Stephen King's the Dark Tower: The Complete Concordance Revised and Updated

by Robin Furth

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  CONTENTS

  Tarot Reading

  Foreword by Stephen King

  About This Book

  The Wind Through the Keyhole and the Winds of Mid-World

  Abbreviations and Text Guide

  Key

  Door

  Gilead Fair-Days

  Mid-World Moons

  Introductions: Parts One and Two

  Characters, Magical Objects, Magical Forces

  Mid-World Places and Borderland Places

  Our World Places and the Multiple Americas

  Portals, Magical Places, and End-World Places

  Appendix I: Mid-World Dialects

  Appendix II: A Brief History of Mid-World (All-World-That-Was) and of Roland Deschain, Warrior of the White

  Appendix III: Mid-World Rhymes, Songs, Prayers, and Prophecies

  Appendix IV: Mid-World Miscellany (Dances, Diseases, Drugs, Games, Holidays, etc.)

  Appendix V: The Tower, the Quest, and The Eyes of the Dragon

  Appendix VI: Political and Cultural Figures of Our World Mentioned in the Dark Tower Series

  Appendix VII: Maps of Mid-World, End-World, and Our World

  Appendix VIII: Reading Group Guides

  Appendix IX: Versions of the Commala Song

  About Robin Furth

  Endnotes

  We live our short lives on one side of the door; on the other is all of eternity. Time is the wind that blows through the keyhole.

  —Stephen King, e-mail correspondence October 15, 2011

  FOR MARK

  FOR STEVE

  FOR ROLAND

  Commala-come-come,

  A new journey has just begun!

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  It takes many people to transform a manuscript into a book. I would like to thank the talented and hardworking people whose time, labor, and dedication helped to make this Concordance a reality. Here’s a salute to the memory of Ralph Vicinanza, my agent who passed away in 2010. Thanks also to Eben Weiss and the people at Ralph Vicinanza Ltd. A huge thank you to Chris Lotts, my present agent, and all the great folks at the Lotts Agency. My profound gratitude goes to Brant Rumble (my U.S. editor), John Glynn, and all the folks at Scribner; Philippa Pride (my U.K. editor) and all the folks at Hodder and Stoughton; Marsha DeFilippo and Julie Eugley, for years of help and support; my husband, Mark, for living with me through all of this; and Burt Hatlen, who believed in me enough to recommend me for my job as Stephen King’s research assistant. Finally, I’d like to give an extra-hearty thanks to Stephen King, who had faith in a struggling writer living in a secondhand trailer in the Maine woods.

  FOREWORD

  BY STEPHEN KING

  The tale of Roland of Gilead’s search for the Dark Tower is a single tale, picaresque in nature (think Huckleberry Finn with monsters, and characters who raft along the Path of the Beam instead of the Mississippi), spanning seven volumes, involving dozens of plot twists and hundreds of characters. It’s hard to tell how much time passes “inside the story,” because in Roland Deschain’s where and when, both time and direction have become plastic.1 Outside the story—in what we laughingly call “the real world”—thirty-two years passed between the first sentence and the last one.

  How long were the lapses between the individual books that make up the entire story? In truth, Constant Reader, I do not know. I think the longest lapse might have been six years (between The Waste Lands and Wizard and Glass). It is a miracle the story was ever finished at all, but perhaps an even greater one that a second volume ever followed the first, which was originally published in a tiny edition by Donald M. Grant, Publishers.2 The manuscript of that first volume, wet and barely readable, was rescued from a mildewy cellar. The first forty handwritten pages of a second volume (titled, as I remember, Roland Draws Three) were missing. God knows where they wound up.

  Will I tell you what happens to a story when it lies fallow over such long periods of time? Will you hear? Then close your eyes and imagine a vast department store, all on one level, lit by great racks of overhead fluorescent lights. You see every kind of item under those lights—underwear and automotive parts, TVs and DVDs, shoes and stationery and bikes for the kiddies, blue jeans and mattresses (Oh look, Herbie, they’re on sale, 40% off!), cosmetics and air rifles, party dresses and picnic gear.

