Review: Wizard and Glass

Title: Wizard and Glass

Series: The Dark Tower #4

Author: Stephen King

Genre: Low Fantasy Horror Western with strong Post-Apocalyptic vibes

Trigger Warnings: Death, parent death, blood, gore, violence, injury, fire/fire injury, animal death, animal suffering, guns, fire, infidelity, sexual content, sexual content between consenting minors, sexual assault, adult/minor relationship, forced marriage, verbal abuse, pandemic, excrement

Spoiler Warning: This book is 4th in a series, and reading beyond this point will expose you to major spoilers of previous books.

Back Cover:

Roland the Gunslinger, Eddie, Susannah, and Jake survive Blaine the Mono’s final crash, only to find themselves stranded in an alternate version of Topeka, Kansas, that has been ravaged by the superflu virus. While following the deserted I-70 toward a distant glass palace, Roland recounts his tragic story about a seaside town called Hambry, where he fell in love with a girl named Susan Delgado, and where he and his old tet-mates Alain and Cuthbert battled the forces of John Farson, the harrier who – with a little help from a seeing sphere called Maerlyn’s Grapefruit – ignited Mid-World’s final war.

Review:

I waited a while to pick up this one after finishing The Waste Lands, mainly because I can read a Dark Tower book in two days via audiobook at work but it takes the friend I’m reading the series with a month or two to get through each book. But this one picks up exactly where the last book left off, with the riddle contest with Blaine the Mono.

There are two different stories going on in this book. There’s the frame story with Roland and the ka-tet traveling along the path of the beam towards the Dark Tower. But a good three-quarters of the story is backstory, framed as Roland telling part of his story to Eddie, Susannah, and Jake.

It was kind of interesting to get that history. Susan has been mentioned as part of Roland’s past previously, but now we get to find out who she was, how Roland met her, and what tragedy happened that caused Roland so much pain and regret. There’s also more of Alain and Cuthbert, who have also been mentioned previously. This story expands on their personalities so we get to know them a little bit better – although it doesn’t cover what tragedy happened to them.

If the purpose of the story had been to fill in those gaps in Roland’s history, it would have been significantly shorter. I believe this is the longest book in the series, and the story of Roland and Susan is the reason. I did not like it all that much, to be honest. Roland and friends were focused on preventing or winning a war, but since we’ve spent the previous three Dark Tower books in a world where the war happened and went very badly, I knew how it ultimately ended and didn’t much care how it played out.

The rest of the plot was Roland’s young love with Susan, and it turns out I have very little patience for star-struck young love. So much of the romance had me rolling my eyes, wishing Roland would think with his brain instead of his dick and the story would just move along already. Since it was Roland’s story told by Roland, Alain and Cuthbert were not major contenders for reader connection, and Roland and Susan were too busy being stupid for love for me to enjoy them all that much. Roland himself, despite being fourteen at this point, is pretty much the same as the older version telling the story – less jaded and significantly more horny, but still clever, secretive, and dedicated to being a gunslinger.

The annoying thing is that I was actually interested in the parts of the story that were about our normal protagonists – Roland, Eddie, Susannah, and Jake. They finished their ride with Blaine the Mono, ended up in a weird parallel version of Kansas, and had a bizarrely Wizard of Oz-themed encounter before continuing on the journey. That part, I enjoyed. The backstory I think should have been about half its length. (Although to be fair, if you think about all seven books as one single story as opposed to each book being an entry in a series, proportionally that’s a fairly reasonable length for telling a backstory. I just didn’t particularly enjoy it all stuffed in one book.)

This is not my favorite of the Dark Tower books. However, I am still enjoying Roland, Eddie, Susannah, and Jake’s journeys through strange and interesting post-apocalyptic worlds as they hunt for this Dark Tower. I will be continuing the series – I just hope the next book focuses more on the present than the past.

