A Brief Guide to Stephen King

by Paul Simpson

  Since the book was originally published by a small press with a correspondingly low print run, copies of The Gunslinger were hard to find – there was no publicity about the series, but King included it (under the title ‘The Dark Tower’) in the list of books he had written in the front of Pet Sematary in 1983, leading to King being ‘flooded with letters from fans’. The demand was so great that despite two further printings by Grant, a trade edition was finally released in 1988.

  King still had mixed feelings about it being so publicly available: in an interview in the Castle Rock Newsletter in March 1989, he was concerned that it was so unlike his other work, and that it wasn’t complete: ‘When the book ends, there’s all this stuff to be resolved, including: What is this all about? What is this tower? Why does this guy need to get there?’ At that point he estimated the series would run to eight volumes and 10,000 pages; he wasn’t far wrong.

  The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three

  (Donald M. Grant, May 1987)

  Only a few hours have passed since Roland woke by the Western Sea, but he is in trouble: he is attacked by a ‘lob-strosity’, a huge lobster-like sea-dwelling creature. It takes two of the fingers from his right hand and the big toe of his right foot; the wounds quickly become infected, and Roland desperately needs help.

  He treks along the beach and encounters a door, labelled ‘The Prisoner’. Going through he finds himself in 1987 inside a man in our world: Eddie Dean, who is running drugs for crime lord Enrico Balazar. Roland and Eddie hide the drugs through the doorway back on the beach, and Eddie is then interrogated by Customs. Balazar kidnaps Eddie’s brother Henry to make Eddie hand the drugs over, but after he learns that Henry has died of an overdose, Eddie, with Roland’s help, kills Balazar. Eddie agrees to join Roland, even if he is a bit nervous of him.

  A second doorway, marked ‘The Lady of Shadows’, leads to 1964 and the crippled Odetta Holmes, a black woman heavily involved in the civil rights movement. She lost the use of her legs after being pushed in front of a subway train, and is unaware that she harbours a second personality, the violent and nasty Detta Walker. For much of the time that Detta/Odetta is in Roland’s world, Detta is in control, and tries to use Eddie as bait to force Roland to take her home.

  A final doorway (‘The Pusher’) connects Roland with Jack Mort, a sadistic sociopath who was responsible for Jake’s death in Manhattan, Odetta’s crippling and dropping a brick on her when she was a child, which caused Detta to emerge. Arriving in 1977, Roland prevents Jack from killing Jake, then forces him to get medicine and ammunition. He then makes Jack jump in front of the subway train that should have crippled Odetta, ensuring that Detta can see Jack’s death through the doorway. This leads to Detta/Odetta fusing to become a third personality, Susannah, who frees Eddie – who in turn starts to fall in love with her. Both of them recognize that Roland will do whatever he needs to in order to achieve his quest.

  King returned to writing about the Dark Tower a dozen years after completing work on the original five short stories, although apparently the original version of the second volume (then known as ‘Roland Draws Three’) was lost. He worked out a complicated outline detailing what would happen in the remaining books of the series – certain hints are given about the next two volumes in the afterword at the end of The Drawing of the Three – but then set the story aside, to return to when he was ready. ‘It’s the one project I’ve ever had that seems to wait for me,’ he commented in 1989, shortly before the trade version of the second volume was released.

  What would become a hallmark of the ‘Dark Tower’ series, which spread into some of King’s other work, was most noticeable in The Drawing of the Three. Because the book – like the original version of its predecessor – wasn’t professionally copy edited, there were various inconsistencies both in terms of the continuity with the first story, and internally. Characters would change names, and there were errors of geography, such as the wrong subway train coming into the Christopher Street station, or placing Co-Op City in the wrong New York borough. These were seen to be mistakes on the part of the author at the time, but they later came to be recognized as clues to the multiple levels of reality that were at play in the ‘Dark Tower’ worlds – King would deliberately insert these sorts of ‘errors’ into later books, and responded to one criticism of The Colorado Kid’s ‘inaccurate’ use of a Starbucks by reminding Constant Readers how such things played out.

