by Vincent, Bev
August 14, 1984: NAL and King’s agent pitch him the idea of doing The Gunslinger as a trade paperback, but King passes. Wants to work on It instead.
November 18, 1984: King comes up with the notion of the world resting on a turtle’s back to solve a plotting problem in It.
1986: Eddie and Henry Dean solemnly pledge to never become needle freaks.
June 10, 1986: King starts to think about returning to the Dark Tower story.
June 13, 1986: King has a dream of Roland telling him to start with the lobstrosities.
June 15, 1986: King starts The Drawing of the Three.
June 24, 1986: Captain Trips ravages the world the ka-tet enters in Topeka.
July 16, 1986: King has written three hundred pages of The Drawing of the Three.
September 19, 1986: King finishes The Drawing of the Three, two days before his birthday.
Fall 1986: Eddie crosses from the land of Recreational Drugs into the Kingdom of Really Bad Habits.
1987: Eddie smuggles drugs. Roland and Eddie kill Enrico Balazar and Jack Andolini.
June 19, 1987: King receives his copy of The Drawing of the Three from Grant. Decides to let NAL do the first two books as trade paperbacks.
August 5, 1987: Helen and Ed Deepneau are married.
October 19, 1987: King starts to confront his drinking problems.
December 1987: Susannah joins Eddie and Jake Toren in Central Park.
1988: The Tet Corporation firebombs Sombra Enterprises in New Delhi.
April 12, 1988: Walk-ins article pasted into King’s journal.
June 19, 1989: King has been sober for a year.
July 12, 1989: King reads Shardik by Richard Adams.
1989: John Cullum is shot and killed by low men.
September 21, 1989: King receives roses for his birthday. Hypnotizes himself. Ready to return to the Dark Tower.
October 7, 1989: King starts writing The Wastelands.
October 9, 1989: King decides to call it The Waste Lands instead.
January 9, 1990: King finishes The Waste Lands.
1990: Calvin Tower dies of a heart attack.
November 27, 1991: King starts getting mail about the cliff-hanger ending to The Waste Lands.
1992: Aaron Deepneau dies of cancer.
March 23, 1992: King receives a letter from a cancer patient asking for the ending of the Dark Tower series.
July 1992: Ed Deepneau flips out; Ralph Roberts hears about the Crimson King.
September 22, 1992: Grant edition of The Waste Lands sells out.
April 1993: Ralph Roberts gets insomnia.
1993: Tyler Marshall is born.
October 8, 1993: Ralph meets the Crimson King, saves Patrick Danville’s life.
January 2, 1994: Ralph marries Lois Chasse.
July 9, 1994: A driver kills Chip McCausland on Route 7 in western Maine.
1994: The Tassenbaums buy John Cullum’s house in western Maine.
1994: Chew Chew Mama’s becomes Dennis’s Waffles and Pancakes.
July 1995: Tak unleashed and possibly destroyed in Desperation, Nevada.
June 19, 1995: King feels the wind blowing again.
July 19, 1995: King is two hundred pages into Wizard and Glass.
September 2, 1995: King watches The Seven Samurai and sees in it inspiration for the next book.
October 19, 1995: King finishes Wizard and Glass.
Mid-1990s: Callahan travels todash to Mexico for Ben Mears’s funeral.
1997: Moses Carver retires as head of Tet Corporation.
August 19, 1997: King gets first copies of Wizard and Glass.
Summer 1997: King knows story of Wolves of the Calla, but it seems like too much work. Starts on Hearts in Atlantis instead.
July 6, 1998: King works on Hearts in Atlantis and sees the Dark Tower as his überstory. He contemplates easing back or retiring when it’s finished.
August 1998: Ralph Roberts dies in Derry, Maine.
August 7, 1998: King hears about walk-ins.
January 2, 1999: King dreams about June 19, 1999. O Discordia.
June 1, 1999: Mia crosses from the Calla into New York.
June 12, 1999: The Kings move back to the summerhouse by the lake. Mordred kills Randall Flagg/Walter o’Dim.
June 17, 1999: King talks about doing Rose Red as a miniseries.
June 18, 1999: Eddie is killed in Blue Heaven.
