by George Beahm
37
THE ROAD TO THE DARK TOWER:
ROLAND’S QUEST
I’m never done with The Dark Tower. The thing about The Dark Tower is that those books were never edited, so I look at them as first drafts. And by the time I got to the fifth or sixth book, I’m thinking to myself, ‘This is really all one novel.’ It drives me crazy. The thing is to try to find the time to rewrite them. There’s a missing element—a big battle at a place called Jericho Hill. And that whole thing should be written, and I’ve thought about it several times, and I don’t know how to get into it.
—STEPHEN KING, ROLLING STONE, NOVEMBER 6, 2014
A CHANCE ENCOUNTER
The longest journey begins with the first step.
And so it was that in 1970, when King was a senior in college, he began writing what would prove to be his magnum opus, a massive work that still occupies his mind. Nearly five decades later, King is still drawn back to Roland’s world and impelled to write about a big battle at Jericho Hill. Dark Tower fans are already anxiously waiting its eventual publication.
The Dark Tower story began when King had gotten odd-sized, thick, lime-green paper that he fed through a battered Underwood typewriter. Then living in a cabin near the Androscoggin River in Orono, King began the first chapter of what would be published as The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger and showed them to Chris Chesley, who was impressed, and told King so.
Serialized in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, the novel appeared in five installments, starting with “The Gunslinger,” followed by “The Way Station,” “The Oracle and the Mountains,” “The Slow Mutants,” and “The Gunslinger and the Dark Man.”
Donald M. Grant, Publisher
The Director of Publications at Providence College in Rhode Island, Donald M. Grant wore a different hat away from the office: He was the publisher of a small press in the fantasy/horror field. Best known at the time for publishing Robert E. Howard’s fiction, Grant got to talking with King at a college dinner and asked him if he had anything suitable for his small press.
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (October 1978), in which “The Gunslinger” appeared—the first publication of King’s ambitious story cycle.
King offered the Dark Tower stories, which he felt were similar to the kind of books Grant had previously published. King also felt that the subject matter of the Dark Tower was sufficiently a departure from his horror novels that a small press and its correspondingly small audience was the only way to go: The Dark Tower, King felt, wouldn’t appeal to his mainstream readers.
The novel, as Grant wrote, “begged for” illustrations, and both Grant and King agreed that Michael Whelan was their first choice. Michael had previously illustrated the wraparound cover for the Phantasia Press edition of Firestarter. As Grant explained to me, “We both thought that Michael was at the top of the game.” And King “certainly liked Michael’s work, so we were in accord there.” “King was very pleased” with the finished artwork, Grant recalled.
The book went into preproduction, and the early word among fans was that no true fan of fantasy and horror could afford to pass up this book.
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (November 1981), containing King’s “The Gunslinger and the Dark Man.”
The first edition, from Donald M. Grant, Publisher, of The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger, with art by Michael Whelan.
Grant sent out a full-color brochure to people on his mailing list, telling them about King’s new novel:
Written over a period of twelve years, The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger is the first cycle of stories in a remarkable epic, the strangest and most frightening work that Stephen King has ever written. It is the book of Roland, the last gunslinger, and his quest for the Dark Tower in a world in which time has no bearing.
Against the weird background of a devastated and dying planet—with curious ties to our own world—the last gunslinger pursued the man in black. It is a time when man’s thirst for knowledge has been lost, and the haunted, chilling land harbors strange beings: the Slow Mutants, less-than-human troglodytes dwelling in the darkness; a Speaking Demon, laired beneath a forgotten way station; and a nameless vampiric presence, held captive in an ancient circle of altar stones.
Herein lies a tale of science-fantasy that is unlike anything bestselling author Stephen King has ever written; indeed, it is unlike anything anyone else has ever written.
King fans rushed to place orders for the book.
The editor and publisher of the semiprozine Whispers, Stuart David Schiff, wrote in the August 1982 issue about Grant’s latest offering. He noted,
I am not a partner with Donald Grant, although I would certainly like the opportunity to join up! Still, my never-ending praise for his publications might make it appear I have a financial interest in his press. The reality of the situation is that Don does great work and as such deserves praise. He has just produced what might possibly be the most important book ever from a specialty press. It is Stephen King’s The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger (HC, $20; signed by author and artist, 500 copies, $60) as illustrated by Hugo-award winner, Michael Whelan. The book is an epic tale, weird and unlike anything else King has written. The Whelan artwork is superb. The trade hardcover has “only” a 10,000 copy run. No sarcasm is intended by my quotation marks. King’s hardcovers normally sell many times that number, so the book may sell out quickly. Regarding the materials, Don has spared no expense. The paper is special, there are colored pictorial endpapers, five color plates, and the usual other expertise the field has come to expect from Grant. Do not miss this book.
The first printing of 10,500 copies (10,000 plus 500 signed/numbered) were immediately snatched up by fans.
“To issue such a book, of course, is one of the few ways I have of saying that I am not entirely for sale,” wrote King in an essay for Castle Rock in 1985, “that I’m still in the business for the joy of it, and that I have not been entirely subsumed by the commercial juggernaut I have cheerfully fueled and set in motion.”
