Did you read Black House? Only reason I ask is because Talisman seems like a really unpopular and rare book for people to list in their top King books, but I also really liked it, and I'm not sure people realize that he made a sequel, maybe because it was 16 years later

I haven't re-read Pet Sematary in forever and never thought much of it. I wonder if, now that I have a kid, I'd appreciate it more.

I haven't read it in a long time, but I always viewed the Overlook as a separate nefarious entity that manifests by magnifying a person's already-existing flaws, insecurities, and vices. Jack is himself responsible, but not without the hotel.

I can't remember if Doctor Sleep did anything to explain this issue. It had some explanation of Horace Derwent (the overlook's prior owner), so it might. Either way, Jack's relationship to King himself is pretty clear.

Pet Sematary floored me when I first read it. It still does.

The first time I read it, my first kid had just been born, so that probably made me the perfect receptor for its themes.

Maybe. Or could be an age thing for me too. I read It first like 25 years ago and am certainly a much different person. I don't know...I might try Pet Semetary again to see if I feel the same. I hope not because I really do enjoy reading a book that scares the crap out of me and he has always done a good job on first read. Haven't found another author like that.

I've re-read a few over the years: The Shining, Salem's Lot, It, The Stand. I read each of these within a few months of them coming out (even The Shining: yes, I'm old).

Amusingly, I finished the last couple of hundred pages of the Shining on a weekend summer afternoon. My parents and siblings had gone out, but I begged off sick to stay home and read. We got hit with a summer thunderstorm, and the power went out at our house with about 75 pages to go -- so I read the last bit of the book by candlelight in the middle of a thunderstorm. I'm pretty sure I was fifteen: the book came out in '77, but I read it in paperback, so I think that was in the summer of '78. That summer, I was helping on basic carpentry projects, starting to think about college, and likely listening to Exile's "Kiss You All Over" and wondering in a state of teenage angst what that would be like.

Loved reading some of the write ups. I am using a mobile so I will keep it short.

In my opinion, and this is what I love about books as there can be so many narratives as to what is right, I think the Overlook represents the claustrophobia of addiction. Whether that is mental or physical, the hold and power addiction has over people, really makes it feel like there is no feasible escape, and thus a descent into madness is the only route at times.

Probably could have explained better but on a mobile.


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i have no real addictions, but have long believed that a descent into madness, morbid though the thought may be, is pretty much the best of all possible outcomes.

I have just finished Pet Semetary and for me it knocks Misery into 3rd place.

It is seriously tight with IT for #1, but I think Pennywise just about makes it.

Did it scare me? No. I am not frightened by fiction, but it gave me the creeps and had me postulating in work at times about life and death, and my own dog who is now 13, and showing signs of old age. I love books that hold that power over you.

The writing was fantastic. Mid way through the book I finished a chapter, and appreciated that King was on form.

A really fine piece of work and I am glad I have read it.

I will read Salems Lot next.


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I'm reading the End of watch right now is great book. Anyone else enjoy it?

I gave some thoughts on that on the previous page.

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Thinner by Richard Bachman

This feels like Bachman and King are starting to merge into the same writer. Its content and style appraoches King more than the previous Bachman outings, probably helped by the supernatural element of the Gypsy's curse. Bachman does go all Grand Gugniol/EC comics on this one, with a fat guy cursed to lose weight. The gypsies are a clear made-up artefact straight out of Universal horror, and more fun for that (and reused as a premise very nicely in the horror movie 'Drag Me To Hell'). It's interesting to be with him, though he's rather unlikeable and self-pitying, as he transitions through the weight loss which starts him at 249 pounds, first getting more healthy, then emaciated, then positively ill and hard for people to be around. We see his dawning horror when he visits the two guys who have also been cursed (well the wife of the judge who informs him of the alligator skin developing, along with the exploding pimpled sheriff (a theme he mentioned in Danse Macabre when he explored the nature of monstrousness... where he wondered at what point a skin condition goes from a small problem to monstrousness).

