by Rocky Wood
King is not just a successful writer but is also a truly global multi-media phenomenon, with massive exposure on television, film, the Internet, audio books, even the stage and computer games.
There appear to be a multitude of reasons for this but it appears the unique mix of our times and King’s style has resulted in the massive popularity of all things King. The horror, science fiction and fantasy genres have existed in modern form for two centuries, at varying levels of popular acceptance and success. There is no doubt however, that the surge in popularity for horror (and King appeared on the scene just as horror was returning to the fore in the early 1970s), science fiction (again, a comeback of SF can be traced solidly to the mid-1970s) and even fantasy (more recently moving out of obscurity and again confirmed as part of mainstream culture by Jackson’s brilliant interpretations of The Lord of the Rings saga) has never reached a higher level than the last quarter of the 20th century and the early 21st.
This allowed King’s works to move easily from “genre” into the mainstream. A few continued to try to peg him as a horror writer, as some badge of disgrace, but as King proved he was capable of more than one genre, so did the common opinion move quickly to a higher level of respect for that very style of fiction.
In the same 35-year period there has been an explosion in the need for entertainment software. Technology advanced rapidly, allowing more channels on cable and satellite television, the video rental industry appeared and boomed, the Internet exploded from literally nowhere in the early 1990s, and DVDs as a method of delivery came to the fore in the very late 1990s.
Ironically, as every year doomsayers predicted the death of the book, that form, magazines and reading each proved resilient. Governments everywhere were in deregulation mode, selling their telecommunication companies, allowing more television and radio stations and introducing Pay-TV into Europe, Asia and specific countries, such as the UK (late 1980s) and Australia (mid 1990s). Major producers of entertainment software such as Disney and News Corporation (owners of FOX) suddenly realized there was more money to be made by selling a video (and later, DVD) than there was in a movie ticket, or television advertising revenues. “Blockbusters” began to run only a few weeks in movie theaters before moving to multiple lucrative avenues of distribution – video and DVD rental, Pay-TV, video and DVD sales, and Free-To-Air television. All this was both the cause and a symptom of the splintering of the media. By 2000 “mass media” was already a contradiction in terms, as the consumer had a choice of dozens, if not hundreds of TV channels, thousands of magazines, multiple local movie screens, tens of thousands of videos and DVDs and literally hundreds of thousands of book titles, along with millions of web sites, all at the click of a mouse or remote control.
This combination of surging technology, deregulation, the change in marketing tactics by entertainment software “manufacturers” and the splintering of the media has had two major results – freedom of choice for the consumer, and an unprecedented demand for new product.
King sat at the epicentre of this change. Here was a man who was capable of, and interested in, creating large volumes of entertainment product. Here was a man in touch with cultural trends (brand names, popular and sub-culture music themes and other cultural iconography abound in King’s works). And here was a need. The perfect marriage was consummated, with King creating the raw material in droves and the publishing and filmed entertainment worlds providing it to the consumer in unprecedented quantities.
Today, anyone can easily find a King movie or mini-series on a television channel near him. Anyone can find a King movie on the big screen or dozens of them at ther local video store. We can all find all his mainstream books still in print at the local bookstore or on-line seller, at the library or second hand bookshop. Those who prefer the audiobook will find the majority of his works available in that form. The user of the Internet will find hundreds of websites and chatrooms dedicated to the world of King. Bands perform songs based on King material. With the general exception of the live stage and the musical it is hard to think of an entertainment mode that has evaded King’s successful reach.
It is the combination of King’s brilliance as a storyteller with his strong willingness to experiment with new modes of delivery and the fundamental change in the entertainment market that has resulted in the sheer size and impact of the phenomenon that is King.
The Proof
As any hard core King fan knows there are those who “refuse” to read King (one often wonders if some of these people are actually readers at all), writing him off as “that horror writer” or similar put-downs. Try surprising these doubters with the simple riposte; Did you enjoy The Shawshank Redemption? For the vast majority of moviegoers the answer is Yes. How about The Green Mile and Stand by Me? Almost always yes again. Try informing the doubter that these are King stories, and highly accurate to the book versions. Jam in a bit of The Shining for the serious movie snob (the ones for whom Kubrick could do no wrong) and the doubter will be on the way to conversion, or at least may be left muttering, inanely.
In Conclusion
This book’s value lies firmly in providing King’s “Constant Readers”7 with the latest information about 99 King works of fiction that they may not know of and, in the case of most pieces, have not read. These works of prose, poems and screenplays represent a significant portion of King’s output and a study of them contributes immensely to understanding how an obscure, hardscrabble Maine schoolteacher, with no more than talent, craftsmanship, dreams and determination, became the most popular storyteller of his time.
What is the Joy of Stephen King? Should the man answer the question himself but two words should suffice – “The Story”.
