Childe Ben to the Dartower Came

Ben: OOOHHHHH SHIIIIIIIT.

Me: The time has come.

Ben: Two hundred pages into this book and I still have no idea what the kid from THE TALISMAN has to do with any of this.

Me: I don't think he shows up again.

Ben: If the epilogue of BLACK HOUSE has nothing to do with this series at all then I'm going to kick Stevie King in the nuts.

Me: What happened in the epilogue of Black House?

Ben: The kid from THE TALISMAN who is now the adult who was formerly the kid from THE TALISMAN gets assassinated and he flips over to the lovely land where his barren fuckfriend is like yo I can heal you but you'll never be strong enough to return to your own land and then something something you still have a role to play in saving the world from the bulldozer king something something allusions to gunslingers and the tower blah blah blah.

Ben: And it's so obvious that he's going to show up in the story like Callahan did but if you're telling me he's not then wtf is this hack author even smoking.

Me: I think those were in the box because Black House talks about the Bulldozer King a lot.

Me: Tbh I made this reading list 25 years ago and remember nothing about these books.

Me: Has anything exciting happened yet?

Ben: Callahan got eaten by vampires, uh, Jake escaped a Warner Brothers cartoon dinosaur.

Ben: Susannah did something, but nobody cares because she's the worst character.

Ben: Baby Mordred is silly.

Ben: Rooting for baby Mordred to eat Stephen King irl.

Me: Did the Walken Dude come back yet?

Ben: The Man In Black, Whom The Gunslinger Hath Followed Across The Desert? Nah.

Me: Played by Matthew McDonald.
 
Ben: Matthew Broderick.

Ben: The entire cast is a reunion of FERRIS BUELLER'S DAY OFF.

Ben: The principal is the bulldozer king.

Me: Good casting given the Kirk plot in Black House.

Ben: Too soon.

Ben: Oh here's R.F. Stine right now.

Me: What chapter are you on?

Ben: CHAPTER III: THE SHINING WIR; THE DARK TOWER: BOOK SEVEN: THE DARTOWER.

Ben: THE THRILLINGLY CLIMACTIC EIGHTH BOOK IN THE EPIC 20-BOOK SEPTOLOGY.

Me: WHAT HAVE I BECOME MY SWEETEST FRIEND

Ben: I did like how the opening quotes were Robert Browning and Trent Reznor.

Me: Both college dropouts.

Ben: I started reading the poem in the beginning and was like wtf there's no way Stephen King wrote this, it's actually good.

Me: Hahaha.

Ben: Ka is a wheel.

Me: Time is a flat circle.

Ben: It's like he's being typecast but I'm not sure what his type is.

Ben: Ok, they just name-dropped the town from BLACK HOUSE so if that's the only reference to BLACK HOUSE in this book then I'm going to punt Stephen King into geosynchronous orbit.

Me: Where is Randall Munroe?

Ben: Randall appears to be in a bit of a pickle.

Ben: Foreshadowing that someone's going to die, trying to guess who it is. Can't be Jake, because he has to be the last to die. Can't be Eddie, because then nobody would bother carrying Susannah. And Susannah is less important to the story than Oy, so it's gotta be her.

Ben: Calling it now that spiderbabby eats her.

Me: Has anyone died yet?

Ben: No I went to go make pizza.

Me: Email me if you want a pizza roll.

Ben: Did you watch the redlettermedia review of A TRANSFORMER IN KING ARTHUR'S COURT?

Ben: RIP Eddie, if only you had died sooner so we could have left Susannah behind six books ago.

Me: Are you crying?

Ben: Tears of blood from my great crimson eye.

Me: Did you cry when Stephen King killed off his most prolific villain in a dramatically extraneous scene with no narrative payoff to seven books of buildup?

Ben: You fool, it's BECAUSE Walter o'Flagg died pointlessly that Eddie had to die pointlessly. Didn't you read the line about ka coming into balance?

Me: I don't think he's dead I THINK HE CAN NEVER DIE.
 
Ben: Didn't he survive an atomic bomb or something?

Ben: Getting your face eaten by a spider seems like it would be relatively easy to recover from in comparison.

Me: Didn't he used to be an incarnation of Nyarlathotep instead of some guy that got ass-raped by a homeless person?

