AllHail: I am sorry I can't word it quite clearly; I'll try again. Trying to cram a great piece of fiction under a category is meaningless unless you intend further to judge it by the pre-existing laws of this category, foreign and external to the book in question. You inobtrusively acquire the right to say King "shouldn't have" written himself into it, or that he "should have" staged that epic battle between Roland and Flagg so many people sorely miss; and it has to do only with laws of genres, sanctified by criticists' analysis of someone else's writing. A great novel creates its own laws and should be judged by them only, with the help of the reader's taste, intelligence, and reading experience, not something someone invented for a different case.