Wizard and Glass, Stephen King

After reading the fourth installment of The Dark Tower series, Wizard and Glass finally helps you realize why Roland is who he is. After clearing up the cliffhanger of The Waste Lands, secrets that were once too painful to reveal are brought to light in an extremely long digression around a campfire, lasting about 500 pages. But don't skip it, because this story might be the most emotionally draining that you've ever read (if you're ok with the consequences, like weeping uncontrollably for hours). The climax is written in a most nostalgic way, making you want the book to just keep on going, praying that what happened was just a dream and the real ending is still to come. But no, the dream was a nightmare all along, and the worst turns out to come even later, as a second serving of tearjerking suspense. 

King is at his most magical and romantic in this book. The romance is set on a distant plain under a blanket of twilit stars, in an inviting town sporting a devious witch who's hoarding a mystical crystal ball. A beautiful damsel singing melodies to the stars allures a charming young sharp-shooter, who sweeps her off her feet with his dashing boldness and fearless grace. Gunslingers and renegades do battle near iridescent canyons and the smoke billowing from an oddly-placed industrial complex. Other dreamy icons abound, giving Wizard and Glass everything that a fantasy-romance-western needs to have. Echoes of the lovers' time together still resound in my head: bird and bear and hare and fish, give my love her fondest wish. 

Space King Music Gypsy

    

And now he is Manson, the polyester plastic space demon, raging on the microphone as the band hammers away behind him.  Now he's the Emperor, the King, the President of the United States of Ausmerica.  Listen up children, and listen well, for these are the sounds of a scarred teenager, broken free from the bonds of living by the keys of music. 

In space the stars are no nearer, they just glitter like a morgue.

The girl watches from the bleachers, spellbound by his enchanting, powerful voice.  It grabs hold of her mind, body and soul, shattering all that she held sacred.

I'm not attached to your world, nothing heals, nothing grows.

She feels more distant from him than the stars are, yet paradoxically close in the sense that his voice allows her to see across space, time, and all the dimensions, into the wormhole of his head.

We used to love ourselves, we used to love one another.

He's singing about everyone watching, all the people he grew up with who'd neglected him through the long years, who made him feel so strange that he thought he was from another planet.

All my stitches itch, my prescription's low, I wish you were queen, just for today.

Here his voice is at its most powerful.  There's passion and confusion and desperation and all these mixed-up emotions in it.  The girl feels a strong urge to heal all the hurt inside him, the hurt that has created such dark, disturbing music.  

Next comes the bridge.  It makes everyone in the gym feel disturbingly cosmic, as if the planet he came from were flooding their ears.  It's inconceivably beautiful and sad.  It brings tears of both varieties to the eyes of those more sensitive people.  Jeremy's guitar electrifies their disillusionment, spelling out in notes that the kids they'd thought were losers- the jokes of the school- were actually the ones going places.

Their jaws drop when the final chorus comes, a crushing romp of the spirit.  His voice is enraged this time, the stitches burning through his mouth, the pills spilling over the floor at their feet.  His soul is bare, exposed, limitlessly expanding through the medium of sound.  It's like a celestial-cerebral orgasm, catalyzed by the crescendo of the rising guitar.

Stunned silence turns into violent applause.  Relief captures him in a tide of release.  He turns to face the band, who are all as shocked as he is.  We did it, they finally love us.  How did it take so long?

Nobody knows what to make of the second song, except that it's ending reveals a death wish.

This isn't me I'm not mechanical, I'm just a boy, playing Suicide King.

Suicide, the final option for a defeated tool.  They didn't know it was this bad, not one of them.  The girl wonders why he stayed so quiet for so long, bottling up all those tormented thoughts.   

Mechanical Animals is just as turbulent as the first song.  But for the second time, the roof comes down, the crowd wants more.  They've never heard anything like this.  Their own revolutionary band had been brewing right under their very noses.

The third song shows a softer side, a side that makes all the boys feel uncomfortable and all the girls' hearts melt.

There's something going blank behind her smile, she's standing on an overpass, in her miracle mile.

All the girls wonder if it's them he's singing about, especially the One.  Their deepest wish at this very moment is that he is.

A pill to make you numb, a pill to make you dumb, a pill to make you anybody else.  All the drugs in this world won't save her from herself. 

Now she sees who he really is, a deeply insightful artist, shy and reserved yet brave enough to reveal his emotions in front of a crowd.  A violent confidence in his spirit makes her admire him, causing a morsel of shame in never reaching out to him.  She realizes it had been a mistake to assume he was a nobody, that she should have gotten to know him better.