by Bev Vincent
PRAISE FOR
The Road to the Dark Tower
“Vincent proves himself a master of the Dark Tower world.”
—Publishers Weekly
“There’s much…literature on Stephen King’s work, but most of it can be skipped. Not so with Vincent’s The Road to the Dark Tower, the first full-length study of King’s thirty-year opus, a book-by-book summary with explanations and commentary.”
—Charles N. Brown, Locus
“Vincent has done yeoman’s work here. While The Road to the Dark Tower will not be the last word on Roland’s quest and the Stephen King Universe, it will undoubtedly be the standard by which all future works on the subject will be judged.”
—Joe Hartlaub, Bookreporter.com
“An excellent and maybe even vital guide to King’s grand opus.”
—Faren C. Miller, Locus
The
DARK TOWER
COMPANION
A Guide to Stephen King’s Epic Fantasy
BEV VINCENT
NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,
New York, New York 10014, USA
USA Canada UK Ireland Australia New Zealand India South Africa China
Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
For more information about the Penguin Group visit penguin.com.
First published by New American Library,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Copyright © Bev Vincent, 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:
Vincent, Bev.
The Dark Tower companion: a guide to Stephen King’s epic fantasy/Bev Vincent.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-1-101-61510-2
1. King, Stephen, 1947– Dark tower. 2. Fantasy fiction, American—History and criticism. 3. Roland (Fictitious character: King) I. Title.
PS3561.I483D3757 2013
813’.54—dc23 2012036847
Designed by Spring Hoteling
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.
For Virginia
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
WHAT’S IT ALL ABOUT?
INSPIRATION AND INFLUENCES
“THE LITTLE SISTERS OF ELURIA”
THE GUNSLINGER: RESUMPTION
THE DRAWING OF THE THREE: RENEWAL
THE WASTE LANDS: REDEMPTION
WIZARD AND GLASS: REGARD
THE WIND THROUGH THE KEYHOLE
WOLVES OF THE CALLA: RESISTANCE
SONG OF SUSANNAH: REPRODUCTION
THE DARK TOWER: RESUMPTION
BOOKS AND STORIES RELATED TO THE DARK TOWER
’Salem’s Lot
The Stand
The Talisman
Skeleton Crew
It
The Eyes of the Dragon
Insomnia
Rose Madder
Desperation
The Regulators
Bag of Bones
Hearts in Atlantis
The Plant
Black House
From a Buick 8
Everything’s Eventual
The Colorado Kid
Ur
Mile 81
11/22/63
AN INTERVIEW WITH STEPHEN KING
DISCORDIA
An Interview with Brian Stark
A Few Words with Robin Furth
THE DARK TOWER: THE MOVIE
An Interview with Ron Howard
An Interview with Akiva Goldsman
THE ARTWORK OF THE DARK TOWER
The Gunslinger
“The Little Sisters of Eluria”
The Drawing of the Three
The Waste Lands
Wizard and Glass
The Wind Through the Keyhole
Wolves of the Calla
Song of Susannah
The Dark Tower
Other Artists
MARVEL GRAPHIC NOVELS: THE GUNSLINGER BORN
Introduction
The Gunslinger Born
The Long Road Home
Treachery
The Sorcerer
Fall of Gilead
Battle of Jericho Hill
MARVEL GRAPHIC NOVELS: THE GUNSLINGER
Introduction
The Journey Begins
The Little Sisters of Eluria
The Battle of Tull
The Way Station
The Man in Black
Sheemie’s Tale
MARVEL GRAPHIC NOVELS: GUIDES AND ALMANACS
The Dark Tower Sketchbook
Gunslinger’s Guidebook
End-World Almanac
Guide to Gilead
MARVEL GRAPHIC NOVELS: THE CONTRIBUTORS
Introduction
Robin Furth
Peter David
Jae Lee
Richard Isanove
Michael Lark
Stefano Gaudiano
Laurence Campbell
DARK TOWER GUIDE TO MANHATTAN
OUR WORLD PEOPLE, PLACES AND THINGS
People
Places
Things
THE HISTORY OF MID-WORLD
TIME LINES
THE GEOGRAPHY OF MID-WORLD
MID-WORLD PEOPLE, PLACES AND THINGS
People
Places
Things
Mid-World/Manni/Calla Words and Expressions
SOME STORIES LAST FOREVER
ROLAND DESCHAIN’S ENEMIES
THE END AND WHAT IT MIGHT MEAN
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INTRODUCTION
In my first book, The Road to the Dark Tower, published a month after the final installment in Stephen King’s Dark Tower series in 2004, I wrote for an audience who had already read to the end of book seven. The only way to discuss the significance of certain events in the first book as they related to the way the series ended was to talk about how the series ended. For that reason, the introduction to that book warned readers to set it aside until they reached the final page of The Dark Tower.
