"Harry Potter" Overhyped

Picture this: a series of popular fantasy novels, announced by the author to be a seven-part series, with the fourth and seventh novels being potentially the fattest. Throughout the series, a dark threat looms on the horizon, one which the protagonist has faced before, and only he (and his friends, of course) can stop it. After the fourth novel, however, work on the series is delayed for a number of years, until the fifth is finally published in 2003, much to many people's delight.

Can you guess what it is? Did you say "Harry Potter?"

If you did (and I understand why), you're wrong. Here's another hint: the first novel was originally published in 1982. (Oh, that's definitely not Harry Potter.)

I'm talking about Stephen King's The Dark Tower series of novels, a seven-part mega-masterpiece. King spent time on these books, with each installment coming 4-6 years after the previous, until his accident in 1999. At that point, Harry Potter strode onto the scene and...shall I say...accio'ed all the attention. In 2003, both Rowling and King published the fifth novels of their respective cycles, but King's sixth and seventh both followed a year later.

Did you know that?

So where was the hype?

The Dark Tower, undoubtedly, is the better piece of work. Granted, Rowling's series does a good job of teaching kids about racism and slavery without actually teaching them. But where's the post-apocalyptic world? Where're the alternate universes? Where's the character who is actually supposed to be the author? Hell, King even has Harry Potter references! (Wolves of the Calla (book 5) includes a futuristic heat-seeking flying bomb called a "Sneetch" contained in boxes labeled "Harry Potter model" and the slogan "Don't mess with the 449th! We'll kick the Slytherin out of you!")

The Dark Tower has its evil magician bent on destroying the universe, mysterious artifacts and doors, friends who fall in love with each other, the supernatural (werewolves, vampires), tales of prejudice and war, battles between good and evil, and King manages to pull these off without using trite names (such as Umbridge, a pun on the word umbrage, or the Mirror of Erised—you can figure that one out) or deux ex machina. (Dumbledore to the rescue!)

In fact, probably the only thing King doesn't have (besides an English accent) that Harry Potter does is a child audience. Sure, I read the first one back in seventh grade, when I found it in my teacher's lending library. It was my first Stephen King novel, and I devoured it (meaning I read it and immensely enjoyed it, not meaning I ate it). And that was more or less the time when Harry Potter IV came out.

What else does King's series have? Vampires. Evil cybernetic corporations. Fictional characters from other books, reading the books where they are characters. Characters interacting with the author who thinks he's writing them.

There was even a suicidal pink monorail! Who loved to tell riddles! But I doubt Eddie's dead baby jokes would have been the only reason why Rowling ended up with a more popular series.

And we can't forget the killer ending to the final of the Dark Tower novels—it was such a great ending, such a fitting finale, that no other ending could do the series justice. And if that had been spoiled for me...well, I'd be less upset if someone blurts out the ending to Deathly Hallows before I finish it. (Heck, the ending to HP6 was spoiled for me—and I really didn't care, though it put a hole in my hypothesis that Dumbledore would kill Harry in the seventh book).

With each book, King impressed me with several new things, and didn't always quite stay the same, with Roland's great journey to the Dark Tower spanning different universes and times. Rowling's installments do further the back story, but the only progress forward I could really see was Voldemort's gradual return to power while Harry was working towards graduation.

But we have to thank Rowling for making reading fun for those millions of people who thought watching television was a better use of their time and mind. Maybe reading's gone out of fashion recently with all the ghostwritten autobiographies (plagiarism and lying included) and whatever other crap has diluted the market. At least we can see a couple million people still have a taste for fiction.

I'm not ashamed to say I'll be reading it, too. They are good books. But The Dark Tower series will remain my favorite. Right next to Dune, of course. (Hey! The last Dune book is coming out in August. Isn't everybody excited?!)

But if you haven't yet read The Dark Tower, I suggest you go pick up The Gunslinger (the first book) as soon as possible (meaning, of course, after you finish HP7). Then read the second. And then just try to stop yourself from reading all the rest. If you loved Harry Potter...The Dark Tower is where you go when you've graduated from Hogwarts.

Until next time, here's to the line that started it all, in King's head, circa 1970: "The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed."

---TDM