June 19, 1999: King is killed in an auto-pedestrian accident in Maine.
June 19, 1999: Jake sacrifices his life to save King. Roland and Irene drive toward New York.
June 20, 1999: Irene and Roland stay in Harwich, Connecticut.
June 21, 1999: Roland goes to New York one last time.
Summer 1999: Bobby Garfield receives a message from Ted Brautigan.
September 11, 2001: Black Thirteen is crushed beneath the World Trade Center.
August 2002: Stephen King writes about Roland rejoining Susannah in Fedic.
APPENDIX III:
MID-WORLD GLOSSARY
In The Dark Tower, King says that his editor usually forces him to cappendix-hange words he makes up if they are too strange. However, over the course of the past few decades, King managed to slip a few unusual words past him. The following list contains expressions mostly from High Speech that refer to concepts in the Dark Tower mythos. Some are common phrases from Mid-World speech.
Alleyo: Running away.
An-tak: The Big Combination. The Crimson King’s child-powered engine that Roland knows as the King’s Forge. Its energy output fuels evils in the myriad universes of existence.
An-tet: The position of a person who follows a dinh.
Aven kal: A tidal wave of disastrous proportions that runs along the Path of the Beam. Sometimes it becomes a hurricane or tsunami, sweeping people along with it. This indicates the very Beam means to speak with these people, who would do well to listen. King’s creative force made real.
Can Calah: Angels.
Can Calyx: The Dark Tower, aka the Hall of Resumption.
Can’-Ka No Rey: The red road leading up to the Dark Tower.
Can Steek-Tete: The Little Needle. A sharp upthrust of rock in Thunderclap.
Can-tah: The little gods. The turtle scrimshaw is one.
Can tam: Little doctors; the black bugs associated with Type One vampires.
Can toi: The low men, taheen-human hybrids; sometimes called the third people. They wear human masks, take human names and hope to replace humans after the fall of the Tower. Roland calls these soldiers of the Crimson King the fayen-folken.
Commala: Refers to rice and the festivals associated with it. Also a dance and a festival of fertility. The word is used in numerous ways, many of them expletive. See Wolves of the Calla for a summary of its meanings.
Dan-dinh: An implicit agreement between someone who is an-tet and his dinh. When presenting a personal problem dan-dinh, the follower opens his heart to his leader and agrees to do what the leader says. This tradition predates Arthur Eld.
Dan-tete: Little savior. John Cullum is a little savior for Roland and Eddie.
Dash-dinh: A religious leader.
Devar-tete: Little torture chamber.
Devar-Toi: Prison where the Breakers are held. Known as Algul Siento—Blue Heaven.
Dinh: The leader of a ka-tet. It also means “king” and “father.” This latter ties Mordred to the legends of Arthur and Charlemagne, where children were born of incestuous relationships. Roland is Susannah’s dinh, in some ways a father. Walter o’Dim thinks of Mordred as his new dinh.
Din-tah: The furnace of destruction. Chaos.
Discordia: The great chaos. All that will remain if the Tower falls.
Fan-gon: Exiled one.
Gan: Supposedly the creative force in Hindu mythology according to fictional Stephen King.1 It is everything that is not Discordia, a force too great to be called God. Gan rose from the void (the Prim) and gave birth to the universe through his navel. Then he t
ipped it with his finger and set it rolling, and that was time. Gan is responsible for the creative force in King. The Tower is Gan itself.
Gilly: A woman usually taken to bear children outside wedlock. Concubine or mistress.
Graf: Apple beer.
Gunna: A person’s worldly possessions.
Howken: Roland’s hypnosis trick in which he uses a bullet that dances along his fingers.
Ka: A force of fate and destiny. When someone doesn’t know what to do in a certain situation, they throw themselves into ka’s hands.
Kai-mai: A friend of ka, someone who carries out ka’s will, like Father Callahan bringing Black Thirteen to the Calla from the way station.
Ka-mai: Ka’s fool, a term Roland applies to Eddie. Mia says it is one who has been given hope but no choices.
Ka-me: Someone who acts wisely.
Kammen: The bells that accompany a todash journey.
Ka-shume: A melancholy awareness of an approaching break in a ka-tet.