This book is aimed at a different audience. My assumption is that you haven’t necessarily read the entire series, or that you are currently reading it. Perhaps you became interested because of the Marvel graphic novel adaptations and want to learn more about certain characters, events or locations. Maybe the concept of ka has you a little mystified and you’d like to find out what it really means. Perhaps you took a break between reading The Waste Lands and Wizard and Glass and you’d like to refresh your memory of the earlier books. Maybe you’re planning a trip to Manhattan and would like to visit some of the real or imaginary locations mentioned in the series. The Dark Tower really does stand at the corner of Second Avenue and 46th Street in Turtle Bay—and Maturin dwells nearby, too. Or maybe you’ve read the entire series but you can’t remember who Theresa Maria Dolores O’Shyven is. If any of these apply, this book is for you.
The spoilers come sequen
tially. At the end of each chapter about one of the individual books, you’ll find a labeled, easily avoided section where I mention a few things that the book foreshadows about the rest of the series. The glossary is a different matter—each entry there contains a summary of everything known about the person, place or thing, so if you read the entry about the Dark Tower itself, you will see things you might not want to know until you’re done with the series.
A few things have changed in the Dark Tower universe since 2004. First, there is the Marvel graphic novel series that tells Roland Deschain’s story between his coming of age and the end of The Gunslinger. Though these comics adapt existing material from the Dark Tower novels, they also expand upon it. Some incidents that are mentioned in passing in King’s books are developed into full scenes. For example, The Long Road Home turns a few pages from Wizard and Glass detailing Roland, Cuthbert and Alain’s journey back to Gilead after their adventures in Mejis into a five-issue adventure. The story of the fall of Gilead has never been told before, so the Marvel graphic novels venture into uncharted territory there. At the helm is Robin Furth, King’s research assistant when he was working on the latter volumes in the original series, so the graphic novel series is in hands that respect the Dark Tower mythos; however, these stories diverge from King’s at times because of the nature of the graphic format. You’ll hear from many of the writers and artists involved about their contributions to the series.
There have been developments at King’s Web site, too. The Dark Tower section has undergone a couple of redesigns since the series ended, the most recent in 2012. In 2009, the site debuted an interactive game called Discordia, in which players play the part of Tet Corporation’s Op19, who explores the Dixie Pig, the “mind-trap” tunnel leading to Fedic and, ultimately, Mid-World and the rotunda at the Fedic Dogan. Discordia represents another component of the expanded universe of the Dark Tower, one that is also directed by Robin Furth, who, together with a team of collaborators, developed an intricate mythos around the battle between Tet Corporation and Sombra/North Central Positronics and how this conflict opened the way for a mobster with a Dark Tower fascination to make her way to Mid-World. Phase II of this game—the Mid-World section—launched in early 2013, and Phase III is in development.
Attempts to adapt the series for film have come and gone. Ron Howard currently owns the rights and seems eager to adapt the series in his unique hybrid vision of film and TV miniseries. Hear what he and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman have to say about their plans.
And, finally, we have an eighth novel in the Dark Tower series: The Wind Through the Keyhole, which King has dubbed “The Dark Tower 4.5.” The Voice of the Turtle spoke once again and King found himself revisiting Roland, Eddie, Jake, Susannah and Oy, filling in a gap in the “contemporary” story of the ka-tet’s quest, adding another incident from the young gunslinger’s adventures and introducing readers to a “fairy tale” from the olden days of Mid-World.
This companion contains a list of all the characters, places and things from the eight Dark Tower novels and the Marvel graphic novel series. You’d be ka-mai not to check it out.
Finally, King talks about the series and reveals a few secrets. For the first time ever, he reveals the name of Roland’s sister. Did you even know Roland had a sister? You do now!
WHAT’S IT ALL ABOUT?
The Dark Tower is a series of eight novels written by Stephen King between 1970 and 2011, set (mostly) in an alternate reality called Mid-World. The books detail a gunslinger’s quest to save the Dark Tower, which is the linchpin of reality. The series combines the feel of a Clint Eastwood Western with the epic scope of The Lord of the Rings and the horrors of, well, a Stephen King novel.
The gunslinger’s name is Roland Deschain. He was born into one of the noble families of Gilead in the Barony of New Canaan, the hub of “In-World.” He is the equivalent of one of King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table, except he carries revolvers instead of a sword. The other big difference is that, in his universe, Arthur Eld died many generations before. The other gunslingers of Roland’s time were mostly descendants of Arthur Eld, but they too are dead, and Gilead was destroyed in a civil war. Roland is the last of his kind, and he has been wandering Mid-World for hundreds of years in search of his destination.
Technically, Mid-World is just one region of Roland’s universe, which consists of In-World, Mid-World and End-World, territories that become decreasingly civilized the farther one gets from Gilead, the home base of Arthur Eld’s gunslingers. However, Mid-World has become synonymous with Roland’s world.
