King made us all complicit with Roland's fate. By offering us the chance to opt out and leave the book knowing that Roland reached the Tower and that Susannah was reunited with Eddie and Jake in another version of New York, King made us all Roland by proxy. We couldn't resist. We had to know what was in the Tower. And when we find out, we all share Roland's fate of going back to the beginning. (hide spoiler)]

Review # 2 was written on 2011-03-20 00:00:00 Todd Marion [ So. Randalf Flag, Susannah's baby, and most of all the Crimson King were all huge anticlimaxes for me. Given the nature of the ending and King's skill I wonder if these weren't perhaps intended to be anticlimaxes with everything turning out to be less impressive, less important, more shabby and spoiled than it had been built up to be in Roland's mind. In book 4/5 we see that anything can be magic, with Dodge gearsticks performing as magic wands. Perhaps here we see that anything can be your arch-nemesis and the undoing of the world - it's us (or Roland) who invests them with that power and at the end of it all he sees them for what they are? Who knows. Either way as a reader finding the Crimson King who has sat at the heart of this epic for decades, and finding him to be an unimpressive grenade-lobbing old man with no special powers, no wisdom or insights ... offering no closure ... well it didn't sit well. Perhaps this was intentional - to give me the same empty feeling Roland gets in the end, but it didn't quite work for this reader. I felt short-changed. The idea for the close of the story, the coup de grace, is brilliant. But it could have been spelled out more clearly perhaps. A tough call since you don't want to over do it. The end message (that I took at least) is that the journey was (and is for all of us) the important thing. Not the ending. And that if we set our sights on the end goal and sacrifice everything to get it, we will lose out on every level. Roland, who we admired for his unflinching commitment to the cause, for the doggedness with which he pursued the tower, is doomed to start at the beginning and repeat the hunt yet again for Ka is a wheel and he is bound to it. The strengths we saw in him, the willingness to sacrifice everything, even friends at the very end, are now shown as his weaknesses. His only chance to leave the wheel and find peace is to see this truth - that the important things are those he sacrifices time and again. His singularity of purpose is his curse, not his strength - the friendships and loves he encounters in the NOW are what matters, not the paper-thin Crimson King trapped in an empty tower. The path he plots toward the tower is the crucial thing - not if he gets there. This is a beautiful, powerful way to conclude such an epic and I applaud King for his vision. I just wish he'd written it in a way that connected better with me when I read it. (hide spoiler)]