Ben: Please tell me that the final boss of this fucking ten-year saga isn't motherfucking Santa Claus.
Me: Would you prefer a catfish in your mother's nightgown?
Ben: Is that from INSOMNIA?
Ben: And yes, maybe.
Ben: Rather than just a dumb old dude.
Ben: Well if you had responded like four days ago we could have seen DARTOWER THE FILM.
Ben: No for real I was visiting last week and brought all your books back.
Ben: But in lieu of your response I have yet to begin the very last SUB-BOOK of DARTOWER SE7EN.
Ben: So that one's coming back with me I suppose.
Ben:
Oh also someone ought to tell Stephen King's publisher that for the
last sixty pages of the most recent sub-book (THE WHITE LANDS OF
EMPATHICA) they accidentally entitled the top of each page with the name
of the prior sub-book (IN THIS HAZE OF GREEN AND GOLD), the tremendous
hacks.
Ben: Starting on the home stretch while riding the bus home.
Ben: I want to believe that Susannah is gone for good, gone forever on that dumb scooter of hers, but I don't dare get my hopes up.
Ben: Looking forward to the quality dialogue that Roland will be having with Scooby-Doo and the tongueless Rembrandt.
Ben:
"His asshole was now a broken squeezebox that could no longer make
music but only gasp." <-- ought to have just ended the book right
here, on the best line King's ever written.
Ben: "Susannah could see tread-marks, like those made by a bulldozer, pressed into the packed snow." BULLDOZER KING CONFIRMED CANON.
Ben: BULLDOZER CANON, CONFIRMED KING.
Ben: Doing a club in Brooklyn,
it probably was "boid" and "hoid"; in Pittsburgh it would be "burrd" and
"hurrd"; the Giant Eagle supermarket would become "Jaunt Iggle".
Ben: ^ I have never felt more kinship with Stephen King.
Ben: Shit, you actually weren't lying about INSOMNIA.
Ben: Remind me what happens in
that book? Some old dude can't sleep for the first half, which made for
an actually decent story, and then in the second half he and his
withered girlfriend turn into kids to fight aliens, akin to geriatric
Animorphs?
Ben: Hahaha, you weren't lying about the not-canon part either. What was even the point of this exchange?
Ben: I can't believe motherfucking Susannah is still alive.
Ben: I'm preparing a strongly-worded letter to Stephen King to berate him for this oversight.
Ben: I was really, really hoping he would bring the black lady CEO with him and just forget Susannah ever existed.
Ben: Reading a subchapter
wherein Stephen King (the character) reflects upon writing the book's
previous subchapter and Stephen King (the author) tries to defuse any of
his Constant Readers who are mad at him for killing Jake by professing
that Stephen King (both of them) had no say in the matter. This isn't
HOUSE OF LEAVES, you fuck!
Ben: I don't want to read this scene where Roland fucks an old lady.
Me: Does this happen in every book or something?
Ben: I don't think this has happened since the fifth book.
Ben: And that lady was only sorta old.
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.
Author: Joe Schreiber
Medium: Novel
Publication Date: December 2010
Timeline Placement: 3,645 BBY
I almost stopped reading this book on page 16, when I got to this passage at the end of the second chapter:
Opening his eyes again, he looked at the cracked wall. It had been strong, but now it was damaged, its value weakened in some fundamental way by what had been inflicted on it.
I am that wall.
It’s always a good sign when a book comes with its own built-in SparkNotes, just in case you find its heavy-handed symbolism too obscure. It’s good to show contempt for your audience.
Red Harvest is a zombie book, and a prequel to the 2009 zombie book Death Troopers, which I haven’t read and am now dreading. The story involves a zombie plague that breaks out on an ice planet full of faceless bad guys when an evil faction at war with the Republic attempts to harness the knowledge of an ancient Sith Lord 3,000-some years before the movies. If this plot sounds familiar, it’s because it is. A lot of indistinguishable characters are introduced, do nothing, and die. Eventually the main girl escapes due to no agency or capability of her own, and the book ends. That’s the whole plot.
Let’s take a look at our cast of characters, if you can call them that. The dramatis personae lists fifteen named characters, thirteen of which are human and thirteen of which are male. It’s like an argument for affirmative action right there on the first page.
Hestizo Trace, nicknamed “Zo” because even the author realized what a stupid name “Hestizo” is, is the main character of Red Harvest, as far as I can tell. A twenty-five-year-old member of the Jedi Agricultural Corps, she has a natural affinity for plantlife and psychic communication with shrubbery. As established in various other sources, the AgriCorps is basically where you get sent when you’re inducted into the Jedi Order as a child but your Force powers don’t develop enough for you to become a Knight. You don’t get a lightsaber, but you do get to spend your life telepathically encouraging plants to grow. Yayyyy. I don’t think this fact is ever mentioned in the book, however; Zo is consistently referred to as a Jedi, but she doesn’t have a lightsaber and is Force-incompetent to the point of being regular-incompetent.