This feels more like a King book than a Bachman book mostly in tone and style, and King feels like he is having fun here. He even references himself (“You were starting to sound a little like a Stephen King novel for a while there.”) It is, in effect, an extended EC comics tale, and feels part inspired by Richard Matheson's The Shrinking Man. Whilst that book contains specific allegorical elements of loss and redemption as the human loses power then refinds it through action and defining himself anew in the universe, this is a much less intellectual exercise, and is mostly pure story, though King's phrases still zing off the page here and there.

It contains a few Kingisms - small town minutae, an old man with a rotting nose (it's in Apt Pupil and It), and it's odd that the main protagonist is not that likeable. He starts to blame his wife more and more for events, and there's a fine twist when he finally confronts the old man and suggests ironically the grudge should keep rolling down through the generations, touching on themes of curses between generations - he killed the old man's daughter, now his own daughter will suffer from a dead parent. The old man doesn't lift the curse, and it's a nice surprise when Halleck curses him back.

And his curse is the best bit of the book, with mobster Richie Ginelli emerging as the curse, bringing clear threat back to the gypsies. It's fun to have a procedural second half all about how the mobster terrorises the gypsy band, whilst getting a big kick out of it. I also liked how, in following the gypsies, he started to appreciate their life and how they are treated, and knew that, even if cured, he could not go back to his old life again after all of this - all the while, resenting his wife more and more.

The book was creepy, strange, bizarre, and outlandishly funny at times, too. It was extremely entertaining, a lot of fun, and never boring. I like the ending which I should have seen coming, but still caught me off-guard. Without spoiling it, I can't help wondering what motivates Halleck to do the last act - I see several motivations possible, but the writing doesn't give it away - I guess it's for the reader to make up their own mind.

A very fine yarn

7/10

[b]Thinner[b] (1996) (the movie)

Cheesy adaptation of the book with basically no likeable characters, all trying to revenge on each other. It was a pretty good adaptation even though the fat suit at the start didn't really work, with some fine, gruesome effects. Never scary, but fun.

6/10

Interesting article in latest New York Review on King. It's locked but you can read the beginning paragraphs here
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016...-stephen-king/

Pet Semetary

Horror is all about context. If you watch The Shining in broad daylight, on TBS with commercial breaks and naughty language bleeped out, with a bunch of people around you talking about the sports game, it ain't gonna be that scary.

With that pretense, I can honestly say this is the scariest book I have ever read.

A little bit of comparisons first. I'm a 30 something year old physician who studied in Chicago, and so is Louis Creed, the main character in this book. I have two boys, ages 4 and 2. Louis has a 5 year old girl, and a 2 year old boy. My in-laws wish I never married their daughter, and that's putting it mildly in the case of Louis. Where we differ is in the recent tragedies in our lives. I recently lost my wife to breast cancer, whereas Louis had something a bit different happen to his family. Still, I couldn't help but feel a huge connection to this character, more than any other King character before.

He really dug in deep to how we process sickness, dying, and death. The part that hit home the most was Rachel's experience with her sister Zelda's death. She described the dying process, and what it does to the person dying, but also what it does to the people trying to care for the dying one. At one point, she admits that she hoped that Zelda would just go ahead and die. I know exactly this feeling, as horrible as that sounds. Towards the end, when there are no miracles left to pray for, sometimes you just hope that the suffering ends, not just for the one suffering the illness, but selfishly for those around them. I've never seen someone put in words like that before, and it was almost cathartic to read, as I had many moments of feeling ashamed towards those thoughts.

The story does a fantastic job of explaining why Louis makes the choices that he makes, and what brings him to try and use the cemetary to his benefit. He even plays devil's advocate, explaining all the rational things that we as the readers are thinking as to why he shouldn't try it, and yet we can understand what brings him to that fateful decision.

I finished the book today. I was on a plane, in the middle seat, with my two year old sleeping peacefully in the window seat, and my 4 year old humming the ABC song over and over in the aisle seat. I could barely look at my sons after I was finished, as I was too frightened of what I had just digested. I hugged them tightly, so much so that I woke up my little one.

