Hacker News Reader

Comment by TRcontrarian | Hacker News Reader

I've heard that Stephen King considers the Dark Tower series his greatest work[1][2], but almost none of his fans do[3][4]. The intent of a work can be far divorced from the public reception of it.

[1] https://darktower.fandom.com/wiki/The_Dark_Tower_Series [2] https://stephenking.com/darktower/ [3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbes-personal-shopper/2021/02...? [4] https://stephenking.com/xf/index.php?threads/which-king-book...

View on HN

Reminds me of Archy on Shakespeare [1]:

  here i am ben says bill
  nothing but a lousy playwright
  and with anything like luck
  in the breaks i might have been
  a fairly decent sonnet writer
  i might have been a poet
  if i had kept away from the theatre

  ...

  well says i pete
  bill s plays are highly
  esteemed to this day
  is that so says pete
  poor mutt little he would
  care what poor bill wanted
  was to be a poet

[1] http://ianchadwick.com/blog/three-archy-poems-by-don-marquis...

Well, the first 4 books are some of his best writing, I think... The final 3 suck terribly, and were a great disappointment (to me, of course, maybe some people actually liked them)

Overall I agree, but I actually quite like the ending of the series. I've read lots of folks online who absolutely hated what ultimately happens to Roland - I thought it was a cool ending which was very much in keeping with the sort of "cosmic cycles" theme of the books. That said, there is a _lot_ of junk in those final three books, and the seventh one in particular drops the ball in several disappointing ways before it ends.

It was the best ending possible. The first line of the first book was what hooked me on this universe, so I loved reading the last line years later.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com