by George Beahm
THE LONG PUBLICATION PROCESS
As King explained in the introduction to The Little Sisters of Eluria (originally published as a separate book in 2009, which included a rewritten version of the first Dark Tower novel published in 1982), “I had no idea of how things were going to turn out with the gunslinger and his friends. To know, I have to write.”
In other words, the stories would come when they came, and that proved to be an ongoing frustration to readers … and to King, too, who was besieged with never-ending queries, until Roland reached the Dark Tower in 2004 and blew his horn.
The publication timetable of the Dark Tower novels from Donald M. Grant, Publisher, stretched over a period of twenty-two years, from The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger in 1982 to The Dark Tower in 2004. (The Wind Through the Keyhole, the eighth Dark Tower novel, which fits into the plot between volume 4 and 5, was published in 2012.)
What accelerated the publication schedule was the accident on June 19, 1999. Struck by a minivan near his home in Center Lovell, Maine, King subsequently endured a slow, painful recovery. That unexpected event emphasized the fragility of life, which hangs on a thread. It gave King the impetus to get the series completed.
The cycle is now complete, at least for the time being. In an interview with Rolling Stone (November 6, 2014), King said that he feels impelled to rewrite the books because they feel like “first drafts.” It remains to be seen whether he will devote precious time rewriting a previously published saga that readers already feel is complete.
The wild card, though, is that in the same interview King says there’s one major book as yet unwritten in the series—depicting the battle of Jericho Hill. My thought is that he will almost certainly write that book. I’m not so sure, though, that he’ll rewrite the rest of the books in the series, because the temptation to do so is tempered with the fact that there are new books crying to be written … and his time, with each passing year, becomes even more precious.
The Dark Tower: The Wind Through the Keyhole
Once again, Dark Tower fans will have to wait and see, which is always a frustrating situation. It’s one that fellow fantasist George R. R. Martin fans are currently dealing with, because his saga, Song of Ice and Fire, is a work in progress, which has frustrated fans: Some churlish readers have complained online, adamantly insisting that Martin has an obligation to finish the series before attending to other projects, attending conventions, or giving more interviews. Other readers have speculated about his health, worried that he may die before completing the series. (It happens: the last Gormenghast novel, Titus Awakes, was posthumously published as a fragment, owing to Mervyn Peake’s death in 1968.)
As Neil Gaiman explained to one impatient fan who had the expectation that Martin should stop everything he’s doing, personal and professional, to complete the Fire and Ice story cycle: “George R. R. Martin is not your bitch.”
The same holds true for Stephen King.
YOUR ROAD MAP TO THE DARK TOWER
When it comes to books about the Dark Tower, I am of the firm opinion that such books should only be read after the reader has finished the series, just as you should not watch the supplementary material provided on DVDs until after viewing the movie itself.
For instance, if you’ve yet to read Tolkien’s epic fantasy The Lord of the Rings (a book that inspired King, influencing not only the Dark Tower series but also The Stand), you are best advised to read The Hobbit first, since it lays the groundwork for the larger, more ambitious books to follow, and then read, in order, The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King. After that, you’re free to round out your reading with the multivolume book series The Complete History of Middle-earth or the many nonfiction studies on Tolkien’s considerable body of work.
The correct chronology for reading the Dark Tower novels in order:
1. The revised edition of The Gunslinger, because of the inclusion of an additional nine thousand words
2. The Drawing of the Three
3. The WasteLands
4. Wizard and Glass
5. The Wind Through the Keyhole
6. The Wolves of the Calla
7. The Song of Susannah
8. The Dark Tower
The Little Sisters of Eluria is not available as a standalone book in any trade edition; now out of print, the short novel was originally published in Legends, edited by Robert Siverberg.
It was subsequently reprinted by Donald M. Grant, Publisher, in a beautiful edition paired with a rewritten version of the first Dark Tower novel, The Gunslinger, with new artwork by Michael Whelan.
If you want to read the story itself, it was reprinted in King’s anthology, Everything’s Eventual (Scribner, 2002). In an introductory note to the tale, King eplained, “I had lots of space to move around in—Silverberg wanted short novels, not short stories—but was still hard.”
Art by Glenn Chadbourne
Hard but not impossible, as it turned out. The short novel flowed out of King’s word processor. “One thing this story has going for it is that you don’t need to have read the Dark Tower novels to enjoy it,” King explained in his note.
To guide you to the Dark Tower, I highly recommend Robin Firth’s exhaustive and authoritative concordance Stephen King’s The Dark Tower: The Complete Concordance, Revised and Updated (2012), which incorporates The Little Sisters of Eluria and The Wind Through the Keyhole.
In his foreword to the book, Stephen King points out that “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.”
When King asked his mentor and longtime friend Burton Hatlen for a recommendation, Hatlen recommended Robin Firth, “and my wandering gunslinger had found his Boswell,” wrote King.