The ones who missed out were the King readers at large who bought his trade editions from bookstores, because they were unaware of the specialty presses that catered to fandom.
The Dark Tower quietly went out of print.
King was happy, the fantasy fans were happy, and Donald M. Grant, the publisher, was happy as well, but he would have been even happier if King had allowed a larger print run, because he knew the demand far exceeded the supply. The best he could hope for was a second printing, if King agreed. Unlike most of the books Grant had previously issued, with much smaller print runs, which sold slowly over the years, mainly through book dealers in the field, The Dark Tower was a bestseller. It was—as is every signed, limitededition King book—a license to print money.
THE FIRESTORM
When Pet Sematary went out into the world in 1983 with a first printing of a quarter-million copies in hardback, it alerted King’s larger readership that he had previously published The Dark Tower. Opposite Pet Sematary’s title page was the obligatory listing of previously published books written by Stephen King. Broken down by category—novels, collections, nonfiction, and screenplay—one title in particular stood out: “The Dark Tower (1982).” There was no mention of the publisher, which added to the mystery. King’s Constant Readers were shocked to discover that there had been a King novel that they somehow had missed out on.
The firestorm began: Where can I get The Dark Tower?
Readers besieged his publishers (Doubleday, New American Library, Viking), chain bookstores, and also King’s office; when they found out Donald Grant was its publisher, they deluged him with letters asking how they could buy copies.
King was adamant that because The Dark Tower had limited appeal, it wouldn’t please his mainstream readers, who were accustomed to his horror novels. He therefore refused to allow further printings. “I didn’t think anybody would want to read it,” King explained in Castle Rock. “It wasn’t like the other boo
ks. The first volume didn’t have any firm grounding in our world, in reality; it was more like a Tolkien fantasy of some other world. The other reason was that it wasn’t done; it wasn’t complete.”
“I wanted to do something about it,” King explained at a public talk in Pasadena, “and Don wanted to do something about it. He was upset. We talked on the phone one night and I said, ‘What if you published another 500 or 5,000?’ There was a long sigh. And I said, ‘That would be like pissing on a forest fire, wouldn’t it?’ He said, ‘Yeah.’”
Michael Whelan in front of the door to his home studio.
But as the firestorm spread, King reluctantly allowed Grant to go back to press. Another ten thousand copies were printed, with priority going to people who specifically had written to King to request information on where to buy it.
Like the first, the second printing was immediately snapped up; once again, the demand far exceeded the supply, and it quickly went out of print.
King finally changed his mind, and in 1998 New American Library published The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger in an inexpensive edition to ensure as many people as possible could afford to buy it. The book featured a new painting by Michael Whelan depicting Roland, with the Dark Tower in the background; the book also reprinted the interior art from the Grant edition.
Wraparound cover art by Whelan for the seventh Dark Tower novel, in the Donald M. Grant, Publisher edition.
The Donald M. Grant edition of The Little Sisters of Eluria, with Michael Whelan art.
Now the question was no longer Where can I buy it? but When is the next one coming out?
On his official Web site, King answered:
I am going to continue the Dark Tower series, mostly because I have three women who work in my office that answer the fan mail, and a lot of times they don’t tell me what’s going on with the fan mail, except for the stuff that I pick up myself. But they put every Dark Tower letter on my desk. This is like a silent protest saying, get these people off our backs.
But my plan this time—if all goes well—is just to continue working until the cycle is done, and then, that way, I can walk away from that.
It’s always been my intention to finish. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about Roland and Eddie and Detta and all the other people, even Oy, the little animal. But this book has never done what I wanted it to do. I’ve been living with these guys longer than the readers have, ever since college, actually, and that’s a long time ago for me.
I want to finish it. But there are no guarantees in this business. I can walk out of here today and get hit by a bus and that would be the end of that. Unless it came into somebody by Ouija board, which is always a possibility.
But the other thing is, I can try and find out that the words aren’t there any more. I don’t think that will happen, but you never know ‘til you open the cupboard.
The Simon & Schuster edition of Robin Firth’s encyclopedic Dark Tower concordance, with cover artwork by Michael Whelan.
MICHAEL COLLINGS ON THE DARK TOWER: THE GUNSLINGER
“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”
These sparse words begin the most atypical and in some ways the most imaginative narrative yet to come from King’s pen, the first volume in what promises to be the longest, most complex story from an author whose trademark has become long, complex tales.
As with so many King texts, the basic story of The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger is simplicity itself. The gunslinger, Roland of Gilead, has been, is, and (so far as the readers can tell at the beginning) always will be pursuing the dark man, a shadowy, quasi-mythic figure that holds the secrets to Roland’s ultimate quest, the Dark Tower, an even more darkly shadowed, more vaguely mythic nexus of worlds, universes, and ultimate possibilities. The quest for the dark man has led Roland from the ruins of his own country—where the world has irrevocably “moved on”—into a vast desert near the far edge of the world. Crossing the desert, he undergoes sore trials and temptations, meeting eventually with Jake, a mysterious young boy from another world, who helps Roland survive and whom Roland in turn grows to love. But he cannot love Jake as much as he loves (or is obsessed with) the Dark Tower. When the brutal choice between Jake’s life and his quest forces itself upon him, Roland barely hesitates before sacrificing Jake in order to confront the dark man. At the end of this first installment of the story, Roland has gleaned secret knowledge from the dark man and sits beside the western sea, awaiting dreams of the Dark Tower and the time of the drawing of the three.