  The Drawing of the Three sees Roland bring his ka-tet together – a group of people connected by a like-minded purpose, or ‘those bound by destiny’ to use King’s own explanation in his foreword to the revised edition of The Gunslinger – which marks a change in the single-mindedness of the gunslinger. The subtitle added to the twenty-first-century editions was ‘Renewal’.

  There are some interesting links to other King/Bachman tales: Balazar is involved with the Mafia thug Ginelli, about whom we learned considerably more in Thinner, and it is in this volume that we learn something of the fate of Dennis and Prince Thomas from The Eyes of the Dragon.

  For King, this was the book that ‘hooked’ him on to the story of the Dark Tower: ‘I loved the way that that took off from the very beginning,’ he told Ain’t It Cool News. He also found a willing audience for it close to home: of all the stories he had written up to then, this was his children’s favourite book, he explained to fan interviewer Janet Beaulieu in November 1988, and they were pestering him to write more. ‘That’s the best incentive I know. Tell somebody a story who really wants to hear it.’ Now that he had an idea of Roland’s world (‘I see the gunslinger’s world as sort of a post-radiation world where everybody’s history has gotten clobbered and about the only thing anybody remembers anymore is the chorus to “Hey, Jude,” ’ he told Beaulieu), he was ready to explain how it had got that way.

  The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands

  (Donald M. Grant, August 1991)

  Five weeks have passed since Roland and his two friends left the Western Sea and started heading east. Roland begins training Eddie and Susannah (who has taken Eddie’s surname) as gunslingers, and after an encounter with a seventy-foot-tall cyborg bear named Shardik, who Roland realizes is a Guardian, they find one of the six mystical Beams which hold the world together. They follow the Path of the Beam towards the Tower.

  Both Roland and Eddie are having mental problems: the gunslinger recalls two separate realities, one with Jake alive, one with him dead; Eddie is having weird dreams and starting to connect with a boy in New York. The boy is Jake, who is also in difficulties and believes he should have died on 9 May 1977 but hasn’t. He writes an essay that contains various clues about Roland’s quest but doesn’t remember writing it. Running away from school, he buys a children’s book called Charlie the Choo-Choo, and believes he’ll find a route to Mid-World, Roland’s domain, on the corner of Second Avenue and 46th Street. However, all that’s there is a construction site, a key, and a rose.

  As Jake searches for a place to cross over, the others travel along the Beam and find a ‘thin’ place. Susannah distracts the demon guarding it by having sex with it, while Roland pulls Jake through from the haunted house in our world. The ka-tet is now complete, and they adopt a billy-bumbler, a smart animal they name Oy.

  Following the Path of the Beam leads them towards the city of Lud, and they stop briefly in the town of River Crossing, where Roland is given a silver cross to lay at the Tower. To get to Lud they must cross the Send Bridge, and Jake is kidnapped by one of the Lud-ites, Gasher. While Eddie and Susannah look for Blaine the Mono, a sentient train that will speed their journey, Roland and Oy rescue Jake from the hands of the Tick-Tock Man. After they have left, the wizard Richard Fannin deals with the Tick-Tock Man’s failure, determined to ensure that the ka-tet get no nearer to the Tower.

  Blaine the Mono agrees to take them to Topeka, the boundary of Mid-World and End-World but the ka-tet quickly realize that Blaine is insane. He intends to commit suicide with them aboard unl
ess they can stump him with a riddle . . .

  The third ‘Dark Tower’ novel is named after T.S. Eliot’s poem ‘The Waste Land’, first published in 1922. Both sections of the book derive their titles from lines in the poem: ‘I will show you fear in a handful of dust’ and ‘What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow/Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,/You cannot say, or guess, for you know only/A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,/And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,/And the dry stone no sound of water.’ The latter is an apt description of the blasted lands through which Blaine travels with the ka-tet on board after they leave Lud. The book was given the subtitle ‘Redemption’ in its twenty-first-century reprints.

  A short portion of The Waste Lands appeared in F&SF in December 1990, under the title ‘The Bear’, relating the ka-tet’s meeting with Shardik, but King reworked the section quite considerably between the short-story publication and the final manuscript of the third volume. In his afterword, King noted that each volume of the series was taking longer and longer to write, but promised that if there was a demand for it, he would continue the series. He apologized for the abrupt cliffhanger ending to the story, claiming that he was as surprised as the reader that the tale ended where it did.

