by Bev Vincent
Speedy’s twin in the Territories explains the nature of the multiverse to Jack after leading him to an abandoned Speaking Circle like the ones encountered by Roland and his ka-tet. He says that there are “da fan” worlds—a number beyond telling, all bound together by the Dark Tower, the axle upon which many wheels spin. Ram Aballah, the Crimson King, wants to bring down the Tower. His physical being is trapped there, but he thinks his other manifestation will be freed from his court, Can-tah Abbalah, if the Tower falls.
With the rescue of Ty Marshall, the Crimson King feels a deep pain in his gut. Something fundamental has changed in his plans. Parkus thinks Jack Sawyer might end up having some part to play in the “business of the Tower” but he did not.
FROM A BUICK 8
The mysterious driver of the unusual Buick that is abandoned in Pennsylvania was probably a low man, one of the can toi. The car itself is a portal to another universe. An even more tenuous connection is the fact that one of the characters in the book, Sandy Dearborn, shares a name with the alias Roland assumes in Wizard and Glass, Will Dearborn. Dearborn was Western novelist Louis L’Amour’s middle name.
EVERYTHING’S EVENTUAL
This collection contains two stories with strong ties to the Dark Tower series. The first is the novella “The Little Sisters of Eluria,” which is discussed earlier in this book. It is a stand-alone Dark Tower story that relates one of Roland’s adventures after the fall of Gilead but before he finds the man in black’s trail.
When the short story “Everything’s Eventual” was published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1997, there was no reason to suspect that it had anything to do with the Dark Tower. However, as King developed the concept of Breakers in Hearts in Atlantis and Black House, he came to realize that the protagonist of “Everything’s Eventual,” Dinky Earnshaw, was a Breaker. A subtler crossover between the story and the series is the fact that Dinky knew Skipper Brannigan, who was a friend of a friend of Eddie Dean’s brother, Henry. His name comes up when Henry and his friends are discussing who they’d want on their side in a fight. Skipper Brannigan was Dinky’s tormentor at the grocery store where he gathered shopping carts, and Dinky was responsible for Skipper’s death.
Dinky is hired to become an e-mail assassin by Trans Corporation, which turns out to be a subsidiary of North Central Positronics. His setup is reminiscent of Algul Siento. He is provided with accommodations and anything he wants if he performs mysterious work on behalf of this shady organization. Dinky’s employer, a man named Sharpton, employs people who look for those with powers like Dinky has. Low men, in other words.
At the end of the story, Dinky writes a lethal e-mail message that contains the word “Excalibur,” which is the name of Arthur Eld’s sword, the metal from which was used to make Roland’s guns. Dinky runs away from his safe house but, as revealed in The Dark Tower, low men caught him and took him to Thunderclap.
THE COLORADO KID
At first glance, King’s short crime novel The Colorado Kid has no obvious connection to the Dark Tower series. However, readers pointed out what seemed to be an error in the story: there were no Starbucks franchises in Denver in 1980. In response, King wrote the following on his official Web site in October 2005: “Don’t assume that’s a mistake on my part. The Constant Readers of the Dark Tower series may realize that that is not necessarily a continuity error, but a clue.” In other words, King is implying that the novel takes place in the same kind of universe where there are Takuro Spirit cars and Nozz-A-La soft drinks.
One of the story’s biggest mysteries is how the Colorado Kid made it from Colorado to Maine in an impossibly short period of time. The answer could be that he went through a magic or scientific portal. Or, like Jack Sawyer, he may have crossed into another reality where distances are shorter and time moves at a different pace.
UR
This novella was published as a Kindle-only eBook in 2009. It has subsequently been made available for other eBook devices and has been released on audio. The story involves a college English professor named Wesley Smith who is shamed into buying a Kindle. However, the one that arrives is pink (the color of a rose?) and has a special feature that allows him to access books and newspapers from parallel universes. When Wesley uses these features, the screen shows an ominous black tower instead of the typical author caricature.
In the alternate realities, famous authors were born and died on different dates and produced works beyond those that are known in our “ur,” the name the device gives to each possible time line or level of the Tower. Wesley is also able to access newspapers from the future.
After he changes the future, two “low men in yellow coats” chastise him for causing unfixable damage to the time line. Wesley understands that they aren’t really men and that underneath they are reptiles or birds—or both. They wear badges featuring the Crimson King’s red eye on their lapels, only these eyes are alive and watching him. The low men tell him that he has no idea what he did. “The Tower trembles; the worlds shudder in their courses. The rose feels a chill, as of winter.”
When Wesley mentions the Tower he saw on the screen, the low men say that all things serve the Tower. Wesley responds that that means he also serves the Tower, to which they have no answer. The story’s unanswered question is who sent the Kindle to him. Was it, perhaps, ka?
MILE 81
The mud-covered station wagon that materializes at a closed rest stop along the Maine Turnpike is a “low men” vehicle that is actually alive and hungry, like the car in From a Buick 8.