The “Afterword” to The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger explains that the projected plot outline for the remainder of the story would take nearly three thousand pages to complete … and, given the time it took to complete the first volume, King “would have to live approximately three hundred years to complete the tale of the Tower.…” It also apologizes for the fact that the Dark Tower series is not exactly what King’s readers have come to expect from him.
In many ways, however, that is precisely the strength of the series, especially this first volume. Coming from the pen of a writer whose popular image is of a single-minded purveyor of cheap horror and the even cheaper “gross-out,” whose style is often condemned as wooden and workmanlike at best, whose books are condemned as overwritten and underedited, The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger is a pleasant surprise. There are certainly elements of King’s trademark horror; the Slow Mutants, for example, resemble strongly similar characters in The Talisman and are described in terms familiar to King’s readers, while Roland’s first response to them is the equally familiar “atavistic crawl in his intestines and privates” often associated with moments of horror in King’s novels. And, of course, there is the sense that this volume is merely the beginning of the longest novel yet, one whose ending is so far distant as to be lost in the mists that obscure the Dark Tower itself.
But as an individual work, The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger undercuts many readers’ presuppositions about King. It is written in unusually spare diction, ranging from typically coarse colloquialisms to carefully constructed analogues of the refined language of high fantasy. There are few narrative digressions in the novel, and few lines and phrases that do not move the story forward. It is, in fact, the shortest of the Dark Tower series thus far, and among King’s shorter novels.
Beyond the level of style, however, is the larger issue of genre. While King occasionally blends horror with other genres—with mainstream pseudo documentary fiction in Carrie, or with science fiction in The Long Walk—in the Dark Tower series, he sets himself the ambitious task of combining horror with the Western (Roland is, after all, the last gunslinger), the action-adventure thriller, touches of the romance in both the contemporary and the medieval senses, alternate-universe and multiple-universe extrapolative speculations, philosophical debate, heroic saga, apocalyptic fantasy, and above all, the epic quest. Browning’s “Child Roland to the Dark Tower Came” provides a character and a focus for the quest, but King’s imagination fills out the spare outlines into a rich tapestry of worlds, some dying, others (ours included) not yet fully aware of an unnamed threat to the Dark Tower itself. Browning also supplies the epic form, but King’s imagination again transforms it into prose narrative of a sort rarely attempted.
The epic impulse itself is almost as old as literature, extending at least as far back as The Epic of Gilgamesh, inscribed in clay tablets with cuneiform script some four thousand years ago. During much of western history, the epic stood at a pinnacle of human achievement, with works such as Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf, Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, Luis de Camoens’s Lusiad, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, and Sir Philip Sidney’s prose Arcadia continuously transforming the genre to meet new requirements of new audiences. Until its culmination in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, the epic reigned virtually unchallenged as the highest literary form, at least for Renaissance audiences; after Milton’s superlative achieveme
nt, however, verse epic almost disappeared, except for such inverted, mock-epic masterpieces as Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock and The Dunciad, and Lord Byron’s Don Juan. Serious verse epic simply could not force language, structure, and theme beyond the point to which Milton developed them; to all appearances, verse epic ceased to be a viable literary form.
The need for epic itself did not disappear, however, but reappeared in a startling new eighteenth-century genre, the novel. Until the end of the nineteenth century and the novel’s descent into realism, naturalism, and the antiheroic, the quest for a hero found its outlet in long prose narratives; and in the twentieth century that impulse was rapidly transferred from the mainstream novel to the science-fiction / fantasy novel, in works as disparate as J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and Frank Herbert’s Dune, in which the actions of a single individual could in fact make a difference, could even save the world, the solar system, or the universe itself.
It is this literary heritage that lies behind the Dark Tower novels, beginning with The Gunslinger. King has created an archetypal epic personage, whose past lies hidden in myth and legend and whose future is wedded completely to the object of his quest. King’s fable resonates with epic scope and grandeur, particularly in Roland’s dream-vision of the Tower and its casual relation to all things. In good epic fashion, King expands the vision of his tale until it potentially represents an encyclopedia of the culture in which it is written; and in The Drawing of the Three and The Wastelands, volumes 2 and 3 of the saga, that potential becomes actual as King anatomizes the strengths and weaknesses of American society over the past three decades, thrusting Roland into contact with the 1960s, the 1970s, and the 1980s. Through Roland, King examines our obsessions and our frustrations, our hopes and our dreams, our successes and our failures, all from the perspective of an epic character out of this time and out of this place. Roland’s perspectives on our world transform the everyday into the alien, giving readers continuing glimpses into who and what we are.
