Wizard And Glass

I have so many thoughts about this book, and no way to properly organize them. Let's give this a try.

This book is 1010 paperback pages. Around 900 pages in, I was sure I was giving this a three star rating, and was already writing my list of reasons in my head why this book is annoying. The last roughly 100 pages though was some truly all time 5 star material. Not because of what happens- the ending is actually pretty “quiet”- But moreso how the entire novel comes together to redefine everything that came before it, and realign everything that comes after it.

I've seen people talk about how much they love Roland as a character. I've enjoyed the previous three books, but I've never seen Roland as particularly great. This is the book where you learn who he is. Why he's doing what he's doing. What matters to him, and what his fears and traumas are. This book elevated Roland from a 4/10 to a 9/10 pretty quickly for me.

Most of this book is a large flashback to Roland's teenage years, and the first time he fell in love. And I really enjoyed this a lot more than I expected when it began. It was a surprisingly touching love story and I thought the entire thing overall was well done. The end “battle” with the antagonists was pretty refreshing too. I won't spoil it, but it handles this build up in a way that I don't see stories do very often.

So why was I originally going to give it three stars? Well:
-Here's as good a time as any to mention that I absolutely hate, despise, detest, the Mid-world lingo. So much. I like “forgotten the face of your father”, because it's just quirky enough to make sense but also be weird and mysterious. But I hate “Sai”, I hate “I wot”, I hate all the “thee” and “thy”, I dislike “cry your pardon” and I even hate “mayhap” most of the time. But I especially, fully, with my whole entire heart hate “thankee-sai”. Did Stephen King ever say this phrase out loud? Did he ever picture ROLAND saying this phrase? Nobody else said this out loud to him and begged him to reconsider? Truly? I don't believe it. This is the silliest fucking phrase I've ever seen in my life and it's used about 300 times in this book.
There are other “mid-world-isms” I'm probably forgetting. But overall, the dialogue in this book drove me crazy because we usually have Eddie, Jake, and Susannah to talk normal in contrast with Roland's dumb fake-child nonsense.
-I did really enjoy the long flashback, truly. But it needed an editor with a backbone. You could cut 150 pages from this 800 page flashback and lose LITERALLY nothing substantial, and you could cut another 50 and lose barely anything else. I'm all for marinating in a story, but there were entire pages I skimmed and didn't miss a single relevant thing to anything happening. That's not good.
-The book randomly turns into a Wizard of Oz reenactment, complete with magic shoe tapping. What, and I say this with much fervor, the fuck? I know this was King's post-Cocaine days but you wouldn't know it from this sequence. I'm sure this has some literary merit to somebody but I think this is the only full blown mistake in the plot to me.
-This isn't just Wizard and Glass, but something that bothers me about storytelling in general- when a character tells other characters information for the first time and then that information just happens to be super relevant immediately. Roland just basically arrives in Kansas and says, “Well, speaking of Kansas, one time I was in a small town” and talks for LITERALLY days and then 10 minutes after he's done, the story he is telling the group JUST SO HAPPENS OUT OF NOWHERE to be directly relevant to their quest all of a sudden. I understand the narrative impulse, it makes sense to put relevant backstory and info into the book where it's going to be relevant. But oh my god, Roland and the group travel for months on end! Just have him tell the story and then be like “they walked around for another month. Oh and then X happened”. Or something!! Roland just randomly getting an urge to finally open up at this time and place just feels too convenient.
-similar to above, but I also hate when a character tells a bunch of info and then someone asks for additional info and the character says, “I just told you so much, I am so drained, don't you know we are book characters? We can't take a quick water break and press on with the info! Instead, that follow-up info is for a different book! Duh!” People don't talk like this, and pretending they do is frustrating. I can tell friends stories for hours. Even emotionally draining ones. And then if I'm drained, I just wait like 10 minutes or something and then I”ll tell them the rest.
-a previous book made an overt decision to save a certain antagonist from death, and built him up to be a threat. He shows up and is then disposed of permanently within two pages, affecting exactly nothing whatsoever. This is just a problem that happens when you take 20 years to write a series, you don't follow through with buildup effectively, but it was still an odd choice.


So, you see the dilemma. I will never read this book again, most likely. And yet, I think it's the best written of the series so far, and almost the most enjoyable. It made the main character of the series a fully dynamic character, and for that, I applaud it. So, 4 stars.

Onwards on the Path of the Beam!