The Dark Tower series:

1. The Gunslinger
2. The Drawing of the Three
3. The Waste Lands
4. Wizard and Glass
5. Wolves of the Calla
6. Song of Susannah
7. The Dark Tower

Review: The Waste Lands

Title: The Waste Lands

Series: The Dark Tower #3

Author: Stephen King

Genre: Low fantasy post-apocalyptic horror Western with portal fantasy elements is my best guess on this one

Trigger Warnings: Blood, death, death of animals, death of children, mental illness, forced institutionalization (mentions), gun violence, body horror, injury, child emotional neglect, drug use (mentions), sexual assault, rape (explicit on-page), excrement, bodily fluids, suicide

Spoiler Warning: This book is third in a series, and reading past this point will expose you to MAJOR spoilers of the previous books.

Back Cover:

Several months have passed, and Roland’s two new tet-mates have become proficient gunslingers. Eddie Dean has given up heroin, and Odetta’s two selves have joined, becoming the stronger and more balanced personality of Susannah Dean. But while battling The Pusher in 1977 New York, Roland altered ka by saving the life of Jake Chambers, a boy who—in Roland’s where and when—has already died. Now Roland and Jake exist in different worlds, but they are joined by the same madness: the paradox of double memories.

Roland, Susannah, and Eddie must draw Jake into Mid-World then follow the Path of the Beam all the way to the Dark Tower. But nothing is easy in Mid-World. Along the way our tet stumbles into the ruined city of Lud, and are caught between the warring gangs of the Pubes and the Grays. The only way out of Lud is to wake Blaine the Mono, an insane train that has a passion for riddling, and for suicidal journeys.

Review:

Only Stephen King could put a fantasy version of a Wild West gunslinger, a heroin addict from the 1980s, and a disabled activist with multiple personalities in a riddle contest with a sentient train and make it feel like horror. And not just horror, but really good horror.

After The Drawing of the Three, I really wasn’t enjoying this series all that much. I only read book two to discuss it with a friend, and said friend (and a spoiler he gave me after I finished book two) was the main reason I picked up this book.

And I’m so glad I did, because I actually enjoyed this one.

I think a large part of that was the setting. Instead of desert in The Gunslinger and an interminable beach in The Drawing of the Three, Roland and company actually went to some interesting places in this book. They spent some time in a forest, traveling across a grassland, and in a small village entirely populated by elderly people. But the most interesting place to me by far was the city of Lud.

Lud has a very post-apocalyptic feeling – even though it hadn’t gone through one singular apocalypse, it’s been devastated by years of war, two different factions fighting each other within the city walls, and terrifying technological happenings that take on a supernatural element because no one understands how or why they work. Considering that the gang was just passing through, I got to see a remarkable amount of the city, but I wish I had been able to explore it more. I love the idea of a long-lost people creating great architectural and technological marvels and the people living with them now not comprehending what it was that the ancient people actually did.

This book also reveals some more details about Roland’s world and why it is the way it is (giving no answers but raising plenty of questions), a bit about Roland himself, and a lot more about Jake. It gets Eddie on board with the “find the Dark Tower” quest, but it still doesn’t explain what the Dark Tower does or why Roland wants it so badly. There’s several encounters with terrifying ancient technology that were really interesting, and it’s definitely leaning harder into horror than the previous two books did.

I can’t call this one of my favorite books, but I actually enjoyed it. I was already planning on reading the next book, and then this one went and ended on a cliffhanger. As annoying as that is, it makes me glad I’d already decided to continue the series. If nothing else, this world is finally getting interesting.

The Dark Tower series:

1. The Gunslinger
2. The Drawing of the Three
3. The Waste Lands
4. Wizard and Glass
5. Wolves of the Calla
6. Song of Susannah
7. The Dark Tower

Review: The Drawing of the Three

Title: The Drawing of the Three

Series: The Dark Tower #2

Author: Stephen King

Genre: Who knows at this point. Low fantasy portal sci-fi Western with horror elements?

Trigger Warnings: Drug use, drug abuse, needles, addiction, blood, death, injury (graphic), medical content (brief), racism, excrement, gun violence, racial slurs, sexual content, sexual content involving minors, murder, rape (mentions), mind control, someone inside your mind without your consent

Spoiler Warning: This book is second in a series, and both this book and this review contain spoilers of book one.

Back Cover:

While pursuing his quest for the Dark Tower through a world that is a nightmarishly distorted mirror image of our own, Roland, the last gunslinger, encounters three mysterious doorways on the beach. Each one enters into the life of a different person living in contemporary New York.