Kas-ka Gan: Prophets of Gan or singers of Gan, for example, authors, like Stephen King and, perhaps, Robert Browning.
Ka-tel: Roland’s gunslinger class.
Ka-tet: A group of people bound together by fate, broken only by death or treachery. Cort believed that since death and treachery are also spokes on the wheel of ka, a ka-tet could never be broken. Roland says, “Each member of a ka-tet is like a piece in a puzzle. Taken by itself, each piece is a mystery, but when they are put together, they make a picture.” Roland believes he’s not a full member of the ka-tet because he’s not from New York. However, Oy is a member of the ka-tet, and even Mordred falls within its scope.
Kaven: The persistence of magic.
Khef: Life force. The sharing of water by those whom ka has welded together for good or for ill—by those who were ka-tet. “Water” and “birth” are other meanings. In Greek, the word “kefi” means “spirit.”
Ki’-dam: Shit-for-brains. Dinky’s nickname for the warden of Devar-Toi, Prentiss.
Kra Kammen: House of Ghosts. What the Manni call the Doorway Cave.
Ma-sun: War chest, like the cave filled with munitions at Little Needle above Devar-Toi.
Moit: A group of five or six people.
Over, the: The God of the Manni. The primordial soup (Prim) of creation, the greater Discordia. Henchick sometimes refers to it as the Force, as in Star Wars.
Pol kam: A dance from the Great Hall days of Gilead.
Saita: A great, magical snake slain by Arthur Eld on a quest.
Seppe-sai: Death seller (i.e., gunslinger).
Taheen: Creatures neither of the Prim nor of the natural world, but misbegotten things from somewhere between the two.
Te-ka: Destiny’s friend. Used by a low man to describe Ted’s relationship with Bobby Garfield.
Telamei: To gossip about someone you shouldn’t gossip about.
Ter-tah: An unflattering term used by Munshun to refer to our world.
Tet-ka can Gan: The navel, derived from the belief that Gan created the universe through his navel.
Todana: Deathbag. The black aura Roland and Eddie observe surrounding King.
Todash: The passing between worlds and the empty voids between worlds. The Manni consider going todash to be the holiest of rites and the most exalted of states. Some pieces of the Wizard’s Rainbow can send people todash against their will. Terrible creatures live in the todash spaces.
Todash Tahken: Holes in reality (thinnies).
Trum: Someone who can convince people to do things they wouldn’t ordinarily do, like stick their head in a rock cat’s mouth. Roland is trum.
Urs-A-Ka-Gan: The cry or the scream of the bear.2
Ves’-Ka Gan: The song of the Turtle. Sometimes the Song of Susannah. Perhaps an analog of the Voice of the Turtle in It that tells characters when it’s time to act.
ENDNOTES
1 Hindu scriptures credit Kaal Purush or Aadi Purush for being the creative force from whose body the universe was born via his navel. The sky came from his head, the earth from his feet and all directions from his ears. “Gan Eden” refers to paradise in Judaism.
2 When translating this phrase, Roland comments that it was hardly the time for semantics in deciding whether the words mean “cry” or “scream.” King may be using this odd aside to subtly chide readers who complained that he got the title of Edvard Munch’s painting wrong in Bag of Bones. Commonly known as The Scream, King calls it The Cry throughout that novel. Many legitimate sources translate the painting’s title as The Cry.
APPENDIX IV:
THE DARK TOWER ON THE WEB*
Official Stephen King Web presence
www.stephenking.com/DarkTower/
Scribner Dark Tower site
www.simonsays.com/subs/index.cfm?areaid=21
Penguin Dark Tower site
www.penguin.com/darktower
Donald M. Grant
www.grantbooks.com/
Hodder & Stoughton (U.K. publisher)
www.madaboutbooks.com/darktower
The Dark Tower dot Net
www.thedarktower.net
Yahoo group discussion of the Dark Tower
groups.yahoo.com/group/The_Dark_Tower/
The Dark Tower FAQ by Jordan Lund
www.geocities.com/jordanlund/dtfaq1.htm
The Dark Tower Compendium by Anthony Schwethelm
www.darktowercompendium.com/
The Nitpicker’s Guide
www.geocities.com/darktowercompendium/nitpicker-menu.html
The Road to the Dark Tower
www.BevVincent.com/
Stephen King fan pages
Lilja’s Library
www.liljas-library.com/
Needful Things
free.hostdepartment.com/n/needfulthings
Charnel House
www.charnelhouse.net
The Collector
www.stephenkingcollector.com/
Stephen King News
www.stephenkingnews.com/
SKEMERs (e-mail newsletter)
www.skemers.com/
Stephen King resources on the Web
scarletking.20m.com/
APPENDIX V:
SYNOPSES AND NOTES FROM THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION
“The Gunslinger”
Thus ends what is written in the first Book of Roland, and his Quest for the Tower which stands at the root of Time. [This is the first time Roland is named.]
