A Brief Guide to Stephen King

by Paul Simpson

  As everyone celebrates, Mia takes control of Susannah’s body and goes through the doorway with Black Thirteen, cutting off the rest of the ka-tet’s access to that world . . .

  The accident which nearly took Stephen King’s life had a dramatic effect on the story of the Dark Tower. Although he knew how it would end, and a lot of the pieces along the way, the realization that he might have died, leaving the book stuck in limbo, altered King’s perspective on it. One of the tasks he set himself once he was back writing was to complete this epic adventure.

  The three books which form the concluding trilogy of the original version of the ‘Dark Tower’ series were written as one, and divided for publication. Readers were not going to have to wait for another six years to find out what happened next: all three books were advertised together, with Viking even including a prologue from the Grant edition of Wolves of the Calla in their trade reprint of Wizard and Glass.

  Prior to starting work on the new story, King listened to the entire quartet of novels as recorded by Frank Muller, and hired Robin Furth as his assistant to prepare a list of every important name and object from the saga to date – this would eventually form the core of Furth’s mammoth Dark Tower Concordance. The fifth volume went through various title changes: initially it was known as ‘The Crawling Shadow’, or ‘The Werewolves of End-World’ before he decided on Wolves of the Calla, which he subtitled ‘Resistance’.

  The saga’s roots in the Western became more obvious in this story, which riffs on the John Sturges film The Magnificent Seven, itself a version of Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai. The Spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone, and the works of Howard Hawks also play a significant role. King also mined his own back catalogue: Pere Callahan is the erstwhile priest of ’Salem’s Lot, and this book acts as a sequel to King’s second bestseller, providing considerable detail about Callahan’s life and death after leaving the Lot, and mentioning in passing the fate of the book’s protagonist, Ben Mears (which Callahan learns when the Black Thirteen allows him to go todash). Callahan’s reaction when he reads excerpts from the vampire novel is priceless.

  The intervention of agents of the Crimson King in our world, as seen in Hearts in Atlantis, is put in context as well. In the reality Eddie and Jake visit, Charlie the Choo-Choo has a new author: Claudia y Inez Bachman, important because there are nineteen letters in her name, but also because she was the widow of a writer who died of cancer of the pseudonym, one Richard Bachman.

  Two excerpts were released ahead of publication: the prologue appeared on King’s website as ‘Calla Bryn Sturgis’, while ‘The Tale of Gray Dick’ was published in the magazine Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern in February 2003 and a month later in the book anthology, McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales. Both stories were tweaked from their final printed versions to remove extraneous information about plotlines that weren’t relevant to the short story form.

  Wolves of the Calla was the final book in the saga to have an ‘Argument’ at the front – in the second to fourth books, these served as an aide-memoire for readers given the length of time between publication. The ‘Final Argument’ in Wolves ends with King admonishing the reader not to start in the middle of the story with this tale. In an interview with himself on his website (a conceit he occasionally used to get information to the fans), he confirmed that there would be no more ‘Arguments’, particularly given how quickly the final two volumes would be appearing.

  The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah

  (Donald M. Grant, June 2004)

  Managing to get the doorway open, the ka-tet is split, with Jake, Oy and Pere Callahan sent to New York in 1999 on the trail of Mia/Susannah, and Roland and Eddie arriving in Maine in 1977 to try to ensure the safety of the lot containing the rose.

  When Mia is in the Keystone (i.e. our) World, she has legs, and the door deposits her at the corner of Second Avenue and 46th, which now contains 2 Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, a skyscraper known as the Black Tower, inside which is the rose. Susannah and Mia cooperate to get hold of a hotel room, where they can go todash to talk properly. Arriving at Castle Discordia, in End-World, Mia explains she will call the baby Mordred, because he will slay his father, Roland. Susannah hasn’t realized that Roland was the father – she was impregnated by a demon that had retained Roland’s semen from having sex with him as a female. Mia also tells her that the Tower will fall; all Roland can do is slow it down, while the Crimson King wants its end to come quicker, so he can rule over the resulting chaos. Mia was a demonic spirit who gave up her immortality to have a child, and even though she knows Mordred will grow rapidly, it is worth it to her. Richard Sayre calls Mia to the Dixie Pig restaurant where Mia realizes she has been used and asks Susannah for help. However, she is taken through a door to the Fedic Dogan, where the two women are separated, and the foetus transferred to Mia.

