3/5. What a colossal disappointment. I normally don't purchase new King books because his books over the past 10ish years have been really hit or miss and get them from the library instead, but I enjoyed The Talisman and Black House quite a bit, so I was excited to hop into Other Worlds Than These. I can only hope that it's true that there are other worlds than these, and that there exists a world where King is still able to write high quality works, but so far I've been mostly disappointed.
To preface, I am a massive Stephen King fanboy and have read all of his books at least once but I've also reread many of his books as well, and I consider him to be one of my top three favorite authors.
I am going to go off on what seems like a tangent, but I promise that it's relevant to this book and my experience with it. Reading this book reminded me a lot of watching The Force Awakens or The Matrix Resurrections. Both movies were built on extremely solid foundations with their respective franchises. The original Star Wars and Matrix trilogies had great ideas, characters and character development, worldbuilding, and plots.
With Star Wars, we had the threat of the evil empire who created the Death Star that was capable of destroying entire planets and it was up to our heroes to stop the bad guys. Then The Force Awakens rolls around and the (definitely *not* the Empire) First Order creates (definitely *not* the Death Star) Starkiller Base which is just like the Death Star from the OG trilogy but it shoots FIVE lasers instead of just one, which means it's FIVE times as cool right? For myself, when watching The Force Awakens the predominant thought in my head was "This seems a little familiar..." while the movie was crafted to essentially retell the fundamental story from A New Hope. And meanwhile all of the imagery just keeps reminding you of how awesome the original movie was, making you question why this exists in the first place.
The Matrix Resurrections did all of this in an even more egregious way. Set decades after the conclusion of the final movie of the original trilogy, apparently the peace between the machines and humans has come to an end and, yep, you guessed it, we're going to rehash a lot of fundamentals from the original movies. But where The Force Awakens had completely original images, The Matrix Resurrections literally plays scenes from the originals in the background, constantly reminding the viewer of how awesome things used to be. This, again, forces the question "Why does this even exist?"
Other Worlds Than These follows a similar track in that it is *loaded* with references and callbacks to The Talisman and Black House (which makes sense since this is book three in a trilogy) but also the entire Dark Tower saga. Honestly, this book could even be considered Dark Tower #8 with where the story goes, but that is a massive negative for me. For me, The Dark Tower could be a mixed bag at times, but still one I overall enjoyed and I am rereading. The Dark Tower had this crazy and interesting world (sometimes maybe a little too weird). Roland, Susanna, Eddie, and Jake were great characters because they were built up well in the first three books and so the reader knows them intimately with how they would act or react to situations, and so becomes invested in their journey. The ka-tet's quest was interesting because it involved trying to stop all of reality from unraveling and the mechanics of this quest were pretty out there and off the wall. Because of these, even when the quality dropped in the series, there was at least still enough to carry you through the end.
Which brings me to the question: why does Other Worlds Than These exist? I know King says that he and Peter Straub had the general idea over a decade ago about the roving gangs of marauding teenagers wreaking destruction through the Territories (Mid-World) but that doesn't excuse the plot. In this book, Jack's character is easily the weakest it's been portrayed throughout the trilogy. I just never felt invested in him or cared about him or his quest. A big part of this being that *we* *have* *already* *done* *this* *before*. Jack needs to stop these gangs because, without getting into the nitty gritty, if they continue doing what they're doing it will lead to "the destruction of the world, and all worlds." Wasn't that literally the point of the Dark Tower series? Why are we doing this again? To make it even more blatant, there are a ridiculous amount of callbacks to Roland, Susanna, Eddie, and Jake, with the worst literally making comparisons to Jack's companions to them. Everytime I saw a reference to the Dark Tower series or even the other two books in this series, I was just reminded how much better those were than this. Frequently throughout the story Jack will read an excerpt from his journal that will describe events from The Talisman. When I'd read these I'd think, oh yeah that scene was awesome, etc. And then I'd be yanked back to the sad reality that is this book.
I think when it comes to my beef with Jack's character in this book, my biggest grievance is the stakes of the plot. It's too big, especially considering this has already happened in this universe. The Talisman and Black House worked because they were way more intimate. In The Talisman, Jack is fighting to save his mother. In Black House, Jack is fighting to save children in the town where he lives. There's very little introspection here; I think one of King's greatest strengths as a writer is his character development. I'm currently in the middle of rereading IT and it's almost shocking that these books were written by the same author. There is a noticeable drop in quality here, and it's just sad because I've seen him at the top of his game. This book is very plot driven, tons of action, and because of this I never got attached to any of the side characters. To compare these to the original ka-tet felt almost insulting.
I'll be interested to see how public reception to this is once more time has passed and more people read it. As of right now, I think I'm in the minority opinion here. I just want King to write things that have a deep impact on me, not things that feel like a cash grab for fans of another series.
