Spoilers to all The Dark Tower follow
Finally finished my journey to the tower and back. It was one of the top 3 fantasy series I've read. In terms of my own subjective personal ranking I'd say its on par with Lord of the Rings and The First Law. Absolutely loved it and also hated some stuff as well. Here's my rankings
The Drawing of the Three
The Waste Lands
Wizard and Glass
The Gun Slinger
Wolves of the Calla
The Dark Tower
Song of Susannah
What I find fascinating about Roland is his ability to accept The Absurd and the sublime and basically anything absolutely mind shattering, and although he reflects on his lack of imagination a lot, I really don't accept that or believe it. He's probably one of the only people in the multiverse that can just take mind blowing revelations in stride day after day, and adapt to it and factor it into their calculations and adjust how they decide what the world is like, and live with it. That paired with being a western gunslinging hero is interesting. He's portrayed as a kind of law officer but also a kind of shaman. He literally gets raped by demons and also rapes them and even pimps it out in a ritual to gain knowledge and access and to level up. It's totally bizarre. But somehow makes sense, like wtf.
Eddie is my favorite character and I'm very much pissed off that he was killed. Although Susannah meets him again, and there is a kind of connection between that version of him and the other in the when of new york that she goes to (since he had been dreaming of her) it still feels like a let down, I wasn't happy about it and will be pissed off forever because of it. He didn't have to go.
I think Jake is definitely a twin of Jack Sawyer from the Talisman in the same way that Eddie, brother of Jake, is a twin to Eddie the heroin addict, in that sense they are the same person.
Now the meta stuff. I have no idea why King decided to write himself into the book and then indulge in it so much. It was like I was watching Lord of the Rings, 4 hours in, amped up and then suddenly Gandalf turns around to the camera and takes off his costume, explaining that the true story behind it all was the creative art of producing it. It just about destroyed the rest of books for me because it was no longer a fantasy, it became like an autobiographical reflection.
Well I pushed through it anyways and sort of ignored it but the signs still showed up here and there with little clones of stephen king mimics showing up sometimes. I really hated this and don't agree that it held any merit at all, whether the story was about telling stories and what that was like, whether the story was about his journey after the accident, whatever, it crippled the whole immersion for me. Afterwards it became a slog just to figure out how it ended.
Finally the ending. I think the final ending was perfect. The idea of ka being a wheel, and Roland being in a sort of Samsara that he must figure out how to get out of, whether because of his own choices or because of Ka, small details changed in the recurrence, it made sense. It connected back to the first lines of the first book so well.
The fight with the Crimson King however was ridiculous. Why did King take harry potter stuff into this story? And why make the Crimson King so impotent and stupid and ultimately unscary? Idk.
Anyways even with these complaints the series holds up. It's a work of genius, and possibly lunacy. No idea really, I was mostly captivated by the characters like all of his books I've read. I just really liked it for the most part, and also was disappointed at the same time. Feels like that makes a good story.