The name calls to mind Middle Earth from J. R. R. Tolkien’s saga. There are similarities and differences. For the most part, Mid-World is populated by humans. There are nonhuman creatures, and even monsters, but except for one or two groups, they don’t have cultures like the elves, dwarves, orcs and hobbits of Tolkien.
Mid-World exists in a universe parallel to our own. Some geographic locations can be seen as analogs of ones from Earth. The River Whye is like the Mississippi and the Clean Sea is akin to the Gulf of Mexico, for example. Lud is located geographically near St. Louis but is physically similar to Manhattan. Discordia is apparently west of the White Mountains in New Hampshire.
In most ways, Mid-World is medieval. However, traces of technology date back to a once-thriving ultramodern civilization known as the Old People or the Great Old Ones. Most of this technology is broken. Other modern contraptions may appear in Mid-World because they were brought from another world—including our own—because some people still know the secret of how to travel between universes. It is conceivable that the Great Old Ones were people from our modern Earth who traveled to Mid-World in its distant past.
Mid-World is falling apart. People call this process “moving on.” Civilization has, for the most part, collapsed. Gilead, once the center of a feudal realm akin to King Arthur’s—or to the Roman Empire—has been gone for centuries, defeated by insurrection and hubris. The great cities have fallen, technology has failed, and mutations run rampant among animals and even some humans.
Worse still, the once reliable physical constants of time, distance and direction are adrift. What was southeast one day may be south-southeast the next. The distance from Gilead to the Western (Pacific) Sea was once only a thousand miles, but it took Roland hundreds of years to cross it. And during those hundreds of years, Roland glanced off the surface of time the way a flat rock skips off the surface of water. He appears to be middle-aged, but he’s far, far older.
The reason everything is falling apart can be traced to the Dark Tower. In one respect, the Tower is simply a building located in End-World. Imagine a black lighthouse that has a varicolored oriel window at the top and a series of balconies that follow a helical pattern around its exterior, corresponding to the windows found in rooms that extend off the spiral staircase inside. There are spires at the top, and it sits in the middle of a field of roses.
However, the Dark Tower is also the axis around which all of the (presumably) infinite versions of reality rotate. It is the sun in the solar system of reality. Each level (or floor) of the Tower corresponds to a different world. Many worlds are nearly identical, differing only in subtle details. The dollar bill has a different president on it in one parallel world. New York’s Co-Op City is in Brooklyn in one reality and in the Bronx in another. The town at the end of the George Washington Bridge is Fort Lee in one world and Leabrook in another. Other worlds, though, are vastly different from ours—Mid-World is one example. In each of these parallel universes, there is something that represents the Dark Tower. In the most important version of our world (known as Keystone Earth), it is represented by a pink rose that grows in a vacant lot in Manhattan.
The Dark Tower arose out of the magical primordial soup of creation in Mid-World. It is supported by six magical Beams that extend from one end of the known universe to the other, all intersecting above the Tower. Left alone, there was enough magic to hold the Tower up forever. H
owever, the Great Old Ones, slaves to technology, mistrusted magic and replaced the Beams with artificial, scientific equivalents. After they died off—or killed one another off in a great war—there was no one left to tend to them, so they have been failing ever since.
Even so, the Beams should have lasted for many centuries. Their decline is accelerated by the work of an evil being known as the Crimson King. He hates creation and wants to destroy it, returning the world to chaos, where he will be the king in more than just name. He has minions (one of them travels under various guises, including the man in black, Walter o’Dim, Marten Broadcloak and Randall Flagg) and kidnappers who round up psychics and force them to weaken the Beams, bringing about the premature collapse of the Tower. If the Tower falls in Mid-World, all of reality will collapse. Roland’s quest, then, is about more than saving one world. It is a mission to save all of creation.
Roland doesn’t know all of this when he sets out as a young man. He knows only that the Tower is in trouble and that he needs to reach it to save it. Part of him isn’t even sure the Tower exists, because a lot of what he thinks he knows about his world is myth and legend. However, during his quest he learns more and more details that tell him where he needs to go and what he needs to do when he gets there.
The term “ka-tet” describes a group of people united in a common mission. Roland sets out alone in search of the Dark Tower after his original ka-tet (a group that included Cuthbert Allgood, Alain Johns and Jamie DeCurry) is killed during the last great battle between the gunslingers of Gilead and their adversaries. He has no direction to guide him—directions aren’t reliable anymore, even if he did.
In the beginning, he’s not very likable. Solitude has turned him cold and ruthless. Saving the universe is a serious mission, and he takes it so seriously that he’s willing to sacrifice anything and anyone to accomplish it. This is one reason why some readers have found The Gunslinger a difficult book.