Zo has a special bond with a Murakami orchid, an especially Force-sensitive flower that is the final ingredient the evil Darth Scabrous needs to complete his immortality potion. He sends a Whiphid bounty hunter named Tulkh to steal the orchid, but because Zo is foolish enough to tell him that the flower, once removed from its incubator, can’t survive outside her presence, she ends up kidnapped and hauled off to the frozen wasteland of Odacer-Faustin, home of Sith High and brazenly pointless filler plots.
 |
| Oh my God, this is so much better. |
Seven of the fifteen characters in the dramatis personae are teenage students at Sith High, and one is a teacher. That’s over half the cast, and you could excise literally all of their point-of-view chapters without affecting the plot in any way. One after another, they’re introduced, get no character development, and then are brutally killed off for no narrative reason. Mnah Ra’at, Hartwig, and Maggs are virtually indistinguishable, and Jura Ostrogoth is only discernible from them because of this incongruous anecdote about how he almost got gay-raped by another student his first day at the school. Kindra is the girl and lives the longest by betraying her classmates and refusing to take her clothes off when they ask her to, but she eventually gets torn apart by zombies anyway. Sith Professor Xat Hracken has like two lines of dialogue and then turns into a zombie. None of these characters ever interacts with or is even aware of the existence of Hestizo Trace or anyone involved with her section of the plot, which is really just “the plot.”
Zo’s brother, Jedi Knight Spanish-for-Red Trace, senses her abduction through the Force. Rather than alert his superiors that his sister has been kidnapped and going after her with some Jedi backup, he sends this message to her abductor through the Force, even though he has no reason to believe that this person is a Force-sensitive who would even be able to receive it: Listen to me. I don’t know who you are, but I am in possession of a very special set of skills. If you bring my sister back right now, unharmed, then I’ll let you go. But if you don’t, I promise you, I will track you down. I will find you. And I will make you pay.
This is the second point where I almost stopped reading the book. Not that Liam Neeson’s Taken isn’t a time-tested classic in the cinematic canon whose influence will be immediately evident to anyone reading this book more than two years after it came out, but why is that in here?
Then later there’s a Fahrenheit 451 reference: chapter 32 begins with the line “It was a pleasure to burn.” The author also revealed that “the first draft of the novel contained a character named Middish Sunblade, modeled after Holden Caulfield, but Sunblade was removed from the rewrite because he was whiny and nobody could stand him.” It’s like this book was written by a high school student doing an assignment for a creative writing class, and he just threw a bunch of references and allusions to books he’d read for other classes and what was on TV at the time into his zombie splatterbook without stopping to consider if they made any sense at all or were in any way appropriate for the subject matter he was writing about.
Anyway, Trace appears in like three scenes after that, then the zombified Darth Scabrous kills him with a sword.
 |
| A Whiphid. You have to be a badass to leave the house in that dopey costume. |
Tulkh, the Whiphid bounty hunter, and Dail’Liss, the Sith librarian, are the only two non-human characters in the dramatis personae and also the only two who come at all close to being interesting to read about. Tulkh carries a spear and his ship has a trophy room full of bones, just like the Predator in Predator 2, and he later teams up with the female character he was previously antagonizing to face a greater threat, just like the Predator in Alien vs. Predator. Unlike the Predator, however, he has no reason to do this, as after he was paid for delivering Zo to Scabrous he could have just left the planet. For some reason, though, despite showing no remorse for kidnapping her and impaling her coworker, Tulkh sticks around to help Zo, and ultimately rescues her at the end of the book before nobly allowing himself to be flushed into space to save her from the zombie contamination within him. This would be an acceptable character arc if anyone had bothered to actually write it.
Dail’Liss is a thousand-year-old Neti, a tree-like alien who at a certain point in its life cycle becomes even more tree-like, sinking its roots into the ground and becoming immobile. The book clearly states that Dail’Liss is rooted in place and can’t leave his library, but he’s somehow still able move his trunk through the walls and cracks of the building by sliding along his branches or something, which makes me wonder if the author has ever seen a tree before. Despite being a Sith, Dail’Liss seems like a pretty chill dude. He just wants to sit in his library and read books, so naturally he gets turned into an evil zombie tree.
The third almost-interesting character is Darth Scabrous’s HK-model assassin droid, who gets neither a name nor a mention in the dramatis personae, but is more important than about two thirds of the characters who do. The droid teams up with Tulkh to eviscerate zombies with giant guns, then later sacrifices himself for no reason to take out the Sith’s antiaircraft batteries and allow his friends (?) to escape.
The book ends with two survivors, Hestizo Trace and a mechanic named Pergus Frode, escaping from Odacer-Faustin aboard Tulkh’s ship. Zo returns to the AgriCorps, but decides that instead of getting back into botany right away she wants to first visit the Jedi Temple on Coruscant to continue her training, even though Darth Malgus razed the Jedi Temple to the ground in the previous book. That’s going to be a pretty short trip, Zo.
 |
| But I, although slighted because I was not big, fought, trees, in your array on the field of Goddeu Brig. |
Stylistically, the book’s prose is very simple and straightforward, with the occasional SAT word like “threnody” or “rectilinear” thrown in for flavor. That’s not to say it descends to the bland juvenility of something like Revan; Schreiber’s writing style is uninspiring but intellectually inoffensive, and I was able to breeze through the book in a handful of sittings over about three days. There is a ton of gore and excessive violence, lengthy and repetitive descriptions of people’s guts hanging out and people’s faces sloughing off, which isn’t typically what I would read a Star Wars book for, but it would be fine if there was anything to it besides graphicness for the sake of graphicness.
