November's recommendation: the Dark Tower series by Stephen King. Individual titles so far published [at the time this review was written] are The Gunslinger, The Drawing of the Three, The Waste Lands, Wizard and Glass, and The Wolves of Calla (which I have not yet read).
I decided ten minutes ago that this would be my next-to-last recommendation for the year, and the decision is still sitting oddly with me. First of all, I have, as a general rule, tried to recommend things I didn't have many gripes with, and I'm not sure that's true here. I'm not sure it's not true either, though -- if that makes any sense. King's not a writer I usually read, and many of the reasons I don't normally read his stuff (mostly having to do with his style, both in prose and plot) still hold true here.
Yet I've decided to recommend it.
More important than the style gripe is the genre one: I started this whole recommendation-a-month thing to recommend fantasy. Not things that existed on the borders of fantasy. Why? Because it seemed that the only fantasy I saw being recommended these days was from the borders, and I wanted to make a case for there still being stuff at the center, new stuff, that was worth reading. But I've already slipped off that train in places; I recommended The King of Elfland's Daughter, for example, which is hardly new. Partly, I will admit, this has been a side-effect of circumstances; I don't have as much time to read fiction as I would like, and so I have at various points this year been forced to choose from things I'd already read in making my recommendations. And that's probably part of what's going on here. King's series is part horror, part science fiction, and a whole lotta Western. Part fantasy, too, but I would never claim it's in the center of the genre.
Yet I've decided to recommend it.
Why?
I guess, in the end, it boils down to: Because I feel like it.
The Dark Tower series is weird and surreal and symbolic, and it switches modes all over the place. Some of it feels like straight-up King (based on my admittedly limited sampling of his work, none of which I've read in years). Some of it feels like a straight-up Western. Some of it verges on high fantasy, if people in high fantasy wore cowboy boots and called themselves gunslingers, and then all of a sudden you've got seventy-foot cyborg bears. The feel ranges from highly dreamlike to the sort of good, solid narrative that reminds me of why I personally value good, solid narrative over highly polished prose -- and speaking of prose, while the majority of it is King's steady, unobtrusive style (I've heard it called "workmanlike"), and some of it is the gritty, earthy stuff that reminds you his characters are people with physical bodies and all the processes that go with such, every so often . . . not all the time, but enough to grab your attention . . . a very few times each book, his words suddenly rise up with a grandeur you never would have believed they could take on, and they seize you by the throat and give you epic in a way that shows much wanna-be epic fantasy for the thin, bloodless thing it is. Roland's words to Eddie at the end of The Drawing of the Three. His sudden facedown of Blaine -- you get to see that one twice, at the end of The Waste Lands and the beginning of Wizard and Glass. Most of the time, I don't envy King his words, the dialogue he puts in the mouths of his characters. But every once in a while, I turn green with pure jealousy.
I've written this far without saying much about the plot, I guess because after reading books three and four back-to-back I don't have much perspective on it, not to mention I somehow assume that everybody reading this journal already knows what the series is. Which might be true for readers of Foxkith's journal (since he has expounded on the meaning of this series far better than I can), but isn't necessarily true for everyone else.
So: the series is very, very loosely based on Robert Browning's poem "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came," which is a poem I actually kind of like. The poem is about a knight questing for the Dark Tower and dealing with a lying man and a shifting landscape (forgive me, those who know the poem well; I haven't read it in ages and don't have a copy to hand); the series is about a gunslinger (which is more like a knight than you might think) questing for the Dark Tower and dealing with a lying man and a landscape that does tricks you wouldn't believe. The story takes you through many worlds -- including our own, those of other King stories, and others I will leave as surprises, as Roland gathers companions, but it also jumps around in time, filling in such gaping voids as Roland's past. The world has moved on, we are told repeatedly, leaving behind a crumbling ruin, but how that ruin came to be we only gradually discover. I think this paragraph, vague as it is, comes as close as anything I've written to capturing why I like this series enough to recommend it; there's something lurking below the surface, something about stories and worlds and the death of worlds and the symbolic role of the Dark Tower in all of that, which resonates with ideas floating around in my own head, but I'm going to have to read the rest of the series (The Wolves of Calla and the two books not yet published) to see if the things I think I see are actually there, or just my mind taking King's story and creating new branches off of it, as he did with Browning's poem.
Either way, I don't regret choosing this for my November recommendation, despite it being rather far from the mainstream fantasy I originally set out to publicize to the world. It's an odd series, and very rough at the beginning (he's been working on this thing for ages, but not in an organized way), but very, very interesting. So go read it. Because, er, everybody should listen to me. Or something.