I should probably wait until I’ve actually finished Dark Tower before I review it, but I’m 530 pages in and it’s FUCKING brilliant. I love Stephen King, I’ve loved him since I picked up IT in 1990 (I think it was). Before then I’d been reading Terrance Dick Doctor Who novelisations, (and whatever dross I had to read for the school ciriculum… well it wasn’t all dross, I liked Space Demons…) so it was a major step up.

124 pages to 1,000 pages.

12 point font, to 10 point font.

And then there was all the swearing and the colliqualisms and the gore… so much gore… hmmmmmm

And I loved how King didn’t just write words, but actually got into the mind of his characters. Okay, his use of itallics was insane, but that didn’t change the fact that by the end of the novel we knew these people. And we either hated them, loved them, or sympathised them. We even came to sort of like the brat kid in Cujo (and didn’t the end of that book shock me… stupid movie changing the ending).

So I’ve been on the Stephen King odyssey for 14 years. I’ve even done three or four interviews on him for local radio stations here in Melbourne. For a while (like 8 seconds) I was dubbed Australia’s Stephen King expert. (The Stephen King expert in Melbourne is actually a lovely chap named Rocky Wood. He’s actually been to that special library in Bangor Maine where, if you’re a very, very special boy you can see some of King’s unpublished work, the stuff he wrote when he was a young man learning the craft).

Anyway… I’ll be sad to finish the Dark Tower series. I’m savouring the last few drops… I’ve already shed a few tears (yes, despite me being all manly and all) and I’ll probably shed a few more.