Month: August 2025

Today I finished The Dark Tower, Steven Kings epic answer to The Lord of the Rings. With 7 1/2 books totalling 4,300 pages, that took some time.

What does Muttrox think? Muttrox thinks it was pretty dang good! King said he always want to write a large epic, but at age 19 didn’t know how do it in his own voice. I’m glad he waited, because in a world filled with endless LotR knockoffs, he created something genuinely unique. King is a great writer, and the length of the books matches the length of the hero’s long journey.

Steven King is also a character within the story. That could have been done very badly. Fortunately it wasn’t, and the integration of real world events and the fiction of the story is woven together in a satisfying way if you accept the basic premise.

Was it perfect? No.

In the early books, Roland has soda for the first time and can’t believe how good it is. He gets 300 bullets, more valuable to him than gold. He gets basic aspirin to help with his illness. But by book four, his ammo is infinite, he drinks soda and eats candy with no reaction. Despite going back to earth multiple times, the characters never try to get more bullets, better guns, better medicines, or really anything from Earth that might be useful. It’s a switcheroo away from a bit of nice realism and back to the cliches of fantasy journeys. This bothered me more than anything else!

Then there are three main opponents – Walter, Mordred, and The Red King. Each is built up over hundreds of pages. Their removal from the board is unsatisfying in each case. It feels similar to Game of Thrones, where characters need to be removed so the author can get to the end of the story already.

Many people disliked the ending. Like the removal of the nemeses, it feels anti-climactic as if all the work before didn’t much of anything. That is, there’s not a sense of payoff. Meh. Whatever, it’s hard to know what ending could have satisfied.

Nevertheless, I am a fan. 11/22/63 is one of my favorites, I’m glad I read this saga (is the movie any good?), and I’m looking forward to my next non-horror Steven King book.

Gerrymandering is terrible. “Voters should choose candidates, not the other way around.” It’s fundamentally undemocratic, removing the ability of citizens to choose their represantatives.

As usual, it is the Trump and the GOP who decide to take the next step to degrade American Democracy. At Trumps direction, Texas is stepping away from the every ten years rule in the Constitution (Article I, Section II) to redistrict. The timing, which seems obviously unconstitutional to me, is so the changes will favor Trump. The redistricting is obvious and nakedly partisan, the whole point is to get another five GOP seats. There is no mystery of what’s going on, no one is trying to hide the motives and goals.

The Democrats have had enough. When the other team cheats, you start cheating too. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Now New York and California are looking at doing identical disgusting tactics in retaliation. Meanwhile the GOP looks to extend the same strategy in their other states.

This quote is dead-on: “The Texas Republicans are taking us on a race to the bottom,” said Representative Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat who lamented in an interview that his party must reluctantly participate in “this rotten system.”

Just awful.