Let the telling begin…
Recommended Resources and Further Reading
On Writing, Stephen King, Scribner, 2000
Danse Macabre, Stephen King, Everest House, 1981
Light Behind the Shadow Trapped Within the Words in Horror Plum’d, Michael Collings, Overlook Connection Press, 2002
I Am a Hick, and This Is Where I Feel at Home by Elaine Landa, in Feast of Fear, Ed: Tim Underwood and Chuck Miller, Carroll & Graf, 1989
Prelude: An Anecdote to Illustrate How Stephen King’s Fans Feel About His Work, in The Essential Stephen King, Stephen J. Spignesi, GB Books, 2001
In the Matter of Stephen King by Tyson Blue in The Essential Stephen King, Stephen J. Spignesi, GB Books, 2001
The Complete Guide to the Works of Stephen King, Rocky Wood, David Rawsthorne and Norma Blackburn, Kanrock Partners, 2004
The Lost Works of Stephen King, Stephen J. Spignesi, Birch Lane Press, 1998
The Unseen King, Tyson Blue, Starmont House, 1989
The Stephen King Illustrated Companion, Bev Vincent, Fall River Press, 2009
Stephen King: A Primary Bibliography of the World’s Most Popular Author, Justin Brooks, Cemetery Dance Publications, 2008
Stephen King: The Non-Fiction, Rocky Wood and Justin Brooks, Cemetery Dance Publications, 2009
1 In making these calculations the seven stories from People, Places and Things are classified as “unpublished” as they were produced in a self-published chapbook by King and Chris Chesley
2 Inclusive of Under the Dome
3 Inclusive of Full Dark, No Stars
4 See the Appendix
5 In an Q&A session for young readers at www.weeklyreader.com
6 In Secret Windows: Essays and Fiction of the Craft of Writing, New York, NY: Book-of-the-Month Club, 2000, page 400
7 King has used this term for many years to describe his loyal reader base. In The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah he went so far as to describe them in his imaginary Journal as ‘CRs’!
Linking Stephen King’s Realities
From his earliest writings, Stephen King has been engaged in the process of establishing various groupings, or “Realities,” in which his work can be placed; and in developing stories and story-lines within them.
It
is now clear that King planned one of these Realities (that relating to the mythology of Roland Deschain’s travels toward the Dark Tower) from a time even before the day he typed the first words of The Gunslinger. He then “simply” continued to develop that Reality in the following decades! Another Reality, which is based in Maine, seems to have appeared naturally, as a series of King’s stories began congregating in the remote, beautiful part of America that happened to be King’s home state.
In fact, to any but the casual reader, it quickly becomes clear that all King’s works of fiction can be grouped into particular Realities. Arbitrary though any classification system may be, the authors of The Complete Guide to the Works of Stephen King8 have developed their own using five great, sweeping Realities and placing each of King’s Works of Fiction in one or more of them. The author of this book was one of those who developed those Realities, which we will now review.
For the purposes of this review we include all King fiction, published or unpublished, and poetry.
The five Realities are:
The Dark Tower
Maine Street Horror
The Stand
America Under Siege
New Worlds
The Dark Tower
This Reality is officially recognized by King. A list of all King’s novels and collections included in The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla first featured the highlighting of tales that, in King’s opinion, are connected to the Dark Tower mythology.
The author relates something of the origins of The Dark Tower cycle in his introduction to the Revised Edition of The Gunslinger – On Being Nineteen (and a Few Other Things). From as early as his reading of J.R.R. Tolkien’s classic, The Lord of the Rings in 1966 and 1967 King had determined to write something as sweeping:
...but I wanted to write my own kind of story.
Then (in 1970), in an almost completely empty movie theater … I saw a film directed by Sergio Leone. It was called The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, and before the film was half over, I realized what I wanted to write was a novel that contained Tolkien’s sense of quest and magic but set against Leone’s almost absurdly majestic Western backdrop … And, in my enthusiasm … I wanted to write not just a long book, but the longest popular novel in history. I did not succeed in doing that, but I feel I had a decent rip; The Dark Tower, volumes one through seven, really comprise a single tale…
The first appearance of a Dark Tower story was of The Gunslinger in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction for October 1978. However, King had been working on his magnum opus since 1970, taking Robert Browning’s 1855 epic poem Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came as his inspiration. The various parts9 that would become the first novel set in this Reality, The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger, each initially appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, before being combined into the novel, first published in 1982. A mass-market edition of The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger was not published until 1988 and it was only from that point that King’s wider fan base may have begun to appreciate the importance of this Reality to his overall fictional output.
King slowly added to The Dark Tower cycle with these novels: The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three (1987); The Dark Tower III: The Wastelands (1991); The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass (1996); The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla (2003); The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah (2004); and The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower (2004).