  The links with The Stand become more explicit in The Waste Lands, with the connection drawn between Randall Flagg and Richard Fannin. The latter notes that one of his previous followers had used the phrase ‘My life for you’ – that being one of Randall Flagg’s less successful acolytes, Trashcan Man, whose actions in The Stand don’t eventually help Flagg’s cause. There’s also a crossover to the later Rose Madder, in which the city of Lud is talked about briefly.

  Talking about the book shortly after publication, King noted that the connections between his twenty-two-year-old self who wrote the first story and the twenty-year-older King who completed The Waste Lands were ‘still there, they happen effortlessly’. To him, ‘the story exists. Only sometimes you get a little pot out of the ground, and that’s like a short story. Sometimes you get a bigger pot, which is like a novella. Sometimes you get a building, which is like a novel. In the case of “The Dark Tower”, it’s like excavating this huge f***ing buried city that’s down there.’ At that point, he wasn’t at all certain that he would ever complete the excavation: ‘I’ll never live to do it all,’ he commented wryly.

  The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass

  (Donald M. Grant, November 1997)

  The ka-tet try to riddle Blaine the Mono without success, but when Eddie starts telling childish jokes from Jake’s copy of Charlie the Choo-Choo, Blaine can’t cope with the illogicality so short-circuits. They reach Topeka, in the 1986 of a world where the majority of the population has been wiped out by a superflu. Various clues make it clear that it’s not the world that Roland brought the others from, and they are no longer on the Path of the Beam. Following Interstate 70 they find a thinny – as the Dark Tower declines, these dimensional holes have been increasing. In the distance is a shimmering green palace.

  As they rest, Roland tells the others the story of how he began his quest. After becoming aware of his mother’s adultery with the sorcerer Marten Broadcloak, Roland was spurred to win his guns aged just fourteen and earn the title of gunslinger. His father Steven, one of the leaders of the Affiliation, sent him and his ka-tet, his friends Cuth-bert and Alain, from Gilead to the town of Mejis, believing this would keep them out of danger. Steven was aware of his wife’s infidelity with his trusted counsellor but had more pressing matters to deal with.

  However, Roland and his ka-tet discovered a plot by ‘The Good Man’ John Farson to use Mejis’s oil to fuel his planned rebellion against the Affiliation. Roland fell in love with Susan Delgado, who helped him and his ka-tet to escape from jail. Farson’s plan was foiled, and during the battle Roland got hold of the Wizard’s Glass, part of Maerlyn’s Rainbow: a pink, glass ball that can be used as a spyglass. Local witch Rhea Dubativo had been keeping it safe and used it to spy on her neighbours, and was furious when it was removed to be returned to John Farson. She took her anger out on Susan and arranged for her to be sacrificed at the Reaping Night festivities. Roland learned of Susan’s death and the danger faced by the Dark Tower from the Glass before the boys returned to Gilead.

  Eddie, Susannah and Jake tell Roland the story of The Wizard of Oz as they approach the green palace and find red shoes. Inside they find both the Tick-Tock Man and a real wizard – Marten Broadcloak, now calling himself Randall Flagg, who currently has the Wizard’s Glass. After Flagg flees, he leaves the Glass, and Roland shows the others how he dealt with a threat the Glass showed him. It came from his mother, whom he shot with his father’s guns after the Glass showed him a false vision of witch Rhea approaching him. He offers his new ka-tet a chance to step away from the quest, but it’s now their quest too.

  Constant Readers had to wait six years for the conclusion to the cliffhanger at the end of The Waste Lands, and King received many letters on the subject encouraging him to finish. These were handled by his staff, Julie Eugley and Marsha DeFilippo, who ‘nagged me back to the word processor’, according to King’s dedication in the volume. In an interview with Joseph Mauceri after he’d delivered the 1,500-page long manuscript, King mentioned a seventy-three-year-old woman with Parkinson’s Disease who ‘had this fear that she was going to die before I finished the story. She was hoping I’d write one more before she got too feeble to read them’.