11/22/63
Though King took measures to keep 11/22/63 from being an overt Dark Tower novel, many of its concepts are familiar to readers of the series. Most obvious is the use of a portal to travel to a different time. It is a North Central Positronics kind of door, always arriving at the same place and time, rather than a magic door, which can be aimed. The lead character, Jake Epping, spends a few months in Derry, which is a significant location in the Dark Tower universe.
The entire concept for 11/22/63 is laid out in Wolves of the Calla. Using Black Thirteen and the Unfound Door, a person could go back to Dallas on November 22, 1963, and see whether Oswald acted alone or was part of a larger conspiracy, Father Callahan says. “And perhaps you could change what happened that day. If there was ever a watershed moment in American life, that was it. Change that, change everything that came after. Vietnam…the race riots…everything.” Eddie replies, “But, Pere…what if you did it and changed things for the worse? I think it takes a great man to make a great mistake. And besides, someone who came after him might have been a really bad guy. Some Big Coffin Hunter who never got a chance because of Lee Harvey Oswald, or whoever it was.”
There are other more incidental connections. Eddie Dean saw Kubrick film The Shining (though he’s never heard of Stephen King). Nigel the robot is reading The Dead Zone and has an extensive collection of King books, including Hearts in Atlantis. The word “cujo” means “sweet one” in Mejis. For an extensive look at the myriad crossovers found in King’s work, including those in books not directly connected to the Dark Tower series, see The Complete Stephen King Universe by Stanley Wiater, Christopher Golden and Hank Wagner.
AN INTERVIEW WITH STEPHEN KING
The following interview was conducted by telephone on January 9, 2012, a few months before the publication of The Wind Through the Keyhole.
Q: To what extent are you involved with the Marvel graphic novel adaptations of the Dark Tower series?
A: I monitored them really closely at the beginning. I wanted to make sure everything was on track and going the right way. I know Robin [Furth] does a really great job. After they went off on their own, I didn’t want to junk up my head with their story lines. That’s Robin’s take on all this, and she’s fine with it and she can do whatever she wants because I’m more or less done. I’ve got this one book coming out, The Wind Through the Keyhole, and there might be more after that, but if there are, they won�
��t be influenced at all by whatever’s going on in the comics and indeed might run contradictory to what’s in the comics. You know what Roland always says: There are other worlds than these.
Q: Do you have any idea why you find yourself going back to the Dark Tower series every five or six years?
A: No. I really don’t. What happened after Wizard and Glass, Marsha and Julie in the office started to bug me about all these letters they were getting. “When is he going to finish this?” So finally I said to myself: “I’m going to sit down and I’m going to write these things—the whole thing—as one novel.” By then I had a good starting place with Wolves of the Calla, because I knew what I wanted to do with it, which was kind of like Seven Samurai and The Magnificent Seven, the Western, the John Sturges thing. Once I started there, the whole thing just sort of spun itself out and I thought I was done with it.
I started to think about fairy tales. It even crossed my mind for a while that maybe what I really wanted to do was to write a book of fairy tales—not about fairies, necessarily—but make-believe stories. Then Roland just kind of walked in and said, “This is my story.” The story originally was the story of Tim Stoutheart, and all I knew was that it had to be a little boy and he had to have an evil stepfather—or stepmother, but I picked stepfather in this case. He had to go on a journey. The skin-man story was going to be something else in that same vein and ultimately the three stories just folded one into the other.
Q: Tim Ross grows up to be a gunslinger. Do you think we’ll see him again?
A: I don’t know. I never know. I know that I sort of left the door open to go back to Mid-World. I guess the one story that I might want to tell, that Robin and her gang [at Marvel] have already told—is Jericho Hill. I don’t know how they did that. I really didn’t want to read that, because if I went back to Roland at all, that would have to be the story.
Q: Would there be another meeting up with Rhea?
A: I don’t know. I don’t know anything about this stuff. I just know that when this thing comes up, every time I’ve gone into one of these things, I’ve gone in with a feeling of…this will never work. And every time it does. From the time you sit down, you know you’re in the right place. And it was great to be with Roland and his friends again and to see Eddie alive and Susannah, Oy. It was great. I really do think the book has the feel of some of those old stories.
Q: One thing that has always confused me about Roland is his age. He meets up with people over the course of his travels who knew him when he was a child, like Sheb in Tull, but he talks about being a thousand years old.
A: Sheb knows him from when he came to Mejis, not exactly as a child but as an adolescent. I don’t know any of these things. Your guess is as good as mine, really. My assumption is that something happened to Roland after Gilead fell and it has to do with the Beams and time getting funny and that he really has lived a more or less normal life, that it’s time itself that’s gone off the rails. That’s all I know. The only other thing that I can say is that my concept of the book when I started, when I was very young, like twenty-two years old, probably mutated to something that was a little less mythic as time went by.
Q: There was a period during the nineties when the Dark Tower came up in just about everything you wrote. Do you still feel that happening these days?
A: I certainly felt it happening in 11/22/63, partly because it was Derry again. The guy shows up in Derry. But also because of the very idea of the yellow card man saying, “You guys think that you haven’t been changing anything when in fact you’ve been changing everything and the whole structure of the universe is getting ready to topple.” At that point I thought to myself, I can very easily reference the Dark Tower here, but in a way I didn’t want to do that. I wanted the book to kind of stand apart, I think because of the historical basis—the whole idea of the Kennedy assassination. I wanted to make it as least fantastical as I could. So I think that people who have read the Dark Tower books and who read 11/22/63 will say that this is certainly a Tower-ish situation at the end of the book.