As time passed, King also published The Bear10 (1990), an “excerpt” from The Dark Tower III: The Wastelands, although it was heavily revised before being included in the novel. He also released a Dark Tower novelette, The Little Sisters of Eluria (1998); and began to refer explicitly to Dark Tower mythology in his mainstream stories. The major references were in Insomnia (1994), Low Men in Yellow Coats (1999), Heavenly Shades of Night are Falling (1999) and Black House (2001). He also provided a lifeline for Dark Tower junkies by giving them a free, on-line taste of Wolves of the Calla in an excerpt, Calla Bryn Sturgis, published on his web-site in August 2001 and later revised for inclusion in the novel; and allowed the publication of the short story, The Tale of Gray Dick (February 2003), excerpted from the same novel, although that too was revised for the novel’s appearance.
Then, in June 2003, King published a Revised and Expanded edition of the Cycle’s first novel, The Gunslinger. He explains the reasoning for the rewrite in his Foreword to the Revised Edition:
…although each book of the Tower series was revised as a separate entity, I never really looked at the work as a whole until I’d finished Volume Seven, The Dark Tower. When I looked at the first volume … three obvious truths presented themselves. The first was that The Gunslinger was written by a very young man, and had all the problems of a very young man’s book. The second was that it contained a great many errors and false starts, particularly in the light of the volumes that followed. The third was that The Gunslinger did not even sound like the later books – it was, frankly, rather difficult to read. All too often I heard myself apologizing for it, and telling people that if they persevered, they would find the story really found its voice in The Drawing of the Three.
In October 2005 King and Marvel Comics announced The Dark Tower mythos would be extended with the publication of an initial six comic arc (to be collected in a hardcover edition). A series of arcs were published from 2007 and can be also purchased in collected hardback editions. Readers should note the original comic “arcs,” while collected in the hardcover graphic novels, contain a lot of background material about the Dark Tower Universe that are not included in those collections. This background is described by King’s former research assistant and writer of the comic series, Robin Furth. The comics and graphic novels may be purchased from specialist stores or on the Internet without difficulty.
The series released or announced to date (in reading order) are:
The Dark Tower: Gunslinger Born; The Dark Tower: The Long Road Home; The Dark Tower: Treachery; The Dark Tower: The Sorcerer (one-shot comic, not collected); The Dark Tower: Fall of Gilead; The Dark Tower: The Battle of Jericho Hill and The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger – The Journey Begins.
King’s first story with strong Dark Tower connections in five years appeared in 2009, when Ur was first published, as a download for Amazon’s Kindle 2 e-reader. While it has yet to see a print publication the audio book was released on 16 February 2010 (King hand-picked the narrator, Holter Graham). This uncollected story is the subject of a chapter later in this volume.
Most Dark Tower experts also link Eyes of the Dragon (first published as a Limited Edition in 1984 and heavily revised for mass-market release in 1987) to The Dark Tower cycle. The following then, is a full list of Dark Tower stories.
Primary Setting:
The Bear
Calla Bryn Sturgis
The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger
The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three
The Dark Tower III: The Wastelands
The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass
The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla
The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah
The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower
The Little Sisters of Eluria
The Tale of Gray Dick
Other Stories of Dark Tower Importance:
Bag of Bones
Black House
Desperation
Everything’s Eventual
Eyes of the Dragon
From a Buick 8
Heavenly Shades of Night are Falling
Insomnia
It
Low Men in Yellow Coats
The Mist
The Regulators
The Reploids
Rose Madder
‘Salem’s Lot
The Stand
The Talisman
Ur
As indicated, The Bear, Calla Bryn Sturgis and The Tale of Gray Dick all initially appeared in significantly different form from that in the novel from which they were excerpted. For more det
ail see the Stories Swallowed by Monsters chapter.
Dark Tower tales are primarily set in that Reality but there is also a deep and abiding linkage with our world (and, due to the nature of the Tower itself, all other Universes and Realities). There is a very important location off-World to Roland’s – a sometime vacant lot at the corner of 2nd Avenue and 46th Street in New York City (in this Reality, each New York City can seem slightly different from the one we know). And, significant events occur in the state of … Maine!
The Dark Tower cycle is set in an alternate reality, Roland Deschain’s world. Roland is the last of the Gunslingers, a knight/warrior of sorts. Many years ago he embarked on a quest to find the Dark Tower and save it from destruction.
The geography of Roland’s world is somewhat obscure but some towns have featured strongly in his life, including the now lifeless Eluria (in Mid-World) and Tull; the urban jungle of Lud; Hambry in the Barony of Mejis (where he found and lost the love of his life); and Calla Bryn Sturgis (in End-World). Roland hails from Gilead, in New Canaan, a city-state that had gone out of existence 1000 years before he arrived in Calla Bryn Sturgis. In the Calla, Roland and his small band of followers met Pere Callahan, who had once lived in the town of Jerusalem’s Lot, in a wholly different world.
