The Obscure

"Out of the blue, and into the black." he says, knowing full well that the ramifications of such things are fully lost on we mortal men, with the audacity to walk on two legs.

I read "It" again just now, for the first time since I was many years younger and many inches shorter. After finishing it I was filled with this crazy sense of thoughful nostalgia, which is kind of amusing, seeing as that is kind of the tone of the novel. Once again, I became unthinkably outraged at one Mr. Stephen King, for creating such an incredible web of fancy and then shitting all over it with the completion of one poorly written novel. Dark Tower VII, fie on you!
Stephen King had damn well better not die before writing some kind of capper that puts a sufficient ending to this whole sh-bang, or I'm going to desecrate his corpse.
The reason behind my present fury is undoubtedly lost on most of you, with the exception of my mother, my sister, and possibly (if by some mischance he remembers my ranting from long ago) Tim. I will not attempt to give you a short form, I'll save that for when I am more lucid and can compose an essay on it, or something. That would be interesting to attempt...

Anyway, so that my posting this isn't entirely meaningless, let me crack it to ya' this-a-wise.
Before the beginning of time, there was a giant turtle. This turtle was so big that the largest thing you could ever possibly think of would be invisible next to it, it would look smaller than the smallest hair on the back of the smallest virus in the body of the smallest germ in the veins of the smallest animal. The turtle was infinite, dig? I refer to when Moses (was it Moses?) got a look at the backside of God and aged fifty years, or whatever. That kind of thing, Mankind can't comprehend it. Then this turtle gets a stomache-ache, and vomits up the universe. (As in, "I created the universe, but don't hold it against me. I had a tummyache."<--not quoted ver batim.)
Sounds kind of Norsely Mythological, doesn't it? I know. But it's the design of the universe that gets my panties in a bunch.
See, in this here story, (I may be wildly inaccurate about this. Remember: John+Late-Night Reading Frenzy=Temporarily Insane [inane]) our world, in the vast perspective, is like a fragment of an atom, see? And our world is surrounded by millions of other worlds that make up that one atom. Then, that atom is surrounded by an unfathomable amount of millions of other atoms each containing millions of worlds. Then you pull back farther, and you see more and more universes on top of universes, until you think that contemplating anything larger than that would completely destroy your mind. Then you pull back even further, and see that all those universes, that enormous number of existences that was so large you thought it would drive you mad, is all stuck together to create the form of a single red rose, on the corner of a crumbled down abandoned lot in some forgotten section of New York.
And through the center of each of these unnumerable worlds is driven some version of The Dark Tower, which is the axis upon which all of these things turn. So then you have this guy, the Crimson King, who is using all of the horrible things at his disposal to take down the seven beams that hold up the Dark Tower so that the "macroverse" is plunged into black chaos. Pretty shifty.
But on the other hand, you have Roland of Gilead, the last and the greatest of the gunslingers of Gilead (who were like the Knights of the Round Table, in that universe. "There are no gunslingers left. John Kennedy was the last gunslinger."<--not ver batim), and his three companions, who he drew out of our world and then trained to be gunslingers with skills that rivaled his own (in "The Drawing of Three", very original title, I know). Then they wander around for a while, fighting the Crimson King and trying to find The Dark Tower so that Roland can climb to the top and find out the truth about the universe and defeat the Crimson King once and for all. It was all extremely exciting, especially when you read all (almost all) of Stephen King's books and realize that wonderful little fact: that he has been tying almost all of his novels into that one idea since his college days.

And then the final book comes out.

Now, I'm sure it wasn't as bad to me, seeing as I only had to wait a couple of years to get my hands on it. But some people, i.e. my mom and to a somewhat lesser degree my older sister, have been waiting many years (in some cases, decades!) for this thing to "finish," and are given one of the least fulfilling stories of his generally well-written career. Oooh, it ticks me off something fierce.
After my mom read it she gave it to me and didn't say a thing about it except, "I want you to read it quickly so that I can talk to you about it." I should have known from that, that it was a lost cause.
Don't get me wrong! I advocate reading Stephen King with all of my blackened and sickening hate-filled heart; I'm just preparing anyone who does read it and gets anywhere into the Dark Tower series that there will be an eventual let-down, and it will burn you to your very soul.
Except for "the Dark Tower VII" (and "From a Buick 8," I didn't like that book very much for some reason.) though, ol' Stevey has got some good juices flowin'.

Tomorrow I am going to read this post and not remember writing it and be very frightened and embarassed. Until then, I leave you with this...

"See the turtle of enormous girth,
On his shell he holds the Earth,
His thought is slow, but always kind
He keeps us all, within his mind." <---Not Ver Batim.