  Now imagine the lights failing, one by one. The huge space grows darker; the goods so temptingly arrayed grow dimmer and harder to see. Finally you can hardly see your hand in front of your face.

  That was the kind of room I came to when it was finally time to write The Drawing of the Three, except then the store wasn’t so big—the first volume was less than three hundred pages long, so it was actually more of a mom n pop operation, do ya not see it. I was able to light it again simply by reading over the first volume and having a few ideas (I also resurrected a few old ones; I hadn’t entirely forgotten what was in those handwritten pages, or the purpose of the tale).

  Coming back to write the third volume (The Waste Lands) in the mid-eighties was harder, because the store was once again almost completely dark, and now it was much bigger. Once again I began by reading over what I’d written, taking copious notes, and filling paperback copies of the first two books with yellow highlighted passages and pink Post-it notes.

  Another four years passed . . . or perhaps this time it was six. The store had once again grown dark, and by the time I was ready to write Wizard and Glass, it was bigger than ever. This time I wanted to add a whole new annex (call it Roland’s Past instead of the Bridal Shoppe). Once again out came the books—three of them, this time—the yellow highlighter, and the packets of Post-it notes.

  When I sat down to complete Roland’s story in the year 2001, I knew that just rereading and writing myself Post-it notes wouldn’t be enough. By now the store that was my story seemed to cover whole acres; had become a Wal-Mart of the imagination. And, were I to write three more volumes, I’d be adding dozens of characters (I actually ended up adding more than fifty), a whole new dialect (based on the pidgin English used by the natives of West Africa and first encountered by me in Richard Dooling’s extraordinary White Man’s Grave), and a backstory that would—I hoped—finally make Roland’s wandering present clear to the patient reader.

  This time, instead of reading, I listened to Frank Muller’s extraordinary audio recordings of the first four Dark Tower stories. Unabridged audio forces the reader to slow down and listen to every word, whether he or she wants to or not. It also lends a new perspective, that of the reader and the audio director. But I knew even that would not be enough. I needed some sort of exhaustive written summary of everything that had gone before, a Dark Tower concordance that would be easy to search when I needed to find a reference in a hurry. In terms of the store metaphor, I needed someone to replace all the fluorescents, and inventory all the goods on offer, and then hand me a clipboard with everything noted down.

  Enter Robin Furth. She came to me courtesy of my old friend and teacher at the University of Maine, Burton Hatlen. Burt is a wonderful scholar of poetry and popular fiction. He has written about Roland for several scholarly journals, and was sympathetic to what I was up to with the books (indeed, he seemed to
understand what I was up to better than I did myself). So I gave him my list of requirements with some confidence (some hope, at least) that he would find the right person.

  Someone who was bright and imaginative.

  Someone who had read a good deal of fantasy (although not necessarily the Tower books themselves), and was therefore familiar with its rather unique language and thematic concerns.

  Someone who could write with clarity and verve.

  Someone who was willing to work hard and answer arcane and often bizarre questions (Who was the mayor of New York in 1967? Do worms have teeth?) on short notice.

  He found Robin Furth, and my wandering gunslinger had found his Boswell. The concordance you hold in your hands—and which will surely delight you as it has delighted me—was never written to be published. As a writer I like to fly by the seat of my pants, working without an outline and usually without notes. When I have to slow down to look for something—a name in Volume III, say, or a sequence of events way back in Volume I—I can almost feel the story growing cold, the edge of my enthusiasm growing blunt and flecking out with little blooms of rust. The idea of the concordance was to limit these aggravating pauses by putting Roland’s world at my fingertips—not just names and places, but slang terms, dialects, relationships, even whole chronologies.