Dark Tower, here I come.

Partly because I liked the series first time through and partly so that I can pshaw the hell out of the movie when it drops, I've decided to reread King's magnum opus. Of course I lent a few of the books to a friend a long time back, and we all know what happens when you lend somebody your ****.

So I bought myself a new copy of the first book. King didn't go all George Lucas on it, but he did revise The Gunslinger to make it mesh better with the entire series. He did his thing and knocked off some adverbs and added some foreshadowing -- I don't remember North Central Positronics or the number 19 being mentioned in the previous edition, stuff like that I guess he added. I think he added some backstory for Roland, too, though I'm not sure exactly what. Been a long time.

(NB: I'm about to spoil the **** out of the series for you if you haven't read it, so pull back now, go read the books, and then come back and we'll talk. Probably best that you don't read any posts I'm about to make over the next couple months regarding this series if you plan on ever reading it. You are hereby forewarned.)

I was totally geeked out when I opened the book and got through the intro. "The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed," is such a great first line. That scene in the desert where the gunslinger seems to materialize out of the heat haze -- awesome.

Unfortunately, it's mostly downhill from there, at least with regards to this book. King proceeds to wrap a story within a story within a story, and the pace of the book just dies. We get the nice little showdown in Tull where the gunslinger displays his skill and dispassionate brutality, but that's really the only action or tension until near the end when Roland tests his manhood versus Cort.

Pacing, characterizations, motivations, and so on -- all kinds of big problems for The Gunslinger. I mean, okay, let's just plop some kid into the middle of the desert. Oh, and let's make Roland instantly love him. Good? No, let's kill the kid. You'd think it would tear the gunslinger apart, seeing how much he loved Jake, but we barely see a reaction. Sure, it has implications for the gunslinger's character going forward, but it doesn't do much of anything in this book. So much pointlessness.

The Gunslinger just isn't a well-thought-out book. For instance, the Oracle. Roland goes into the enchanted grove to find out about his future. Then at the end of the book (for whatever reason) the Man in Black stops running and reads the gunslinger's future in Tarot cards. Very weak in that King could've easily combined these two scenes and also in that the MIB has no reason to stop. He's been getting chased for God knows how long to get to some insignificant place so that he can just sit down and palaver? Bull****.

I've also got issues with what King says his characters are all about and what they show themselves to be all about. Roland's acceptance of Jake is weak, like I said. King also describes in the backstory how the gunslinger's character is that of a plodder -- not as smart or quick or skilled as any of his friends. Then in all instances the gunslinger defies all those descriptions. His use of the hawk David to best Cort. His destruction of Tull. His instant love for Jake. These do not make an unimaginative, slow-handed, dispassionate character.

It's not all bad, though. The desert setting is overwhelming, oppressive, and fantastic. "The world has moved on," says the gunslinger. And we get some great plays on time and space throughout the series, starting here. Time becomes a trickster, space bulges into weird shapes, and Jake measures his time at the Way Station by how many poops he takes. We get some cool introductions into how this apocalyptic world came about: from the courts of Gilead to the Western hardpan, to the pumps at the Way Station run by atomic slugs, through the subway tunnels with the Slow Mutants, down the railroad tracks in a hand car (upon rereading, I thought it a nice foreshadowing of the third book where the tracks are a wee bit more sophisticated and threatening). I also like the juxtaposition of Roland's childhood and Jake's -- their privileged upbringings, distant fathers, and whatnot.

Ultimately, this isn't one of King's best books, but it does serve to build the gunslinger's world, and if you're gonna tackle this apocalyptic science fiction knight cowboy story thing, you gotta start here. Could it have been better? Yeah, a lot better. But even King says in his intro how immature his writing was at this point in his career, and it shows in many facets of The Gunslinger. Mercifully, it's the shortest book in the series.

I'm on to The Drawing of the Three, and already I'm digging it way more, as the lobstrosities are one of my favorite King creations.