  A portion of the book was released as an extra in the double-pack of The Regulators and Desperation, although King was criticized for this; a note from him in response, addressed to ‘Gentle Readers’, was posted to the alt.books. stephen-king online group by his publishers on 21 November 1996 which concluded: ‘Those of you who are yelling and stamping your feet, please stop. If you’re old enough to read, you’re old enough to behave.’ Penguin reprinted the text on their website a couple of months later.

  King wrote some portions of Roland’s childhood when he was first working on the original ‘Dark Tower’ stories, and comments in his afterword on how the series has slowly become more central to his writing. In the gap between volumes three and four, his other work had included Insomnia, which has many links to the Dark Tower, as did, to a lesser extent, Rose Madder; however, he was more concerned about being able to write the love affair between Roland and Susan – the relationships he was creating in his contemporary books were very different (this is the period of Dolores Claiborne and Gerald’s Game). Wizard and Glass links most strongly to The Stand, with the connections to Randall Flagg – and his various disguises through the ‘Dark Tower’ series – starting to become clearer. The twenty-first-century subtitle was ‘Regard’.

  The rest of the story was started as he returned from Colorado to Maine after overseeing work on the miniseries of The Shining – which was clearly a productive time for him, since he also began to think about Kingdom Hospital (see page 247) around the same period. Many years later, he admitted that he knew how things were going to end for Roland by the time he finished Wizard and Glass – although his next story for the Gunslinger stepped back into Roland’s past once more as he met ‘The Little Sisters of Eluria’ (see page 178). His plans for the rest of the ‘Dark Tower’ however were put on hold as a result of his accident on 19 June 1999 – and the figure 19 started to become increasingly more important within the saga’s mythology.

  NB: Readers coming to the Dark Tower’ fresh are recommended to read The Wind Through the Keyhole between Wizard and Glass and Wolves of the Calla. However, since King retroactively inserted this story into the saga, it is covered in chronological order of publication on page 175.

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  THE WHEEL COMES FULL CIRCLE: WOLVES OF THE CALLA TO THE WIND THROUGH THE KEYHOLE

  The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla

  (Donald M. Grant, November 2003)

  The ka-tet are continuing along the Path of the Beam and arrive in the farming village of Calla B
ryn Sturgis. The inhabitants there need their help, and the code of the Gunslingers will not allow Roland to refuse. Every generation, the Wolves descend on the village and take a child from each of the town’s twins; they are returned a little later, ‘roont’ – mentally handicapped and fated to grow to a large size then die young. Andy, a positronic robot, has warned the villagers they have a month before the next arrival. The villagers’ plea is echoed by Pere Callahan, a priest who has come through to Mid-World bearing Black Thirteen, another piece of Maerlyn’s Rainbow.

  The ka-tet are distracted by constant references to the number nineteen, and by dreams which see them go ‘todash’ and visit New York in 1977, where they realize they have to protect the rose Jake saw on Second and 46th. Callahan tells them that Black Thirteen can help them go todash, which means they have a way to get to New York – a city which Eddie and Jake notice is in a different reality from theirs. They also have another problem: Susannah is pregnant, and has developed a fresh personality, Mia, who isn’t keen on visiting the rose.

  As the ka-tet prepare to help the villagers, and train some of them to use their sharpened dishes, Orizas, Eddie travels through another doorway (the means by which Callahan appeared in Mid-World) back to New York, so he can buy the lot containing the rose. He wants it to be sold to an ad hoc company, the Tet Corporation, for a dollar. On his way back, he brings a number of valuable books through from the old bookseller, Calvin Tower, who owns the lot, and has gone into hiding to avoid those who are trying to buy it in order to destroy the rose. The books include a copy of Stephen King’s ’Salem’s Lot.

  The gunslingers protect the village from the Wolves – who use lightsabers and ‘Harry Potter Edition’ ‘sneetches’ – after Roland has caught a traitor, who explains that a chemical is taken from the children’s brains which helps the powers of the Breakers who are trying to destroy the Tower. Even as Susannah’s waters break, the Wolves are destroyed, although a young boy Jake befriended and one of the village women are killed.