Firth’s concordance is an exhaustive work of scholarship and honors the Dark Tower story cycle and King as well. Like carrying an American Express card in the real world, I wouldn’t travel through Mid-World without this concordance as my constant companion. And if you need another recommendation, here’s King’s endorsement from his foreword to Firth’s book: “I found this overview of In-World, Mid-World, and End-World both entertaining and invaluable. So, I am convinced, will you.”
I am coming to understand that Roland’s world (or worlds) actually contains all the others of my making; there is a place in Mid-World for Randall Flagg, Ralph Roberts, the wandering boys from The Eyes of the Dragon, even Father Callahan, the damned priest from ’Salem’s Lot.
—STEPHEN KING, AFTERWORD, THE DARK TOWER IV: WIZARD AND GLASS (1997)
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MICHAEL WHELAN:
ILLUSTRATING THE DARK TOWER
As King critic Dr. Tony Magistrale points out, “The Dark Tower reflects King’s career-long fascination with culling together diverse genres: the epic, the western, the gothic romance, science fiction, fantasy—all these things into a hybrid text where various elements of literary and cinematic traditions interface and coalesce. And they do so in a way that’s totally unexpected.”
The paperback edition of The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger, with art by Michael Whelan.
Clearly, this story presented a formidable challenge for any illustrator, but Michael Whelan was up to the task. I asked him to give me a sense of what it was like to read the first book in manuscript form.
“I found The Gunslinger to be an extremely depressing book, despite feeling flattered to have been asked to do it in the first place,” Whelan said. “It was January 1981 when I began work on the assignment, a stressful month for me all around. My mother had just died a couple of weeks before, the children of our family’s closest friends died in a car crash on I-95, and John Lennon had been killed. The weather was blustery and icy; to tell you the truth, the last thing I wanted to do was illustrate The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger. I was just not in the mood.”
In addition, Michael and his wife, Audrey, had just become parent
s for the first time. The birth of their daughter, Alexa, meant that they came to know all about the joys of sleep deprivation and round-the-clock feeding schedules.
Finding himself with back-to-back assignments for specialty presses, Whelan was initially daunted by the demands of illustrating “two dark and disturbing books”: Charles Grant’s Tales from the Darkside, followed by King’s The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger.
“But in the end I rolled up my sleeves and got into it,” Whelan said. “Once I started making sketches, things started going quickly. I prepared some watercolor board panels and started painting, and soon found myself lost in the story. But in retrospect, I don’t know why I didn’t do some research by watching all the Clint Eastwood movies. Ordinarily, I would have thought that to be part of my homework. I’m really puzzled by this, because they’re so obviously an influence on King’s Gunslinger. But I suppose my thinking was to jump into the project with both feet and complete the commission without delay. I can’t go back and do them over again, but I wish I had seen the movies and visited the Southwest before attempting to begin the artwork.”
Whelan rendered five paintings and several pen-and-ink pieces for The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger, including an iconic image of Roland sitting on a beach, with the nebulous outline of the Dark Tower in the distance, set against a blood-red sun.
The original painting sold for $1,750. “I could easily get up to $35,000 for that today,” Whelan shrugs. “Whoever bought it got a good deal.”
For the trade paperback edition, published in 1988, Whelan painted the background a “peculiar mustardy color that seemed to express the dusty, oppressive feeling of the book to me,” he wrote in The Art of Michael Whelan. The portrait depicts Roland in profile with a raven on his shoulder. The resemblance between Roland and King is deliberate. “I had a profile shot of Steve that I used because at that point he was describing the Gunslinger in terms of having similar features of his, so I thought he should look faintly like Steve.”
“There’s only one scene when you really see Roland well: he and Cuthbert are standing at the foot of the hanged figure of Hax. I deliberately gave him a Stephen King feeling to his face because it felt to me that he had already inserted himself into the story, into Roland’s character. Even at that early stage, I had no idea that he would write himself in as an actual character in The Dark Tower [book 7, 2004]. I just felt that. So you can see King’s dark hair and some of his facial planes.”
“King’s description of Roland evolves through the series. At first he’s described as a hard-bitten guy with a face that seems chiseled out of ‘obdurate granite.’ Then to Susannah he says he looks like he has the ‘face of a tired poet,’ and so on. I became something of a weathervane in response to King’s changing descriptions, responding to different sections as I encountered them. I came to accept that Roland would change over time and become a more sympathetic and complex character. I feel I got a good fix on him now, but it went through a lot of change in the process.”
“The way I depicted him on the cover of book seven (The Dark Tower) was a pastiche of all the hard guys in the movies that I could think of. There’s some of James Coburn in his face, some Lee Marvin, and a little bit of Clint Eastwood. There are different people I think of when I painted the face on the cover of the book, but now I admit I regret having done so. I wish I had thrown his face into shadow. Everyone has a slightly different idea of what the character looks like—even me—and to fix it so solidly was a mistake. Ah, well, live and learn.”
“Over time I believe I’ve settled on how I think Roland should look. You’d think it late in the game to do that, after having illustrated so much of the material, but my conception of a character evolved over time, just as Steve’s idea of Roland’s appearance evolved considerably over the course of the seven books. I feel I’ve gotten closer and closer to the mark.”