The Mist

I enjoyed The Mist, the first story in the Skeleton Crew set of short stories, and itself released as a separate book long after this collection had been out. It's a lesser King though, and takes a little time to get going - setting the scene for the happy family man whose house suffers damage from a huge storm, and his conflict with a pompous, self-absorbed lawyer type next door. There are themes in all this - the destruction of the house presages the destruction of this little family AND the destruction of the area, or indeed the rest of the world.

It gets much more interesting when the man and his small son go to the supermarket with the annoying neighbour, only to have a mist roll in - and there's odd monsters out there. The monsters are distinctly Lovecraftian, and the events seem to be tied to military experiments going on. It struck me how elements of this might be a partial inspiration to the recent TV show 'Stranger Things' as I read this part.

I really liked how it went from a people under siege by the monsters outside into a thing about the things happening in this little community are going down the drain so fast that it's safer to face the unknown but clearly present monsters outside than to stay where they were. An interesting theme - and I couldn't help but see echoes of what's happening in American politics with Trump and Hillary right now - Trump seems another face of Mrs Carmody...

There was a few missteps in my opinion. The gratuitous sex seemed very out of place here, and I really didn't like the guy not having the guts to check on his wife, but I did appreciate the ambiguous, hopeful ending (so, so different in the movie). which reminded me of the end of Shawshank Redemption, with people moving to somewhere there is hope.

6/10

The Dark Tower, Book 2: The Drawing of the Three

TL;DR -- I guess what I'll do from now on for people who may want to read this series but haven't gotten to it yet is post a non-spoiler summary tl;dr, sort of an abstract, at the head and then follow it with a more in depth pontification below.

This is one bad ass book. King at the height of his considerable authorial powers. He makes great use of a structure he laid out in Book 1: The Gunslinger, and rolls through points of view with ease, always keeping the pace barreling forward while seemlessly integrating character development. King makes great use of ominous elements both within the characters and without. The landscape of Mid-World, as we saw in The Gunslinger, is harsh and foreboding, and in this book we meet the flawed characters who will populate that universe. King runs his characters through a pressure cooker and brings them out the other side hardened and polished and raring to go through the rest of the series. And he sprinkles in some nice ironies and foreshadowings as well. The last gunslinger, Roland, provides a great audience surrogate for our journey, and a great leader for our flawed new companions. Here is where the series gets going in earnest, and this may just be the best book of them all. We'll have to wait and see about that, though.

[SPOILERS BELOW. Last warning!]

As mediocre as I found Book 1: The Gunslinger to be, The Drawing of the Three is phenomenal. There's an adage among writers, something about put your character up a tree and throw as many rocks at them as you can, then see what they do about it. Point being that character development happens when straits are most dire, when everything's going wrong. The character's reaction to terrible circumstances shows the reader what that character is all about.

So we pick up where The Gunslinger left off -- several years later in King's writing career -- on the beach of the Western Sea. (Funny to look at the "Also By Stephen King" page at the beginning of my 1990 paperback edition and see only like 20 novels! Including the Bachman Books!) The first stone King throws is that Roland wakes up with the tide coming in to find that his gunbelt is drenched. ****, that makes half his ammunition questionable... but more immediately, it makes his guns unusable against the second stone King throws -- the LOBSTROSITIES!!! Here they come up the beach with their lawyerly questions (Dum-a-chum?) and scissor-like claws, and Roland has no means of fending them off. He kicks at them but they chop off his toe. And even worse for a man whose entire life has been based around the use of guns, the lobstrosities lop off two of the gunslinger's fingers.

Of course, our hero eventually bests his omnipresent adversaries, but at great cost. The loss of his gunslinging fingers on his favored hand sets up an angle wherein King can force his hero to become something more than he has been. No longer can Roland rely completely on his skill with firearms. He will now be required to use his brain to pull himself out of hairy situations. His brain, his inhuman endurance, and his soon-to-be pupils, whom he stumbles, bleeding and delirious, down the beach to "draw".

