Insomnia

There's some major Dark Tower spoilers coming up (who'da thunk it?) so Stan and Webber, don't read this yet! Anyone else planning to read those books eventually should probably stop now as well. Part of the allure of the Dark Tower series is all the insane connections King managed to spread across all of his books and the way Dark Tower seems so essential to it all. Some connections are small (the Takuro Spirit shows up in 11/22/63), some are blatant (trekking through the setting of The Stand at the start of Wizard and Glass, and some actually really add to the Dark Tower story (like say, Black House, which unfortunately wasn't all that good). Insomnia falls into the last category. It was good, not great (much better than Black House) yet it felt so neccesary to make sense of the ending to the Dark Tower series. The Crimson King, for instance, a guy who's often spoken of but rarely seen in the series, appears several times throughout. The similarly oft-spoken of Dark Tower itself is expanded upon- in the series it was somewhat confusingly spoken of as being at times a literal tower, and other times a metaphorical one where each "floor" represents a different level of reality- Insomnia elaborates on this. Finally, there's the odd case of Patrick Danville. Towards the end of the series when most main characters have been killed off, Patrick suddenly enters the picture and becomes the reason Roland is able to defeat the Crimson King. Who is Patrick Danville? What did he do to deserve this sudden push to the forefront? At least Father Callahan did some badass stuff to warrant his late arrival into the ka-tet. Seeing Patrick Danville play such a huge role and not Jake or Susannah kinda pissed me off. But in Insomnia Patrick, despite only getting a few lines, gets suitably built up as the important character he will eventually become. Knowing this book came out in '94, a full decade before Patrick entered the Dark Tower series, had me thinking "this is awesome!" when it depicted some major foreshadowing of the Dark Tower conclusion. But what about the story itself? Does Insomnia stand up on its own without the Dark Tower tie-in? In my mind, only sorta. King is known for having pretty bloated books and doesn't mind spending a couple hundred pages without any major action. This is usually fine for me as long as I like the characters I'm reading about, but that wasn't quite the case here. We have Ralph Roberts, a retiree in Derry, Maine who recently lost his wife to a brain tumor, slowly afflicted with a major case of insomnia. He gets less and less sleep with each passing night, and it's starting to drive him loopy to the point of hallucinations. As the hallucinations get more and more intense, he starts to learn that this is no natural case of insomnia but something that has been forced on him, for a purpose he will never understand (saving the Dark Tower). There's a lot of interesting talk about just what sleep is, but there's also plenty of ruminations on growing old, and how hypocritical some right-to-lifers can be that didn't interest me much at all. There are a few awesome moments, mostly when the hallucinations are getting really intense but Ralph still doesn't quite realize what the heck is going on, but more than any other long book of King's I feel this one could have benefited with some major cuts. Oh well. I'm already halfway into another King book, or series of novellas really, but after that I'll take a break from my Stephen King mega-marathon.