these books do get progressively weirder and more unwieldy as they go on! but on the other hand, they lose this claustrophobic oppressiveness and there will be much more character interaction and certain... liveliness, you know? and roland won't stay alone for long. the ending is a typical king ending, wherein he doesn't quite stick the landing: i didn't think it Ruined The Series or anything, but it was anticlimactic and i could see why people would be disappointed.

the series suffer and win at once for being king's magnum opus: the further in you go, the more of the overarching myth he tries to pack into it, tying literally every damn other book he wrote to it, expanding on the whole turtle-vs-tower dichotomy, et cetera. it... sometimes works and usually doesn't, because that kind of thing worked REALLY better in coy references. and there's a literal self-insert in one of them! not even a character-based-on, straight-up king himself, it was kind of hilarious.

THIS SAID, i think if anybody deserves to write a really rambling, weird, shambling and yet wildly successful magnum opus in his own multiverse, it's stephen king, and it's very hard to grudge these books to him. i've enjoyed them all, to various degree, even though i'm not a fan kind of fan for them.