Here he links forces with the defiant young Eddie Dean and the beautiful, brilliant, and brave Odetta Holmes, in a savage struggle against underworld evil and otherworldly enemies.

Once again, Stephen King has masterfully interwoven dark, evocative fantasy and icy realism.

Review:

This was a weird reading experience. I’m reading this series more to talk about it with a friend than because I want to read it, and if it wasn’t for him I wouldn’t have continued after The Gunslinger. This book does get more into the action, so it felt less like an extended beginning and more like an actual story. At some points it was even enjoyable.

Roland spends this book going back and forth through doors that are only half there to collect the three people the man in black told him he needed. These three people are in our world in different times. There’s Eddie, a drug addict who’s on his first smuggling run when Roland meets him and who quickly became my favorite. There’s Odetta, a black amputee and two different varieties of racist stereotype. And there’s Jack Mort, whose section was fairly enjoyable even though I spent the entire time hoping that he would not have to end up joining the group.

That’s pretty much the plot. There’s an overarching plot of Roland has an infected injury and is trying to stay alive and the three shorter plots of what’s through the doors and trying to get the three people to join him, tied together by sections of walking down a disturbing beach. It is slow-paced, but it’s interesting enough, and compared to book one it’s absolutely action-packed.

It was true of book one, and only got more extreme in this book, but The Drawing of the Three falls into one of my biggest complaints with adult fantasy-adjacent books: relying on grossness and bodily fluids to portray “realism.” There’s a lot of urine, feces, sweat, pus, saliva, and all other kinds of disgusting liquid-ish things that the human body can produce. I know that it is realistic, but personally I read for fun and prefer all the gross stuff to be sanitized by the lens of fiction. I’m aware this is a personal opinion, but if bodily fluids make you squeamish you may want to skip this one.

I was also pretty weirded out by the preteen girl masturbation scene and the guy who orgasmed by murdering people, but it’s not like Stephen King has never written creepy sexual scenes before, so I guess that’s a risk you take when reading his books.

When I finished this book, I was really ambivalent about reading on. Even though this series isn’t the worst thing I’ve ever read, it’s a little too slow and gross for me. This series was starting to feel more like an obligation than anything I particularly want to read. But my friend who’s also reading the series gave me a spoiler for future books that makes me more interested in reading on. So I guess I am continuing the series after all.

The Dark Tower series:

1. The Gunslinger
2. The Drawing of the Three
3. The Waste Lands
4. Wizard and Glass
5. Wolves of the Calla
6. Song of Susannah
7. The Dark Tower

Review: The Gunslinger

Title: The Gunslinger

Series: The Dark Tower #1

Author: Stephen King

Genre: No idea. Post-apocalyptic low-fantasy western?

Trigger Warnings: Death, death of children, blood, gore, gun violence, excrement, death of animals, sexual content, misogyny, infidelity (minor)

Back Cover:

Beginning with a short story appearing in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1978, the publication of Stephen King’s epic work of fantasy — what he considers to be a single long novel and his magnum opus — has spanned a quarter of a century.

Set in a world of extraordinary circumstances, filled with stunning visual imagery and unforgettable characters, The Dark Tower series is King’s most visionary feat of storytelling, a magical mix of science fiction, fantasy, and horror that may well be his crowning achievement.

In The Gunslinger (originally published in 1982), King introduces his most enigmatic hero, Roland Deschain of Gilead, the Last Gunslinger. He is a haunting, solitary figure at first, on a mysterious quest through a desolate world that eerily mirrors our own. Pursuing the man in black, an evil being who can bring the dead back to life, Roland is a good man who seems to leave nothing but death in his wake.

Review:

I am not the biggest Stephen King fan. He’s definitely a good writer, but I’m not very into the horror genre and that’s what he’s famous for. I didn’t know what this book was about going in or even if it was horror or not, but one of my friends has been going on and on about how awesome this series is and I figured I might as well give it a shot.

I have yet to see a description for this book that actually says much about what the book is about, instead of something like “the first volume in King’s magnum opus” or some other such praise that tells me nothing about the story. The story is about the gunslinger, whose name we later learn is Roland, tracking the mysterious “man in black” across a desert wasteland. Along the way he reflects on his past and tells some of his story to people he meets, so you slowly put together some of his backstory, what this world is, and why he’s chasing the man in black, although the book ends before the puzzle is anywhere close to complete.