Ben: Eager for Stephen King to explore that plot thread further in the inevitable prequel.

Me: THE DARTOWER 0: THE DICK THROUGH THE ASSHOLE

Ben: I ROSE IN HIS KEYHOLE

Me: IN THE COURT OF THE SODOMY KING

Ben: WIZARD AND ASS

Me: Somebody send in the Safety Ghosts.

Ben: Hahaha, what the fuck even did we do?

Ben: All I remember is that I was Cornelius.

Ben: Or was Will Cornelius?

Me: Will was Cornelius Cannerary.

Me: Reported rapes dropped by 80%.

Ben: Oh right, we stormed the bathroom and harassed Brandon.

Ben: Mission accomplished.

Me: WORST ROOMMATES EVER GOD.

Ben: Do you think he cherishes those days? Thinks of them sweetly and longingly in his moments of quiet contemplation?

Ben: I wonder if Roland successfully manages to convince Stephen King to write the book I'm currently reading.

Ben: Plot twist: King gets flattened by a truck, but they convince K.A. Applegate to ghostwrite the last three books.

Me: The taheen are Animorphs that got trapped while demorphing.

Me: Wait what happened to that weasel guy who couldn't successfully masturbate?

Ben: He got shot off-screen.

Me: Best character all series.

Ben: Looking forward to the scene where Roland tells Stephen King to not kill Eddie, and also to just stop giving a fuck for narrative and climax and just type AND THEY WON; THE END, and also bring Susan back and make her titties bigger than ever.

Me: Stephen King just controls the fire, he can't create it.

Ben: It was always burning, since the world's been turning.

Ben: I am 500 pages into this book, how can that possibly be only halfway?

Me: Did they save the Tower yet?

Ben: No.

Ben: Fucking spoilers.

Me: Didn't they save the old man from Hearts in Atlantis who was knocking the Tower down by thinking at it really hard?

Ben: Yeah.

Ben: But Ronald's friend from Mejisco is going to die from a foot infection, just nobody knows that yet.

Me: Shlomo the magic pianist.

Ben: I've just seen the entry entitled "Headcanon" on our popular blog and I'm sad to report that I do recall the part of this book where Roland, when casually faced with the collected bibliography of Stephen King, orders none of his ka-tet to read them; wishing I had the same sense of foresight.

Me: Are you reading the whole tome in one day?

Ben: I don't have it in me, sai.

Me: What is your comp-level critical analysis of the story so far?

Ben: At least they fucking did something, unlike in the last book.

Ben: Like, they had a problem, they came up with a solution, they carried it out. That's a story. There were no stories in SONG OF SUSANNAH.

Ben: Other than one's own mental image of Stephen King, pen in one hand, lubricated shaft in the other, writing his own dialogue.

Ben: I feel absolutely sure that the entirety of the sixth book could be replaced by an index card reading "THEY MET STEPHEN KING IN 1970 AND GOT MACGUFFIN THAT PROTECTS ANOTHER MACGUFFIN" and nothing of value would be lost.

Me: Didn't Jake and Roland have to rekill a bunch of minor characters they already killed in the second book?

Ben: Not that I recall, Jake and Roland had no time together because they went todash immediately after Susannah who escaped at the end of the fifth book.

Me: Fuck I don't remember anything from that book then except Jake and Callahan bought a pet turtle.

Ben: No, they found a carved turtle, and technically I think it was first alluded to in the fifth book anyway.

Me: It was the baby of a big turtle.

Ben: The sixth book of this series is just Stephen King saying to himself, fuck, didn't I want there to be seven books in this series? Better bullshit for six hundred pages having the characters do things of no consequence.

Ben: THE STAND was a more productive read.

Ben: And that's saying something.

Me: Was Callahan worth the wait for his return from that bus ride?

Ben: At least Callahan was a nifty throwback to King's days as a starving artist.

Ben: You aren't allowed to see the movie until I'm there in the theater with you.

Ben: It will be the culmination of this aeons-old journey.

Me: Make sure to schedule enough time to watch every Linkara video ever made.

Ben: I'll make sure to schedule enough time to first stop by the gun counter at Wal-Mart for a fresh new firearm (don't forget the three day waiting period!), plus a single bullet.