This is ostensibly a horror novel, but it’s never scary. Even the unremitting violence isn’t that fun; there are hardly any cool zombie kills, with the exception of Tulkh and the HK droid briefly teaming up at the very end and a non sequitur scene in which Zo, whose greatest talent is talking to plants, uses the Force to slow down time enough to grab an arrow in mid-flight and use it to kill ten zombies in about two seconds. This is the only cool or interesting thing she does in the entire book, until near the end when she uses the Force to somehow phase through the bonds tying her to a sacrificial altar.
This book isn’t insultingly, embarrassingly bad like Revan, but Revan failed both as its own story and as the follow-up to a much better story; Red Harvest is just a whole lot of nothing, so that’s what I’m giving it.
0/5 Death Stars.
So I read this comic forever ago and pretty much forgot what happened in it. Well I remember it sucks.
Originally published as a series of online web strips that were later compiled into three comic issues that were later collected in a transparently skinny trade paperback, the story takes place concurrently with Deceived, and even features a few of the same characters. Because it was one of the earliest tie-ins to Star Wars: The Old Republic, however, predating the release of the game by nearly a year, almost none of those characters’ personalities match how they’re depicted in the book we just read.
For example, Darth Malgus’s boss, Darth Angry, shows up as one of the main antagonists. Deceived portrayed him as lackadaisical bureaucrat, a career politician more interested in processing paperwork and making racist jokes among his peers than plumbing the depths of the dark side. Here he’s a vitriolic hothead who runs around shouting a lot and trying to murder everyone. He’s ideologically opposed to making peace with the Republic, whereas in the book he couldn’t seem to care less; his characterization here is more akin to how Malgus was portrayed in Deceived.
His rival, Darth Bareass, had only a very small cameo appearance in Deceived, but in his expanded role here he’s characterized closer to how Darth Angry was in the book: even-tempered, calculating, politically shrewd. Not having played the MMO that both of these works are based on, I don’t know which version of these characters is more faithful to their presentation in the game.
One thing that I’m guessing was changed between this promotional comic and TOR‘s release was Satele Shan. A descendant of Bastila Shan and Revan, Satele also put in an unmemorable cameo in Deceived. Before that, we saw her as a young girl in the cinematic trailers Return and Hope. It’s been 28 years since Return; according to the birthdate Wookieepedia has for her, that should make Satele about 46 at the time of Threat of Peace. The guy who wrote this comic apparently didn’t know that, though, despite the back cover saying he was also a writer for the MMO.
Despite being a middle-aged adult, Satele is still a flighty apprentice prone to being chastised by her Jedi Master, secret villainess Dar’Nala. She also develops an adolescent flirtation with Republic clone trooper Harron Tavus. Apparently early information about the MMO placed it thirty years after the Treaty of Coruscant, but in the finalized timeline there’s only a ten-year gap. The resulting discrepancy in Satele’s characterization is pretty funny.
Another thing not worth mentioning is that this comic is the first and only appearance of Zym, the Grand Master of the Jedi Order, who was mentioned in Deceived but didn’t appear. The title “Grand Master” was, as far as I can tell after consulting Wookieepedia’s virtually useless method of source citation, created by Sean Stewart in his excellent one-and-done Star Wars novel, Yoda: Dark Rendezvous. At the time it was just an honorific unique to Yoda, signifying his leadership of the Jedi, his unsurpassed wisdom, his centuries of Jedi training, and his real-world popularity. Later books extended the title to Luke Skywalker as well, which was fine, because if there are two characters worthy of representing the pinnacle of Jedi-ness, they’re Yoda and Luke.
So naturally it wasn’t long before the EU ruined this title the same way it ruined the Darth name, handing it out like Cracker Jack prizes to unremarkable scrubs in an attempt to make them seem interesting without having to actually write anything interesting about them, because writing is hard. Case in point, Grand Master Zym shows up, does nothing, and dies like a bitch. Other Grand Masters include Satele Shan, Nomi Sunrider, two characters from reference articles who never appeared in an actual story, and this elf/cat lady. What great and memorable characters, truly worthy of standing in the pop culture pantheon right next to Luke Skywalker and Yoda. Or maybe just a tiny, tiny bit below them.
Also there’s a non sequitur subplot about a bounty hunter who wears Mandalorian armor but isn’t Mandalorian trying to kill a bad Wookiee.
Plot is nonsensical, characters are nonexistent, art is possibly the worst we’ve seen so far. I feel like I say that every time we cover a new comic, but every time it feels like it’s true.
Skip this one, it stinks. 1/5 Death Stars.
Next: Sith High