  Roland and Eddie are ambushed as they arrive in Maine, but escape thanks to local old-timer John Cullum. They succeed in persuading Tower to deed the lot to them and then start looking for Stephen King, whose name they recognize from the copy of ’Salem’s Lot. Since King moved to the area, there have been ‘walk-ins’ by creatures from other dimensions, and Eddie and Roland deduce that their adventures are linked to the writer. Possibly King and the rose represent the only two surviving Beams supporting the Tower. King recognizes Roland and under hypnosis explains that he has been prevented from continuing writing the story of the Tower. Roland implants a suggestion to return to it periodically, and King tells Roland to destroy Black Thirteen, and that the baby will be dangerous to Susannah.

  King is able to send a message forward through time to Jake, in the shape of a key. Jake and Callahan also get a message from Susannah sending them to her hotel, where they find Black Thirteen. Despite its best endeavours, they are able to leave the orb in a locker in the World Trade Center, paid ahead for three years – i.e. beyond 9/11. Following Susannah’s trail to the Dixie Pig, they expect to die in the attempt to rescue her, but find a scrimshaw turtle that Susannah discarded earlier which gives them some hope.

  The coda covers Stephen King’s diary from 1977 to 1999, relating his quest to write about the Dark Tower, and the reception he receives. It concludes with a newspaper report of his death on 19 June 1999.

  Song of Susannah introduces Stephen King as a character within the ‘Dark Tower’ saga, a move that divides fans to this day. King has admitted that it wasn’t part of the initial plan for the story, but that it was triggered by the accident in 1999. If he had died then, the ‘Dark Tower’ would have been his own unfinished symphony, rather like Charles Dickens’ The Mystery of Edwin Drood. He saw himself, to an extent, as the ‘god’ of the worlds of the characters, and that he too was serving the Beam – it’s worth noting that Roland very quickly disabuses the reader of any idea that King is a god – so saving his life would ensure that the story continued.

  King, perhaps a little disingenuously at the time, maintained that it was outside his control. ‘They always accuse me of having done this. And it doesn’t matter how many times you say to the readers: “You don’t understand. I didn’t do anything. The story did me,” they just don’t get it,’ he told the Guardian in September 2004, shortly before the final volume was released.

  The book is subtitled ‘Reproduction’ which is perhaps the most obvious in meaning of the seven ‘re-’ words that King chose for the saga’s volumes. We learn more about Pere/Father Callahan’s life after ’Salem’s Lot, and the crisis of faith which he experienced. Otherwise the connections to King’s work are primarily through the characters’ encounter with King – and the comments he makes about his own life in his ‘diary’ entries included as the story’s coda.

  The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower

  (Donald M. Grant, September 2004)

  Pere Callahan sacrifices himself to save Jake as the battle rages in the Dixie Pig. Jake gets through to Susannah, who by this stage has seen Mordred’s birth, and subsequent transfor
mation into a were-spider (since somehow he is also the son of the Crimson King). The creature eats Mia and then escapes, but can’t maintain his spider form for long. Walter O’Dim (aka Randall Flagg) turns up hoping to kill Mordred, and use the mark of the Eld on his foot to gain access to the Dark Tower. Instead, Mordred kills Flagg.

  After establishing a ka-tet of the rose in 1977 Maine to ensure its survival, Eddie and Roland arrive in time to kill a posse chasing Jake, and reunite with their friends. The ka-tet decide they need to free the Breakers, who are being forced to destroy the Beams holding up the Tower. They pass through to Thunderclap Station where they meet a trio of renegade Breakers – Ted Brautigan (from Hearts in Atlantis), Dinky Earnshaw (from ‘Everything’s Eventual’) and Roland’s friend Sheemie – who help them with the attack. Eddie Dean dies during this battle.