  Robin provided exactly what I needed, and more. One day I walked into my office to discover her down on her knees, carefully sticking photographs to a huge piece of poster paper. It was, she explained, a “walking tour” of Second Avenue in New York, covering the avenue itself and all the cross streets from Fortieth to Sixty-sixth. There was the U.N. Plaza Hotel (which has changed its name twice since I started writing Roland’s story); there was Hammarskjöld Plaza (which did not even exist back in 1970); there was the spot where Tom and Jerry’s Artistic Deli (“Party Platters Our Specialty”) once stood. That poster eventually went up on the wall of my writing room in Florida, and was of invaluable help in writing Song of Susannah (The Dark Tower VI). In addition to the “walking tour” itself, Robin had patiently winkled out the history of the key two blocks, including the real shops and buildings I’d replaced with such fictional bits of real estate as Chew Chew Mama’s and The Manhattan Restaurant of the Mind. And it was Robin who discovered that, across the street from 2 Hammarskjöld Plaza, there really is a little pocket park (it’s called a “peace garden”) that does indeed contain a bronze turtle sculpture. Talk about life imitating art!

  As I say, her concordance was never meant to be published; it was created solely as a writer’s tool. But, even with most of my mind preoccupied by the writing of my tale, I was aware of how good it was, how interesting and readable it was. I also became aware, as time passed and the actual publication of the final three volumes grew closer, of how valuable it might be to the Constant Reader who’d read the first three or four volumes of the series, but some years ago.

  In any case, it was Robin Furth who inventoried the goods I had on sale, and replaced all the dim overhead lights so I could see everything clearly and find my way from Housewares to Appliances without getting lost . . . or from Gilead to Calla Bryn Sturgis, if you prefer. That in no way makes her responsible for my errors—of which I’m sure there are many—but it is important that she receive credit for all the good work she has done on my behalf. I found this overview of In-World, Mid-World, and End-World both entertaining and invaluable.

  So, I am convinced, will you.

  January 26, 2003

  ABOUT THIS BOOK

  This book had its first stirrings more than twenty years ago. I was fourteen, and I was spending the summer with my grandparents in Maine. I have always been obsessed by books, and so that July I arrived with a stack of them. Top of the pile wasn’t The Gunslinger. No. Not yet. But it was a novel called ’Salem’s Lot.

  I can still remember the feeling I had when I read that book. My body was on the tiny, weedy beach of Patten Pond, but the rest of me was in the Marsten House, or crouched by Mark Petrie’s side as he held up a glow-in-the-dark cross to ward off the vampire at his window. I climbed on the Greyhound Bus behind Father Callahan—my hand burned and my mouth still tasting Barlow’s blood—and the two of us set off for that unknown destination of Thunderclap, a haunted place on the lip of End-World.3

  I closed the novel and, still caught in that dream-web, I began to walk back toward home. And there, in the pine woods, with my feet deep in leaf mould and my skin still smelling of pond water, I saw myself as an adult. I was grown-up, and I was working for Stephen King. I didn’t know exactly what I was doing, but I knew it had to do with books, and Father Callahan, and with that dreaded place called Thunderclap. The vision was so vivid, so convincing, and so quickly over. I held on to the feeling of it long enough to write my first horror story (it wasn’t very good), but as the vision faded, I began to doubt what I had seen. I buried that vision, lost the story, and didn’t think about either for two decades. That is, until one day when I went to check my mail in the English department office at the University of Maine. As I was sorting through the grade sheets and memos, I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was Burt Hatlen, one of my professors. Stephen King needed a temporary research assistant, he said. Would I be interested . . .

  Sometimes, art imitates life, and sometimes life imitates art, and sometimes the two of them blend to such a degree that we can’t figure out where one ends and the other begins. For months before my chat with Burt, I’d been dreaming about roses, moons with demon faces, and huge, imposing, smoke-colored Towers. I didn’t think I was losing my mind, but then there was the tall, lanky, ghostlike man pacing at my writing-room door. He seemed to want to get through to our world, to need to get through to our world, and for some reason he thought I could help him. And every time I laid out my tarot cards, my future came out Towers.

  Ka is a wheel, its one purpose is to turn, and so often it brings us back to just where we started. Twenty years had passed since I boarded that bus to Thunderclap, but in Roland’s world, in the world of the Tower quest, twenty years in the past, or twenty years in the future, are only just a doorway apart. I climbed back on that Greyhound Bus only to find myself, as a young girl, still sitting behind Callahan. I’d never really disembarked in the first place.

