The suffering becomes gratuitous after a certain point (spiderman? really?), so I think I just rejected that aspect and focused more on what made the Gunslinger so good: a slow relentless chase across an unknown world where the lines of good and evil are neither defined nor relevant.
Yeah, valid point there. I almost called it quits a couple of times myself.
By the end it was obvious that King was writing from a place that is uncomfortably familiar on a personal level. "Christ, I'm so tired of this project. If I were less conscientious, I could just walk away from it. Let's chop out some features and link in some third-party libraries so we can ship it already."
