Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Vester]

The only thing that annoyed me in the later books of the Dark Tower series was the many plot threads that simply got culled. For example,

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

After having an entire book devoted to it, and its birth being announced with a roll ofd drums, so to speak, Suannah's demonspawn baby eats a poisonous horse and dies.

Do not doubt the might of the poisonous horse.

Okay, I was kinda disappointed too.

[Duke 2.0]

Haven't read/seen Carrie, and though I've heard it's a good movie, the premise has never sold me. A girl gets psychic powers and uses them to kill everyone at her prom? I guess if I knew more than that I'd be more interested. And I don't know of Firestarter.

Firestarter is surprisingly similar to the summary you just gave. Only replace girl with young girl, everybody with scientists trying to harness her powers, and psychic powers with pyrokinetic powers that surpass the sun itself.

 I have yet to watch the movie.

[Vester]

Haven't read/seen Carrie, and though I've heard it's a good movie, the premise has never sold me. A girl gets psychic powers and uses them to kill everyone at her prom? I guess if I knew more than that I'd be more interested. And I don't know of Firestarter.

Firestarter is surprisingly similar to the summary you just gave. Only replace girl with young girl, everybody with scientists trying to harness her powers, and psychic powers with pyrokinetic powers that surpass the sun itself.

 I have yet to watch the movie.

According to SCIENCE, she could crack the earth open with her powers. Alpha level psyker, I'm thinking.

[Grakelin]

The only thing that annoyed me in the later books of the Dark Tower series was the many plot threads that simply got culled. For example,

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

After having an entire book devoted to it, and its birth being announced with a roll ofd drums, so to speak, Suannah's demonspawn baby eats a poisonous horse and dies.

Do not doubt the might of the poisonous horse.

Okay, I was kinda disappointed too.

Mordred serves the purpose of

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

killing Randall Flagg in an incredibly anti-climactic way.

So I guess that in the overall King Mythos, he's vitally important. But in a way that John Wilkes Booth was important to Lincoln's presidency.

[Lord Shonus]

There is that, but you'd expect so much more from the way he was played up.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

The one thing I disliked about Under the Dome was that I had thought that the book was caused by

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

another IT, because the dome device was marked with the same symbol that marked IT's lair.

Instead, it was

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

alien kids.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Fool! There is only (it), The Turtle, and The Other! And seeing as It and The Turtle are dead, It could not possibly be behind the dome! But recall the saying of King's favorite author: even dead gods can dream.

[Lord Shonus]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Then how do you explain all the baby ITs that Stuttering Bill and Ben stomp to death?

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Then how do you explain all the baby ITs that Stuttering Bill and Ben stomp to death?

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The spawn of It are not necessarly It's species. It is the Deadlights, and while the baby Its may have been other extentions of the Deadlights, Bill destroyed the Deadlights in the second ritual of the chud. The It eggs would be stillborn. I would say that It's symbol could be a result of the reality bleeding explained in The Dark Tower. King's works are begining to fuse together as the realty they are set in crumbles. It could very well be he has some absurd overarching plan to create an Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny in the King multiverse.

[Little]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Then how do you explain all the baby ITs that Stuttering Bill and Ben stomp to death?

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I was so disappointed there was no explaining that, or follow-up, especially with one of the kids going, "I think I got all of them..."

[Duuvian]

I started with The Dark Tower series. They were awesome, except the main enemies

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

died very easily.

I'd guess he just wanted to wrap it up and move on. Then I read The Stand. I liked The Stand, except for having "magic" involved. Why couldn't the Walking Dude have been just a power hungry demagogue like a Hitler 2.0 instead of a mystical someone who can kill with his mind? I suppose the mind reading is so there is a reason people who aren't especially evil but more cowardly would follow him wholeheartedly despite his evil ways, but why not just have them at gunpoint or otherwise under his power? It would have served the same purpose if he had been more normal with more guns and tricks and less magic. Maybe he would have had another biological weapon that triggered when he died, and one that he can use to execute people along with the guns. That way King wouldn't have had to resort to

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

"God steps in and saves almost everyone because the bad guy is superhuman!

while at the same time requiring the same

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

explosive ending

to wipe out the bio weapons he was carrying around. Also, he was pretty dumb to be

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

tricked into a self destructive rage where he kills his unborn demonspawn child and his crazy procreation assistant.

Also, I was severely disappointed in the end,

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

where god decides to directly intervene.

I bet a lot of people thought that was cool, but to me it was a super weak ending.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The fact that Trashy effectively saves the world was sweet though.

The scene that affected me most was the live execution's on television. That would have sucked big time.

Anyone ever seen the movie version of the stand? It seemed pretty terrible, so I had to turn it before I even got to see the Walking Dude.

EDIT: Yes, I know the Walking Dude is really

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Walter/The man in black/Randall Flagg

and that's why he has magic and how it all fits in with the Dark Tower. Does it ever explain what the hell he really is though? Is he a demon like in The Stand or is he just a guy who picked up some magic while serving the Crimson King, or are there more than one Randall Flagg causing trouble in different worlds?

[Jackrabbit]

I heard it was pretty good. I've seen about ten minutes of it, it looked okay.

Also, King has this obsession with the battle between Good and Evil, which is fair enough, he is a horror writer, and I think the Stand was his over-the-top moment involving them most Good and Evil things he could think of when he was still sorta finding his feet.

Doesn't change anything, I'm just trying to get inside his head.

EDIT: ^ In the Stand, he is basically Satan and I think the idea is that no matter what universe he's in, he's the absolute embodiment of evil.

[Lord Shonus]

Flagg makes a lot more sense if you've read Eyes of the Dragon.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Yeah, King seems to have marked Flagg, The Gunslinger, and (to a degree) Pennywise as the three who will show up in some form in almost every story he writes. I personaly think that

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The Dark Figure at the end of The Long Walk was Flagg, but this would actualy make it his first apperance, being written before The Stand.

[Helmaroc]

I really enjoyed the Dark Tower series, especially since after having read a few connected novels (Salem's Lot, The Stand, etc) I was able to catch all the references. I guess that some of the plot threads' and characters' abrupt/anticlimactic endings were due to the sheer size of the Dark Tower universe. The series was written off-and-on over a period of 22 years, so maybe he lost inspiration for the other lines/characters over time and felt he had to trim them out quickly to tie up loose ends.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

And then the ending isn't really an 'ending' anyway, so loose threads wouldn't have been as much of a problem anyway...but I didn't mind the ending, I think it gives the Gunslinger and the story a kind of timeless quality. I'm reading Misery now. In the preface to one of the Dark Tower books he tells about an eighty-something year old woman with a terminal illness who wrote him a letter asking him if he could tell her how the story would end. He wrote that he would have told her, but he honestly did not know how the story was going to end yet. I wonder at what point in writing the story he decided to give it the-end-is-the-beginning.

[Huesoo]

Randall Flagg is:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The demon Legion