  Pere Callahan waited in Calla Bryn Sturgis, on the border of Thunderclap, and Roland had to reach him. All he needed was somebody from our world to help crack open Steve’s doorway. I knew many of Steve’s other works, I loved fantasy and horror, and I had those rather sinister initials that implied I might be good for writing something other than academic essays. All that remained for me to do was open Roland’s biography and read that first, all-important line. The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed . . .

  It is now 2012, and I have lived in Roland’s world for more than twelve years. During that time I’ve collected much of the myth, history, and folklore of Mid-World. Just as, when you wake up from a dream, you try to capture what you saw during your night travels, the book that follows is my attempt to capture my journey with Roland. My goal, when I started, was to make a doorway between worlds. I hope that I have, at least, made a small window.

  R.F.

  March 12, 2003

  (revisited July 16, 2006 and again, June 27, 2012)

  THE WIND THROUGH THE KEYHOLE AND THE WINDS OF MID-WORLD

  “There’s nothing like stories on a windy night when folks have found a warm place in a cold world.”

  Roland Deschain

  The Wind Through the Keyhole, 31

  Like all Dark Tower fans, I always hoped that Stephen King would return to Mid-World after the seventh, and seemingly final, installment of the Dark Tower saga. Hence, in 2009, when Steve told me that he had another idea for a Dark Tower story, I was delighted. At that point, the novel had the working title Black Wind. The title alone was intriguing, since as every Tower junkie knows, the winds of Mid-World are intrinsically linked to sai King’s artistic inspiration. As he says in Song
of Susannah, “the wind blows and the story comes.” In Black Wind, however, that wind would have special significance, since it linked three stories, three eras of Mid-World history, and two vastly different periods in Roland’s life.

  By 2010, Steve had begun writing in earnest. The title, Black Wind, had become The Wind Through the Keyhole, and the story was firmly placed between Wizard and Glass and Wolves of the Calla. Since it wasn’t technically a gunslinger novel—Steve had set out instead to write a fairy tale—he thought that the subtitle would be A Novel of Mid-World. In those early days, Steve sent me a beautiful epigraph that he wanted to place at the beginning of the book:

  We live our short lives on one side of the door; on the other is all of eternity. Time is the wind that blows through the keyhole.

  Eventually both the subtitle and the epigram were cut, but I wanted to record them here, in this guide to all things Mid-World. Hence, the epigram appears at the beginning of this volume, and the old title is here too, along with The Wind Through the Keyhole’s many new characters, magical objects, fantastic places, games, words, and maps. Longtime readers will notice that my map of Mid-World’s Beams has also altered. The Lion-Eagle Beam now runs north to south, which is fitting, since the starkblasts of North’rd Barony begin in the land of endless snows, which is also where Aslan, Guardian of Gilead’s Beam, resides.

  To me, The Wind Through the Keyhole is a very special novel. Throughout so much of the Dark Tower series Roland remains aloof: a character we love but don’t fully understand, a reticent loner whose battle scars are so numerous that we can’t help but feel that he has a thick layer of protective scar tissue over his heart. Yet in The Wind Through the Keyhole we not only see the world through Roland’s eyes, but we gain a sense of how Roland sees himself. In both Wizard and Glass and The Wind Through the Keyhole, Roland’s adventures with his American ka-tet serve as frame stories for tales about Roland’s younger days. But while in Wizard and Glass Roland’s autobiographical adventure is recounted in the third person by an unseen narrator, in The Wind Through the Keyhole, Roland tells his story in his own voice. In this novel, Roland is not just a young gunslinger-prodigy with dazzlingly quick reflexes and a precociously subtle sense of battle strategy. He is a young man struggling to make sense of the decisions he has made in his life, and to cope with the terrible consequences of his actions. Over the course of the novel, he comes closer to making peace between his conflicting emotions and allegiances. Somehow, his rigid sense of duty to the way of the gun and his resulting rage against Gabrielle Deschain for betraying her husband and her Barony, must sit beside the profound but confusing grief he feels over the accidental shooting of his mother.