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Title:
Wizard and Glass Author:
Stephen King Hardback: 668 pages Publisher: Plume (1997) Amazon: Instant Look Up Appraising Eyeballs: |
About the Book (From Amazon.com Books):
Wizard and Glass, the fourth episode in King's white-hot
It's a great race, for the mind and pulse. Movies should be this
good. Then comes a 567-page flashback about Roland at
age 14. It's a well-marbled but meaty tale. Roland and two teen homies must rescue his first love from the dirty old
drooling mayor of a post-apocalyptic cowboy town, thwart a civil war by blowing
up oil tanks, and seize an all-seeing crystal ball from Rhea, a vampire witch.
The love scenes are startlingly prominent and earthier than most romance novels
(they kiss until blood trickles from her lip).
After an epic battle ending in a box canyon to end all box
canyons, we're back with grizzled, grown-up Roland and the train-wreck
survivors in a parallel world:
Bruce’s
Appraisal: So
I’m just starting to appreciate Eddie of New York and Susannah of New York
and Jake of New York. Jake doesn’t
suffer from “Scrappy Doo Complex,” which had laid
low so many would-be child protagonists over the years. Surprisingly, neither does Oy, the bumbler. It took time, almost a thousand pages of
time, but I’m finally starting to enjoy these characters, despite their
all-too-human (and all-too-believable) flaws. We’re finally getting that momentum on the
journey to the So
what happens? Naturally, it’s time for
a prequel. After
a jaw-dropping battle of wits with So
then the prequel hits. It’s time to
palaver. I
kicked. I
screamed. And
then something else, happened. I found
that I loved the characters in the
past. In fact, by the end of the
flashback, when time shifted again to It
was so good, in fact, that I had trouble reading more than twenty or thirty
pages at a sitting. It took forever to read this story! I came to love these characters so
intensely that it was as if they were my own friends. And the knowledge that something horrible
was about to befall at least one of them—something so awful that it has been
foreshadowed in almost every scene of the three books preceding this one—loomed
over every page I turned. It has been years since I’ve been this engrossed
in a novel. It blew away House of Leaves, surpassed Lord of Chaos and Marked for Death. Wizard and Glass is every bit as good
as the Stephen King epic it riffs on, and it never pales in comparison when
it also riffs on another American classic that happens to be set in From
the five words that changed Roland’s life to the searing images that could
only be shared through the wavering vision of spilling tears, this story
delivers everything we’ve needed from the very beginning, even if we didn’t
realize it. Gunslingers in action, a
world that was moving on but hadn’t
wholly moved on, young love, true
heroism, and, to truly show those things, all of the petty and malignant
evils that devils and hobgoblins could never really understand, the ones that
can only be borne of a human heart. Bad
guys—No, not bad guys, these were villains—Some
of the ones I expected to survive met their delicious just desserts while others
live to haunt another volume, and I can’t wait to see justice dealt upon
them. And, ultimately, we fully
understand Roland’s reaction upon meeting Sheb in
the doomed town of The
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