OKAY FINE, STEVE. I am on record as not totally loving The Gunslinger but being willing to go along for the “Dark Tower” ride for a while to see what all the fuss is about. King has proven himself to me with basically everything else I’ve read of his as an adult, so he has a certain amount of capital with me. Plus, I like to read before watching, and if you think you can tear me away from Idris Elba at the end of […]
A dystopian disappointment
After ploughing through the biggest of the big books with The Quincunx, I was, as I saw someone put it on Twitter after back to back reading The Luminaries and The Goldfinch, “yearning for a pamphlet”. And what better palate cleanser, I thought, than the opening volume of Stephen King’s epic Dark Tower series? It’s a trifling 210 pages and it’s the opening gambit to a series of books that increase in page count as they do in scope. Bound to be a winner, right? Well, as it turns out, no. As it […]