  Warned by Brautigan that Stephen King is in danger because ka is angry that he has stopped working on Roland’s story, Jake, Oy and Roland travel to Maine on 19 June 1999, saving King’s life, but at the expense of Jake. Roland and Oy travel to New York, where Roland reveals that although he has saved both the Tower and King, he still has more to do: he wants to confront the creature at the top of the Tower and make it undo the harm it has done to Mid-World and to Roland.

  Roland and Oy reunite with Susannah and travel across the Badlands from Castle Discordia. They are pursued by Mordred, and encounter Dandelo, about whom both Eddie and Jake tried to warn Roland as they died. Susannah saves Roland, with help from Stephen King (who intervenes in his own story to provide a deus ex machina), and they then find Patrick Danville (from Insomnia) who has been Dandelo’s prisoner, his tongue cut out. They realize Patrick’s talent is in drawing: what he draws comes to exist; what he erases disappears. Susannah gets him to draw an Unfound door for her, and she steps through into an alternate New York, where she meets a different Eddie who has a younger brother, Jake. Their paths are set for a happier future.

  The gunslinger, the artist, and Oy continue towards the Tower, and Oy manages to save Roland from Mordred, but pays with his life. Roland then kills his son. Roland and Patrick approach the Tower, and come under attack from the Crimson King, but Patrick draws him out of existence. Roland then sends Patrick back before entering the Tower, after showing the cross he was given and his gun.

  And there Roland finds his answers . . .

  As with his own involvement in Song of Susannah (and The Dark Tower), King received multiple complaints about the ending of the final volume – a conclusion the Stephen King of the novel warns readers to be careful of, and which would be unfair to reveal here. Most fans reluctantly accepted that what King wrote was the only appropriate ending, and the author was adamant that this was what he had in mind for many years. King would return to the story of the Dark Tower eventually, but only to fill in pieces that had been overlooked along the way, rather than to continue Roland’s story beyond the last pages of The Dark Tower. ‘No matter how it ended people were going to be pissed off with me,’ he told the Guardian. ‘Nothing will make them happy!’

  The first half of the original afterword which he penned for The Dark Tower became used as the introductory essay (‘On Being Nineteen’) in the revised version of The Gunslinger, after artist Michael Whelan commented on its inappropriate light-hearted tone, coming after a book filled with a lot of deaths and what some might see as a bleak ending.

  The Afterword also made clear how different the Stephen King of the ‘Dark Tower’ saga was from the real Steve King who lives in Maine and Florida, but emphasized that he didn’t regret any of the time that he had spent in Roland’s world – a world that crossed over into his other writing, as demonstrated by the number of key characters in the final volumes who appeared elsewhere first.

  The Dark Tower won the British Fantasy Award in 2005 as well as the Deutscher Phantastik Preis; King was given a Lifetime Achievement Award at the World Fantasy Convention in 2004. It was appropriate: while promoting the final books, he was talking about retirement – although he admitted that he had written the draft of a book, which became Lisey’s Story. For King, reaching the Tower had been the goal, and fulfilling the dream of the young author in his early twenties who had wanted to create a huge, popular novel. He didn’t seriously expect to go back.

  The Dark Tower: The Wind Through the Keyhole

  (Donald M. Grant, February 2012)

  Roland and his ka-tet have left the Green Palace (at the end of Wizard and Glass) and are proceeding towards the Tower. They meet a ferryman who explains that Oy’s frenetic behaviour is because billy-bumblers can sense oncoming starkblasts, and one of these freezing tornadoes is heading their way. The group take cover, and Roland tells them two stories, one within the other.

  After Roland returns from Mejis (as related in Wizard and Glass) his father sends him on another mission along with Jamie DeCurry, to investigate reports of a skin-man, a beast that can walk like a man when it chooses. They deduce that the skin-walker is probably one of the local miners, and after a ranch is attacked, Roland hypnotizes the young lad who survives. He learns that the skin-walker has a tattoo on his ankle and can ride. While Jamie heads off to round up the suspects and spread the word that there’s an eyewitness, Roland keeps Bill occupied by telling him the story of ‘The Wind Through the Keyhole’ (set out below) which his mother told him when he was young.