Just as Roland’s look proved illustratively elusive, so too did the look of the Dark Tower itself. “That’s the other thing,” Whelan said. “King doesn’t get around to describing what the damned Dark Tower looks like until the end of the last book. He has scenes of different characters throughout the series that ‘see’ the tower appearing one way or another, as if the tower itself changes its look depending on who is confronting it. Consequently, I tried not to be too specific about it. There’s all kinds of room for interpretation, until King definitively portrays it in the last book as a rather plain, squat tower.”
What was it like to come full circle and illustrate the seventh Dark Tower novel?
“I was so stoked. I must have whooped and hollered for two days. To be asked back to do it again made my year.”
Whelan rose to the challenge and turned in more artwork than what the contract called for. In the end, he submitted twenty-five paintings (in color and monochrome), and thirty-four pen-and-ink illustrations.
“Any final thoughts about the Dark Tower?” I asked.
Whelan replied, “Well, the story’s not long enough. I’m not sure it ever can be!” He laughed. “After his accident, King surely had a flash of his own mortality and didn’t want to leave the ‘roundness’ of the saga incomplete. Like so many other fans, I’m hoping there will be more additions to the whole story, if for no other reason than that the number nine is so important to the whole series. I always felt it should have been a nine-book series. Certainly, there’s plenty of more room to explore unanswered issues.”
“In any case,” Whelan concluded, “I love the books and the characters. Some may complain about it being too long, but as King explains in the seventh book, it’s not the destination but the journey that is important. The road can be as long as you choose to make it.”
MICHAEL WHELAN: A PORTFOLIO
“And if you are one of those who have never visited the strange world through which Roland and his friends move, I hope you will enjoy the marvels you find there. More than anything else, I wanted to tell a tale of wonder.”
—STEPHEN KING ON THE DARK TOWER STORY CYCLE, FROM THE “FOREWORD” TO THE LITTLE SISTERS OF ELURIA (2008)
Elsewhere in this book, you’ll find a 16-page color insert of artwork drawn by artist Michael Whelan, inspired by Stephen King’s Dark Tower series.
Whelan and King go all the way back to 1982 when the first Dark Tower book was published by Donald M. Grant. He mailed his customers a sales flyer, stating that “The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger was unlike anything bestselling author Stephen King has ever written; indeed, it is unlike anything anyone has ever written. And it is a volume that begs for illustrations! The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger is a joining of the foremost author and artist in the fields of science fiction and fantasy. Complementing Stephen King in this most unusual of books is artist Michael Whelan, recepient of both Howard and Hugo awards as best artist in the genre.”
Whelan accepted the commission and threw himself into the project with brio. He eventually rendered five full-color paintings, in acrylic; color endleaves, also in acrylic; and chapter-head illustrations, with complementary end-piece illustrations, in pen-and-ink.
Grant recalled that “King was very pleased” with Whelan’s finished work.
Twenty-two years later, Whelan was once again approached by King to illustrate a Dark Tower novel—this time, the final book in the series, The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower (2004).
In a phone call to Whelan, King explained that because they both started out on a quest to tell Roland’s story in the first book, it seemed only fitting that they should end it together as well, with which Whelan concurred.
As with the first Dark Tower novel, Whelan approached the final book commission with unbridled enthusiasm, resulting in a remarkable suite of paintings and drawings.
It’s not hyperbole to state that Whelan’s work for the final Gunslinger novel towers above all the previously published artwork in the series, including his own. In book seven, Whelan exhibited a mature vision of Roland’s world, a technical mastery in all media, and an unsurpassed imagina
tion that firmly cemented his reputation as the preeminent Dark Tower artist.
39
CHRISTINE
1983
This is the story of a lover’s triangle, I suppose you’d say—Arnie Cunningham, Leigh Cabot, and, of course, Christine. But I want you to understand that Christine was there first.… I think she was his only true love. So I call what happened a tragedy.
—STEPHEN KING, PROLOGUE TO CHRISTINE
In the afterword to Different Seasons, King recounts a conversation with Alan Williams, his editor, who asked him, “Loved Cujo. … Have you thought about what you’re going to do next?”
King suggested a novella collection titled Different Seasons, which wasn’t what his crestfallen book editor wanted to hear: Collections don’t sell as well as novels. King then said, “How about a haunted car?”
That was what he wanted to hear: King, who wrote about a haunted hotel, would now write a horror story about a haunted car, which was a first. Haunted houses were plentiful—done to perfection in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House—but a haunted car?
In retrospect, given the milieu he had grown up in during the fifties, a time when cars and rock and roll held sway, King was driven to write about American car culture. In fact, another baby boomer named George Lucas did just that, writing and directing American Graffiti (1973), a coming-of-age movie that paid homage to rock and roll, and cruising in cars, as does Christine. Cars, a consuming interest of Lucas’s, are chariots of fire: In the movie, the teenage boys driving them are contemporary knights driving supercharged cars propelled by powerful engines.
