My sister and I were having this EXACT conversation this morning ... trying to remember the last thing of King's we read that made us say, "Wow!" It's been a LONG time. We are (were?) both huge SK fans ... and it's been very depressing lately.

I just finished "The Dark Tower" yesterday ... seventh and last in the Gunslinger series. I used to LOVE that series (as I suppose you can see from my avatar), but I'll tell you (without any spoilers, I promise), if you are not immensely and totally devoted to the fate of Roland and ka-tet, you may not want to bother plowing through three 900 pages books. He got WAY out of league with those books, way over his head, IMO ... and it shows. Wolves of the Calla is tolerable, Song of Susannah is deplorable, and The Dark Tower is well .... somewhere in between, with a bad, bad ending. But endings have never really been his best quality.

Plus, the fact that he blatantly copied the entire idea of the series from Tolkien does NOT suit well with me, either. Have to say, my loyalty to Tolkien will always far, far outweigh mine to SK. I used to adamantly defend SK when people called him nothing more than a mediocre writer of mushy pulp. Now .... I'm rethinking that a bit.

Sad. It's a bit like getting a divorce.