  When Jamie returns, the skin-walker is identified, and kills two people as a snake before Roland kills it with a silver bullet he has made earlier. He persuades the local prioress to take Bill in, and the prioress gives him a letter from his mother, who stayed there after her adultery with Marten Broadcloak was discovered. She suggests she knew she would die at Roland’s hands, and forgives him, as well as begging his forgiveness. After the starkblast passes, the ka-tet carry on towards Calla Bryn Sturgis.

  ‘The Wind Through the Keyhole’ is the story of Tim Ross, whose father was recently killed by a dragon. His mother remarries, but his stepfather, Bern Kells, is a mean alcoholic. When the feared tax gatherer, the Covenant Man, arrives in the village, he meets Tim secretly. He tells the boy that Kells killed his father, and shows Kells blinding his mother. Later, he sends a message to Tim asking to meet in the woods again where he will provide magic to cure his mother. Tim takes a gun with him, and is led towards a swamp by a mischievous fairy. The boy makes his way across the swamp with help from the locals, and finds a large tyger. When a starkblast approaches, Tim befriends the tyger, who turns out to be a transformed Maerlyn. The magician gives Tim the cure, and his mother slays Kells after he tries to attack Tim.

  During interviews to promote Under the Dome in late 2009, Stephen King announced that he recently had the idea for a short story, and had contemplated writing three similar pieces to create a book ‘that would be almost like modern fairy tales’. However, as the idea percolated, he came to see that it was a ‘Dark Tower’ story, and so the tale would form the centrepiece of a new ‘Dark Tower’ novel. He also had a vision of a vicious storm, a line of riders, a severed head on a post, and a swamp. He further explained that while working on the copy-edit of his next book, 11/22/63, he saw how it could fit into the established saga, between the fourth and fifth volumes: ‘call this one DT-4.5’ he suggested in the official announcement.

  King’s editor and agent Chuck Verrill suggested that King had wanted to write a father-son story, now that his own boys were parents. ‘I think he wanted to capture something both essential and fantastic about the passage of childhood, and couldn’t resist turning to Mid-world, a setting that’s both archaic and post-apocalyptic and filled with the artefacts of our own culture.’ He also didn’t believe King could ‘resist’ writing another ‘Dark Tower’ book at some point.

  Verrill suggested to King that he remove the references to the Covenant Man being another incarnation of Marten Broadcloak, and just confine Marten’s involvement to the letter from Roland’s mother. The characterization of Maerlyn was drawn in part from T.H. White’s portrayal
of Merlin in the novel The Sword in the Stone.

  The Wind Through the Keyhole – a description of ‘time’ according to King’s assistant Robin Furth – was the first ‘Dark Tower’ story written after Marvel had begun releasing their comic book series. King wasn’t concerned about contradicting continuity established in those stories, but it is perhaps a little surprising that he has Roland telling a tale that includes references to Dogans, Directive Nineteen and North Central Positronics – all of which seem new to the ka-tet when they are mentioned in Wolves of the Calla.

  ‘The Little Sisters of Eluria’ (1998)

  Roland is searching for clues that will lead him to the Tower, and encounters a hospital marquee run by an unusual group of nuns after he is attacked by a group of slow mutants. They are vampires, who feed on their patients once they’ve recovered. With the help of Sister Jenna, who wants to leave the Little Sisters, Roland is able to escape, but Jenna disintegrates into a mass of tiny bugs – which the Sisters used to ‘cure’ their patients – after declaring her love for Roland. Alone once more, Roland continues his quest.

  This prequel to The Gunslinger was written for the anthology Legends in 1998, and then reprinted in Everything’s Eventual four years later. The story was commissioned by Robert Silverberg, with King claiming that ‘in a moment of weakness I agreed to do a Gunslinger novella for the book’. The ‘doctor’ bugs reappear in Song of Susannah and The Dark Tower, while there are explicit crossovers with The Eyes of the Dragon (one of the other patients comes from Delain), and with both The Talisman and Black House. The Sisters use the same unformed language as Tak, the evil at the heart of Desperation and The Regulators, with Eluria stated to be near the Desatoya Mountains, the site of the mine in Desperation.