Eddie Dean is first to be drawn. The Prisoner. I like the device of the Doors through which the gunslinger peers into other people's minds. It's simple and unscientific and reminds me of Aldous Huxley's Doors of Perception. Roland quickly finds out that not only can he perceive someone else's world through these doors, he can also take over that person's mind and force them to act according to his will. Roland toys with this device when he comes forward in Eddie's consciousness, but mostly he uses his powers of observation and persuasion to convince this drug-addled airline passenger that the two packages of cocaine he's got strapped to his body are about to land him in a world of trouble.

King absolutely roars through the first hundred and fifty odd pages of this book. He effortlessly switches points of view to heighten tension -- we see the situation through the eyes of not just Roland and Eddie, but the nervous stewardess who's about to make the bust, the hard-nosed plane captain, and then Jack Andolini, the heavy who comes to claim the cocaine once Eddie's slipped past law enforcement.

Eddie's backstory with his brother Henry gets fleshed out nicely here as well. We see how Eddie arrived at his current sad state, how he became so co-dependent, and we also see the potential within him. Plus, we're introduced to Eddie's cheesy sense of humor, which provides a nice contrast to the pervasive bleakness of Mid-World. All this while Roland nears death's door as he succumbs to infection.

King handles the second drawing differently, as he has a very different type of character to deal with: someone who is used to having her mind invaded by another. For Odetta Holmes is not just Odetta Holmes, the intelligent, compassionate, right-minded activist; she is also Detta Walker, a nasty, hateful creature who can't stand these honky mahfahs who think they can invade her brain and get her to do whatever they want.

Again, great character development by King. And not just that, but Susannah's character (as she will come to be known) gives a window into racial strife (especially by way of Odetta and Detta's diametrically opposed views on the subject), mental instability (what it's like to live as two people, the corrections the mind thrusts upon itself to explain things away), and the progress of time (how Odetta is offended by Eddie's constantly calling her "black" instead of "Negro"). Really excellent stuff all around. King builds not just great characters, but social and personal points of view, attacking issues from many angles, all without losing steam. Pretty remarkable.

I haven't even gotten into how well he uses structure to keep the pace up and build parallels. This is especially evident when we come to the third and final door (thank you, Monty -- gotta love all King's pop culture references, too) and see the ominous print writ upon it: The Pusher. The layered irony is fantastic and has been built towards so damn well: Eddie's fear of descending back into addiction, the reader's knowledge that Odetta/Detta was pushed onto those subway tracks (again, note King's use of railroad tracks!), and our knowledge of how Jake was killed by being pushed into traffic. All this and probably more stuffed into those two simple words: The Pusher.

And King delivers on that build-up as Roland jumps into the "worm-pit" of Jack Mort's mind. Immediately the gunslinger knows where he is and what he must do. This is the man who killed Jake, the same serial pusher who twice ruined Susannah's life. Again, King streams through points of view like he's trying on clothes in a department store. And simultaneously in Mid-World we've got Eddie subdued and hogtied by the cackling Detta Walker who just can't wait for those lobstrosities to come up out of the ocean and slice off Eddie's little white candle. Tension is high as we see the gunslinger save Jake from the death that would send him to the Way Station, as we await Eddie's fate as dusk falls when the lobstrosities will come to feed, as we wonder whether Roland will be able to save his infected lifeless body, as we anticipate which personality inside Susannah will win out.

All this while we shuffle though the perspectives of fat lazy city cops, degenerate gun store workers, and harried pharmacologists. King acts as the circus juggler who marvellously keeps all these flaming chainsaws in the air. At last the climax arrives after a gunfight with the city police as Roland plunges Jack Mort's body under an oncoming subway train at the same instant that the woman who will become Susannah watches on in realization that can't help but break her from the clutches of schizophrenia. What a book!

It's so good that I almost don't want to point out the minor spots in which it fails -- Eddie's "instant love" for Susannah is blech, but not quite as bad as I think Roland and Jake's was in The Gunslinger. And I'm pretty sure that King misdirects us a couple times by having our characters face west and then turn left to the north, stuff like that, very minor.

