And the ending, which just seemed to fade into nothingness after building up to what, in my mind, should have been a terrific climax, a battle to end all battles. I even disliked the main characters, Peter and Thomas, for being whiny and having a curious lack of agency. I hated the narrator of this novel-told-as-story, an omniscient wizard (I assumed) with a personality. What did I specifically hate? I hated the tone. Many King fans dislike it, simply because it strays into a genre they don't see as his. Maybe, of all the King novels I have to reread for this project, this was the one I was dreading most and I'm not alone in that. I brought my own baggage to those 400 pages of dragons and wizards and traditional, fantasy-quest narrative, and I (perhaps inevitably) hated it. So, when I was going through King's work and came to the cover of this – which proudly declared, over a picture of a wizard and some fancy patterns, that this was "a classic fantasy from the master storyteller" – I just had no interest in it. I was told to try The Lord of the Rings, as something more grown-up, but that was, somehow, worse just a mess of nonsense to me. I just couldn't imagine why anybody would want to read such a twee, simpering narrative, overwritten and unimaginative.
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