4500 pages later, I'm kinda disappointed.

The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.

Seventeen years ago, I opened the trade paperback edition of Stephen King's The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger and fell through the hole that King had set for me. I polished it off quickly(it was barely 200 pages), and eagerly awaited the second book. In 1999, when King was seriously wounded in a car accident and suggested he might never write again, I believed that we'd never see Roland reach his goal.

Seventeen years and seven books later, I finally finished reading The Dark Tower this afternoon. It ended, well, it ended in a way that I didn't expect, and I suppose that's a good thing. Further thought on the subject between the time I put the book down(about 3 or so this afternoon) and when I began typing these words has made me realize that I should have expected the ending at least since the third book in the series. Suffice it to say that, just like you can't look at The Sixth Sense a second time without seeing all the clues you should have seen the first time, careful consideration of all that has gone before makes me realize that the end was obvious.

Truth be told, I was expecting a different sort of ending, and King acknowledges as much, by giving the reader the chance to stop reading about four pages prior to the end. But 4500 pages needs the final four, so I kept right on going, even as I had a sinking feeling of what I was about to read.

Now, don't get me wrong. With the exception of Wizard and Glass(which was a one-time only read), the whole story is an amazing read if you have the time and the patience. It is King's Shannara, his Wheel Of Time, his Lord Of The Rings. He openly acknowledges as much in "On Being Nineteen", the new foreward to the latest paperback edition of the first three novels. There is a snap to much of the story, an epic scale that escapes even Tolkien.(If they were to film this, it'd be on HBO and span a number of years, not hours.) And it reveals a conceptual continuity(tm Frank Zappa) running unconsciously at first, then consciously, through virtually all of King's novels. Nearly all reference the saga in some way, and Insomnia and Hearts In Atlants bear directly on events in the final two books of the saga. A fictionalized King even turns up as a major character in the last two novels as well(his 1999 accident is fodder here, as it was in Kingdom Hospital). His appearance serves as a (according to him, fairly exaggerated) demonstration of what it's been like to be enslaved by the tale. After all, King once wrote in Different Seasons, "It is the tale, not he who tells it."

But King's appearance and the idea of continuity never detract from the tale. Rather, much like the books that Tolkien wrote after LOTR, they serve to enhance the idea that The Dark Tower is the sum total of everything Stephen King's ever done.

Just wish that ending had been a little better.