book-review_-dark-tower-ivStephen King
Grant
1997

“Not all is silent in the halls of the dead and the rooms of ruin. Even now some of the stuff the Old Ones left behind still works. And that’s really the horror of it, wouldn’t you say? Yes. The exact horror of it.”

Roland and his band of followers have narrowly escaped one world and slipped into the next. There Roland tells them a tale of long-ago love and adventure involving a beautiful and quixotic woman named Susan Delgado. And there they will be drawn into an ancient mystery of spellbinding magic and supreme menace!

The fourth book in the Dark Tower series pretty much picks up right where the previous novel left off, with Roland and the gang stuck inside a psychotic monorail speeding off West, destination: DEATH BY SMASHY-SMASHY! To kill the time (no pun intended), Blaine (because that’s the name of said Monorail) engages everyone in a game of riddles. This goes on for a few hours, when Eddie decides to go full-on Spock from the episode “I, Mudd” and manages to short-circuit Blaine by telling childish jokes. They get off at Topeka, Kansas, but it’s the one from the 1980s after having been depopulated due to the superbug from the book The Stand (the original 1980 version, not the 1990 recut edition…just, try not to think too hard about that). They camp out next to a tear in reality (because…reasons, I guess), where Roland regales his ka-tet with a lengthy tale of when he first became a Gunslinger and came across another tear in reality, which came in handy when an entire army he was fighting fell into it. I’d go into detail, but let’s just say that things escalated when Roland fell in love with a betrothed maiden (as it does), and came across a pink scrying orb that showed him a rather bleak future. Pretty heavy stuff for a 14-year-old. The next morning in Kansas, Roland and the Ka-Tet (which sounds like a band name), come across Emerald City from The Wizard of Oz, and run into The Man in Black from the first novel, aka Marten Broadcloak from Roland’s story, aka Randall Flagg from The Stand/Tears of the Dragon/pretty much every baddie across the King-o-verse.

I’ll just come out and say it: Wizard & Glass is pretty much a filler episode in the overall Dark Tower series. There was a good six year gap between the previous novel and this one, and one gets the sense that King was not really all that enthusiastic about continuing on with the Dark Tower saga. But, that’s just speculation on my part.

As it stands, Wizard & Glass doesn’t really advance the story arc forward, and is mostly made up of a flashback story from Roland’s youth, something that was adapted into the Gunslinger Born comic miniseries. I did geek a bit from the cross-pollination with King’s other books, specifically The Stand and the revelation that the series’ main antagonist has been seen before in previous stories under different guises. Regardless, while not being a bad one, Wizard & Glass stands as my least favorite book in the Dark Tower series.