Dark times for the series. (Dark Tower 4: Wizard and Glass - Stephen King)

Member Name: mmblah

Product:	Dark Tower 4: Wizard and Glass - Stephen King
Date:	05/06/08 (65 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: none

Disadvantages: cliched love story, repetitive, boring

I enjoyed the The Gunslinger. I loved The Drawing of Three. I found The Waste Lands slightly disappointing, but by no means bad. Wizards and Glass, though? This put the nail in the coffin for me, for the Dark Tower series but also for Stephen King as an author.

Wizards and Glass begins where The Waste Lands finished off, with the whole Blaine the Mono scenario. I found the conclusion to this strand of the story utterly ridiculous, but this is not the main complaint, nor is the irrelevant details which followed this scene. I ask all of you who bear some sort of fondness to long-running TV shows or films to perhaps recall those little flashbacks that intrude every now and then. Those minute long jumps back to prior scenes of the film or from episodes earlier in the series. Those short little interrupts that enlighten you to something you would have otherwised have missed. They're annoying sometimes, I suppose, but they're over soon enough, unless you're watching something that heavily abuses the tactic.

This book is worse - SO much worse. Lost, I hear, is a show that utilises the technique and often devotes whole episodes to flashbacks. That's forty minutes of flashback which seems a tad excessive to me, but it's supposedly necessary. So what is this book in comparison, this book that has five hundred and sixty seven pages of flashback for no good reason? What is Wizards and Glass?

A book deserving of no more than one star, in my honest opinion. I'm not being exaggatory when I claim there was no reason for the flashbacks; such is truly the case. It is comprised solely of some pitiful love story of Roland's youth. Some claim the problem with this arises from King's inability to write romance; this is certainly a contribution to the failure of this book, but the biggest problem is that it simply wasn't appropiate. It was a story that could have been told in a few pages, but was instead dragged into a painful number of chapters, pages, words.

The love story is also just so overwhelmingly typical. There is no variation from any other and it seems no creativity was injected into it whatsoever as King rambled and rambled and rambled. I tried to fight my way through the pages, I really did; but it just wasn't possible. After two hundred, I had to give up. It doesn't get better.

The main proof of the superfluity of the main bulk of the novel is that, after giving up on the flashback, I was able to read the remaining pages of the novel with perfect understanding. I had missed nothing. It's a pity, though, that the remaining pages did not redeem the book; actually, their action was much to the contrary. They simply nurtured my disappointment.

Many will buy this book simply because of the name (and probably rate it highly for the same), but I cannot recommend it.

Summary: If anything, this is a book to be avoided.