That’s really all there is to the plot. Roland is traveling across the desert wasteland and we the reader get stories and flashbacks to orient ourselves to the world (and the characters, to a point) as we go. Even the mysterious Dark Tower that gives the series its name doesn’t get mentioned until the end and I have no idea why Roland wants to find it so bad. I actually have very little idea about Roland himself – the book contains a lot of things that he did or that happened to him, but very little about who he is as a person. He kept his thoughts and feelings tightly under wraps and that prevented me from connecting with him as a character. I didn’t dislike him, but I didn’t know enough about him to like him, either.

The Gunslinger grabbed me right out of the gate with questions: who this gunslinger is (he doesn’t get a name until quite a ways in), why he’s chasing the man in black, who the man in black is, and whether the gunslinger is just traveling through a desert or if the whole world is some apocalyptic desert wasteland. But then it doesn’t make much of an attempt to answer the questions. Even though it’s long enough to be a complete novel, the whole book feels like the first bit of a longer story – the part where the protagonist may have a goal but everything is relatively normal, and the reader is getting oriented to the world before everything goes sideways and the plot starts. I have to imagine this was intentional and Stephen wanted to make the whole series feel like a single story split into multiple volumes, but it was absolutely bizarre to read a whole book that felt like a beginning. It technically is a self-contained story, but the whole book had a feeling of waiting for the plot to start.

If I was just reading on my own, I probably wouldn’t continue the series. This book was reasonably interesting, but it wasn’t enough to grab me and leave me begging for book two. But I had a great time discussing this book with my friend, and my library has the whole series on audiobook. So I’ll probably read book two eventually, if for no other reason than discussing it with my friend.

The Dark Tower series:

1. The Gunslinger
2. The Drawing of the Three
3. The Waste Lands
4. Wizard and Glass
5. Wolves of the Calla
6. Song of Susannah
7. The Dark Tower

Review: Upright Women Wanted

Title: Upright Women Wanted

Author: Sarah Gailey

Genre: Western/Dystopian

Trigger Warnings: Death, execution, gun violence, blood, homophobia, transphobia, misgendering (by request for safety reasons)

Back Cover:

Esther is a stowaway. She’s hidden herself away in the Librarian’s book wagon in an attempt to escape the marriage her father has arranged for her—a marriage to the man who was previously engaged to her best friend. Her best friend who she was in love with. Her best friend who was just executed for possession of resistance propaganda.

The future American Southwest is full of bandits, fascists, and queer librarian spies on horseback trying to do the right thing.

Review:

This is a short, quick, and fairly enjoyable novella in a dystopian version of the American West.

Being so short, there isn’t a lot of worldbuilding. Librarians distribute approved materials, people get executed for having unapproved materials, it’s illegal to talk about Utah, and there’s a constant war going on somewhere in the country, and the rest expects you to have a passing familiarity with the western genre and fill it in with your imagination. Since it’s a novella and I do have a vague idea of how westerns work, it was fine. In anything longer it would have needed more.

This is definitely a character-driven book, focusing on Esther’s discovery that there are people out there like her (i.e. queer) and that being queer does not mean she’s bad, broken, or destined to hurt the people she loves. The society around her is very homophobic (and transphobic, the nonbinary Librarian requests to be misgendered around other people because it would be unsafe otherwise), but she definitely has a lot of the homophobia internalized too and much of her emotional journey is learning that it’s okay for her to exist as she is.

Of course, there is an external journey too, as the Librarians Esther stowed away with are delivering a “package” somewhere and also doing their job of distributing approved materials across the southwest. There’s gunfights, bandits, safe houses and not-so-safe checkpoints. They keep the story interesting, but the heart of it is the world telling these people it’s not okay to be themselves and love who they want and them standing up and saying they’re gonna do it anyway.

For a novella, it does have a lot of emotional depth, but it’s still a quick read. There are a lot of dark events and a lot of people dying so I would absolutely not call this light or fun, but despite being dark it is ultimately hopeful. If you like westerns and want to see a western with some queer protagonists, I wouldn’t hesitate to tell you to pick up Upright Women Wanted.