The way King manages to walk the tightrope between telling a self-contained story and setting up the rest of the series is truly a wonder to behold. The comparison / contrast between NYC and Mid-world is always interesting -- especially as told by Roland's ruminations:

I can imagine that King has taken some flak over the years for his portrayal of Susannah, as I've heard accusations of him using the "Magic Negro" character device in other works. But I don't see it that way. I think that he's just willing to address the issue of racism, as opposed to other authors who might not have the courage to tackle it at all. If you ask me, King's treatment of Susannah's dual nature serves mostly to illustrate how love overcomes hate, racial issues be damned.

After reading this book, I also find criticisms of King's use of metafiction in the final book of the series to be ludicrous. Even here in The Drawing of the Three he sprinkles metafiction in when he talks about how Kubrick used Danny's tricycle POV in the movie version of The Shining. Do I think he planned it all out that way? I doubt it. But that little metafiction nugget is still here, meaning that King at least has a meta-leg to stand on when he himself becomes the interloper in book seven. You might even say that Roland's reverence for paper (see quote above and many other passages throughout the first two books) portends a metafiction angle in later books.

And there you have about twenty dollars worth of my two cents.

If you'd have asked me a month ago which book of the Dark Tower series is my favorite, I would've hands down said The Waste Lands. But it's got a lot to live up to if it wants to wrest that title away from The Drawing of the Three. Fortunately, it's coming up next, so I'll soon have my answer.

not trying to be political at all. but, since everyone seems to think Trump is going to blow up the world, I couldn't help but think of The Dead Zone.

The Dark Tower, Book 3: The Waste Lands

[Spoiler Free TL;DR]
When talking about Drawing of the Three I said something along the lines of that book showing King at the height of his considerable powers. If that's true, then this book is an example of King transcending those abilities. This book is that damn good. I think I also said something about that book getting the series started in earnest. I suppose that's true to a certain extent, but here in Book 3 is where the series truly blossoms. Here is where it begins to breathe.

Book 1 is a bit dull and uneven, mostly setup; Book 2 is great -- fast-paced, tension-filled, strewn with interesting perspectives, devices, and techniques; but Book 3 takes a more measured approach, structurally, thematically, and stylistically, and the novel is better for it. I'd say The Waste Lands is easily one of King's top five full-length books.

[SPOILERS BELOW]
I mentioned the structure of The Waste Lands. It's divided into two books -- first Jake and then Lud -- containing three subsections each titled along the lines of "Key and Rose" or "Bridge and City", emphasizing duality, which is a huge theme in this series and especially in this book. (I'll tackle that one in a minute.) The two-book format gives us a nice build to a midpoint climax. It also signifies a break from the world of New York which if I remember right won't appear in the series again for quite some time. We get to fully immerse ourselves in Roland's universe henceforth.

In this book we get a full helping of what to expect for the rest of the series. While the first two novels introduced us to the setting and the characters and established the ultimate goal, this book begins to show us the path by which all shall be achieved. The ideas of ka, khef, and ka-tet get fleshed out here, as does the notion that "all things follow the path of the beam". We encounter the rose in which all universes exist (just one of myriad brilliant images and symbols King sets forth). And we get to meet a pair of Mid-world's malfunctioning robots. The first -- Shardik the Bear -- allows King to establish the world's mythology. The second, Blaine the Mono, allows King a vehicle by which he might test our heroes as they're transported toward the Tower, while also delving into that aforementioned theme of duality so central to the series.

So, duality. The gunslinger doesn't chase the Man in Black across the desert if the Man in Black doesn't flee. And the Man in Black doesn't flee across the desert unless the gunslinger follows. The two characters seem like faces on the same coin. Good and Evil, clear cut. Detta and Odetta fight it out in Book 2 to become Susannah. And here in this book King uses the split personality device to drive the action once again. Jake and Roland are both losing their minds -- Jake's personality splits into one boy who fell to his death and one who's going to school every day; Roland is remembering a boy and not remembering a boy. Blaine the Mono is not just a mono, he's got that "other" Little Blaine to contend with. And I already mentioned the two books in this one volume and their subdivision titles like "Bear and Bone." Clearly King is not just relying on schism for its own sake. Duality pervades every aspect of this book, driving everything from plot to characters to setting (Bear and Turtle, NY and Mid-World, etc.).