Q: Marten Broadcloak is a guy who has come up in many guises over the years, including in The Wind Through the Keyhole again as the tax collector.
A: You’re right. It is Marten Broadcloak, but Chuck Verrill edited the book and said, Why don’t you take out references to him until the very end when you talk about Roland’s mother, so that’s what I did. But, sure. That guy is undoubtedly Marten Broadcloak. Who’s also lived a very long life.
Q: Another character that seems to be one of his aspects is Farson.
A: Farson has nothing to do with Marten Broadcloak. Farson is a guy, and there could be stories about him, except I’ve never known how to write them, except maybe for Jericho Hill, because he never figures in. Roland is never sent to palaver with Farson or to have anything to do with him. I’m sure that Farson is a minion of the Crimson King, and Marten Broadcloak is as well, and I think there’s a reference to the two of them actually being in contact in Wizard and Glass. What I could never figure out was whether Marten Broadcloak was Flagg.
Q: You can sort of see in the early days, when the stories were first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, how your thoughts about Marten and Walter and the man in black evolved.
A: These stories all want to cohere. The Dark Tower books are always trying to get back to some kind of central myth core, but I could never define it and I never tried to, because I’m not that kind of writer. I’m very instinctive. It’s not anything that I’m really thinking of ahead of time.
Q: Do you still plan to go back and revise the other books to bring them all into line?
A: I don’t know if it’s a project that anyone would care about and I’m a little bit leery about doing it. The first book really had to be done because it had to be brought in line with the way book seven ends. If I went and rewrote the rest of them, I know that I could do work that would please me as the author, but I think that a lot of people might pick up the books and pay the money and say, geez, I don’t know why I bought this. He sold me the same book. The changes would be there, but they would be subtle. The real Dark Tower junkies would know but, for the general reader, I don’t think so.
Q: The character of Maerlyn interested me in The Wind Through the Keyhole because he’s sort of a tired, cranky old man. He was reminiscent of the Turtle from It, who was also world-weary.
A: Yeah, he is. It’s nothing that I ever thought of consciously. I think that if I drew from anything there, I might have drawn from T. H. White’s The Sword in the Stone. His Merlin is sort of cranky, too. I may have drawn a little bit from that. But basically I wanted to play against type. I didn’t want any big, magnificent Disney-animated Merlin. I wanted somebody who seemed like he could be a real person. I love it when the kid says to him, “Was his magic stronger than yours?” And Maerlyn says, “No, but I was drunk.” That’s a very human thing.
Q: At what point did you know how the Dark Tower series was going to end?
A: I knew how things were going to end from probably Wolves of the Calla or Wizard and Glass. There was always a question of what was going to happen when Roland got to the Tower. One possibility was that we would never know. That he would blow his horn and go to the Tower and that would be the end of the series. I’ve never had a lot of patience for that kind of thing. I feel like you have to give people everything and if they like it they like it, and if they don’t, they don’t. A lot of people didn’t like the way the thing ended, but after all the things that I’d written about how ka is a wheel and it always comes back to where it started, I don’t see how anybody could have expected anything different, really. That’s the way it works. The same idea exists in Ghost Brothers of Darkland County, that until you get things right, you have to do them over and over and over again. That’s human nature, as I understand it. That’s how we do what we do. If you want to quit smoking, for instance, if you fail, then you’re smoking again. You’re back where you were. Maybe
you try again, and sooner or later something changes, but only through that process of repetition and incremental learning.
I used to get crazy and I stopped finally by the time that I got into those last three books—the Internet was a growing concern, and people were sending all these posts and everything. There were all these theories about how the Dark Tower was going to end. There were Web sites that were dedicated to it, and all these physicists would write in and say all these things about wormholes and everything, and I’m thinking, Jesus Christ, you guys, I’m an English major. I flunked fucking physics. Give me a break. I did what I did. That’s it.
Q: Do you have an idea of what changes Roland needs to make to redeem himself?
A: Sure. I do. I know exactly what he’s got to do. You have to go back to the first book and look at that and then you’ll know the answer.
Q: Did you always plan to include yourself in the series?
A: No. But after the accident, I was thinking if I had died in that accident it would have been like The Mystery of Edwin Drood. There would have been this whole setup with no conclusion, and to me that was kind of an awful thought—that I would not have a chance to finish what I started. I began to think, well, I am the god of these people’s world. I’m sort of the over-soul that they don’t know anything about, and if all things serve the Beam, then I’m a part of that because I’ve written all these books with the Dark Tower in it and everything, and I thought it was really a neat thing to do. The idea that if they saved me, then the story continued. You know, that’s kind of an old idea, too, the idea of saving the creator so the story continues.
Q: When I was working on The Road to the Dark Tower, you mentioned in passing that Roland had a brother and a sister. Would you like to elaborate on that?