“The Way Station”
SYNOPSIS: The dark days have come; the last of the lights are guttering, flickering out—in the minds of men as well as in their dwellings. The world has moved on. Something has, perhaps, happened to the continuum itself. Dark things haunt the dark; communities stand alone and isolated. Some houses, shunned, have become the dens of demons.
Against this dying, twilit landscape, the gunslinger—last of his kind, and wearing the sandalwood-inlaid pistols of his father—pursues the man in black into the desert, leaving the last, tattered vestiges of life and civilization behind. In the town of Tull, now miles and days at his back, the man in black set him a snare; reanimated a corpse and set the town against him. The gunslinger has left them all dead, victims of the man in black’s mordant prank and the deadly, mindless speed of his own hands.
Following the ashes of days-old fires, the gunslinger pursues the man in black.
He may be gaining, and it may be that the man in black knows the secret of the Dark Tower, which stands at the root of time. For it is not ultimately the man in black which the gunslinger seeks; it is the Tower.
The dark days have come.
The world has moved on.
“The Oracle and the Mountain”
SYNOPSIS: This is the third tale of Roland, the last gunslinger, and his quest for the Dark Tower which stands at the root of time.
Time is the problem; the dark days have come and the world has moved on. Demons haunt the dark and monsters walk in empty places. The time of light and knowledge has pas
sed, and only remnants—and revenants—remain.
Against this twilit landscape, the gunslinger pursues the man in black into the desert, leaving behind the town of Tull, where the man he pursues—if he is a man—set him a snare . . .
Three-quarters of the way across the desert he comes upon the husk of a way station that served the stagelines years (or centuries, or millennia) ago.
Yet there is life here; not the man in black but a puzzling young boy named Jake, who has no understanding of how he came to be there. The gunslinger hypnotizes the boy and hears a puzzling, disquieting tale: Jake remembers a great city whose harbor is guarded by “a lady with a torch”; he remembers going to a private school and wearing a tie; he remembers yellow vehicles that pedestrians could hire.
And he remembers being killed.
Pushed from behind in front of an oncoming vehicle (called a “Cadillac”), Jake was run over. Who pushed him?
It was the man in black, he says.
There is water enough at the way station for two pilgrims to continue onward, across the rest of the desert to the foothills . . . and the mountains beyond. And in the cellar of the way station, Roland discovers a Speaking Demon in the wall which tells him: “Go slow, gunslinger. Go slow past the Drawers. While you travel with the boy, the man in black travels with your soul in his pocket.”
According to the old ways, a Speaking Demon may only speak through the mouth of a corpse; reaching into the wall, Roland discovers a jawbone which he takes with him.
As Jake and the gunslinger continue toward the mountains, the campfire remnants of the man in black grow fresher. And as Jake sleeps, the gunslinger works laboriously over the figures in his own past: Gabrielle, his mother . . . Marten, the sorcerer-physician who may have been the half-brother of the man in black . . . Roland, his father1 . . . Cort, his teacher . . . Cuthbert, his friend . . . and David, the falcon, “God’s gunslinger.”
He remembers the death of a traitor, the cook Hax, by hanging . . . and how he and Cuthbert broke bread beneath the hanged man’s feet as an offering to the rooks. He remembers “the good man,” in whose service Hax died, “the good man” who has ushered in this dark age. The good man. Marten. His mother’s lover . . . and the man in black?