This book also sets forth glaring examples of how the "world has moved on." In the previous two books it was more of a nebulous concept than anything else. A circumstance of setting. Here it is shown through characters -- the rusting zoo outside Shardik's cave, and more incisively at River's Crossing and Lud. In the town of River Crossing we see the haggard faces of Aunt Talitha & co. as they scratch out a living as the final generation. Plus we get to see, through Susannah's eyes mostly, what Roland once was, the symbol of hope that he is. It's a glimpse into a glorious past juxtaposed harshly against a dismal present. In Lud, the gang war between the Grays and the Pubes again serves the theme of duality. Their gang names, and even the Tick-Tock Man's name, further elucidate the concept of how the world has moved on. Times ain't what they once was.

King continues to build his troupe of characters to epic proportions in this volume. Jake, who I thought was such a weak character in Book 1, gets about a hundred pages all to himself early on. Each character is forced to deal with their inner demons in order to arrive at the solutions that push the plot forward. Jake has to overcome his lethargic obedience toward his uncaring parents; Susannah has to let Detta take over and show that rapist demon honky mahfah who's boss; Eddie has to carve the key to Jake's freedom by stepping out from under the shadow of his brother, the great sage and eminent junkie Henry Dean (note: King takes some serious but necessary liberties with Henry in this book -- whereas in Book 2 Henry would protect Eddie by making him walk inside against traffic, here, to emphasize Eddie's codependence on Henry, King lets Henry all but throw his little brother into the street).

And Roland. The last gunslinger gets his time to shine in this book, too. He is forced to question whether he would forsake his lifelong Dark Tower quest for his love of Jake, whom he Will Not Let Fall Again. Plus we get a great scene at the end where Roland is compelled to rely on his wits to verbally bitch-slap Blaine and turn the tables on the psychotic train:

That final scene is such a good demonstration of how the gunslinger has learned to evolve beyond using skill with weapons to using his mental superiority by laying his finger on Blaine's weakness and pushing the schizoid AI's buttons.

Brilliant book, all told. Lots of literary reference -- Oz, Lord of the Rings, TS Eliot, and so on. Great henchmen, villains, and gatekeepers. The riddles and how they're employed, also excellent. Lots of great setup for what's to come. And while I can't say I love everything about The Waste Lands (the ka-tet telepathy is a particular weak link), it's without a doubt one of King's best.

I'm probably going to take a short break before starting Wizard and Glass and moving on to Keyhole -- I'm throwing that into its rightful place in the series instead of saving it for last -- which should be a nice treat since I haven't read it yet. Also, I'll admit I don't remember the remainder of the series as well as what I've read so far. This will be only my second readthrough of the later books whereas I reread the first three books in preparation for either Wizard or Wolves, and Drawing and Waste Lands are so good they've stuck with me fairly well over the last several years.

I will say one thing I miss in the newer edition of Book 3 is the illustrations that were in my lost hardcover. The Dark Tower series has some fantastic artwork associatied with it, and one thing I clearly remember from my old edition is that image of Jake reaching up to unlock the door.

Another aside: kinda curious as to how the movie version of this is going to deal with all the John Irving-esque amputations. I don't know who they've tapped to play anyone but Roland and Walter, but it seems to me that Eddie and Susannah play equally critical roles. I imagine they'll just CGI the **** out of Suze's legs and Roland's fingers.

Anyway, reading these first three books of the series has been a lot of fun. I'm looking forward to getting into Roland's flashback sequence.

I see some talk about IT and Stephen King in the movie thread so bumping this in case folks are interested

New movie was good. I'd say 7/10. The original series part 1 was a solid 9/10, with part 2 being worst of all time. That being said nothing beats the book. Many agree that "It" is some of Kings best work. And I couldn't agree more FWIW.