by Vincent, Bev
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First Electronic edition, November 2004
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I have not forgotten the face of my father,
Donald Vincent,
gone to the clearing at the end of the path
July 1, 1927–January 3, 2003
KEY TO REFERENCED WORKS
DT1: The Gunslinger
DT2: The Drawing of the Three
DT3: The Waste Lands
DT4: Wizard and Glass
DT5: Wolves of the Calla
DT6: Song of Susannah
DT7: The Dark Tower
SL: ’Salem’s Lot
TS: The Stand
DS: Different Seasons
TT: The Talisman
ED: The Eyes of the Dragon
TK: The Tommyknockers
INS: Insomnia
RM: Rose Madder
LS: “The Little Sisters of Eluria”
HA: Hearts in Atlantis
OW: On Writing
BH: Black House
EE: Everything’s Eventual
FB8: From a Buick 8
INTRODUCTION
MORE WORLDS THAN THESE
There are quests and roads that lead ever onward, and all of them end in the same place—upon the killing ground. Except, perhaps, the road to the Tower.
[DT1]
“Everything in the world is either coming to rest or falling to pieces,” he said flatly. “At the same time, the forces which interlock and give the world its coherence—in time and size as well as in space—are weakening. . . .
The Beams are breaking down.”
[DT3]
“When one quests for the Dark Tower, time is a matter of no concern at all.”
[DT1, foreword]
A gunslinger rides into town, sitting tall in his saddle. He wears two sinister guns low on his hips. He grieves the memory of his one true love, long dead. A honky-tonk piano plays inside the saloon near where he puts up his horse. Someone approaches him stealthily from behind and he turns in a blur, guns drawn, ready for a fight, only to find either the town drunk or the village idiot.
Though this description resembles the scene in The Gunslinger where Roland enters Tull and meets Nort the Weedeater, recently raised from the dead, it actually comes from the opening page of “Slade,” a Western political satire1 that Stephen King serialized in The Maine Campus between June and August 1970.
Elements from this story are mirrored in Wizard and Glass, written a quarter of a century later. The love of Slade’s life—Miss Polly Peachtree of Paduka (sic), Illinois—is dead. Sam Columbine killed Sandra Dawson’s rancher father and is trying to take over her land. It’s a short hop from Sandra Dawson to Susan Delgado, whose father was murdered and whose land and possessions have fallen to Hart Thorin. Sandra Dawson’s top man is also named Hart.
Columbine hired a bunch of hardcases—Big Coffin Hunters, in other words—and “Pinky” Lee rides about with Regulators. A sinister character with a deadly pet snake evolved into the witch Rhea. Slade utters Clint Eastwood–like epithets.2 A character loses the index and middle fingers from one hand, though it isn’t Slade. The story even directly mentions its author, Steve King. Of course, Slade is slightly more cavalier about killing people than Roland is,3 and the story ends with the gunslinger wrapping his arm altogether too fondly around his horse’s neck as they wander off into a romantic sunset.
While Jack Slade and his “sinister .45s” stalked the streets of Dead Steer Springs, his creator, Stephen King, was beginning a more serious endeavor, one that would occupy him off and on for the next thirty-five years.
In his introduction to “The Little Sisters of Eluria,” King writes, “If there’s a magnum opus in my life, it’s probably the yet unfinished seven-volume series about Roland Deschain4 of Gilead and his search for the Dark Tower which serves as the hub of existence.” [EE] Using “unfinished” and “magnum opus” in the same sentence may seem presumptuous, but by the time Everything’s Eventual appeared in early 2002, King was well on his way to completing the series.
Shortly after King finished the last three books and publication dates were established, a joint press release from Viking, Scribner and Donald M. Grant quoted the author: “The Dark Tower has been a major part of my life and writing career. I wanted to finish it both for the readers, who have been so devoted, and for myself. . . . For me, it’s like a finale and a reunion, all at once. I’ve put everything I’ve got into these three books.”5
As you should already know, the Dark Tower series chronicles the adventures of the last gunslinger in a strange world that is somehow related to our own. (If you haven’t read all seven books, stop now, for herein there are spoilers aplenty.) Roland’s world has moved on. Time speeds up and slows down unpredictably. A night might last ten years, or nightfall might begin early in the afternoon. Compass directions shift.
Everything is slowly falling apart and at the center of the world’s ills, literally and symbolically, is the Dark Tower, which “stands at the root of time.”6 It is the nexus of
all possible universes, and was originally supported by Beams powered by an unending supply of magic. Lacking faith in the persistence of magic, men replaced it with rational—but mortal—technology.
When he is barely more than a boy—but already a gunslinger who has killed many times—Roland receives a vision of the Tower and realizes that it is failing. If it does, his world—and every other reality, including many only subtly different from our own—will be destroyed, leaving behind only chaos. In one version of America, there is a car model called the Takuro Spirit, and in another Lincoln’s picture appears on the one-dollar bill. In some dimensions, Ronald Reagan was never president, and in others a superflu decimated the population. Between these infinite universes lie dark places containing unimaginable creatures.
The Crimson King, who intends to rule the chaos after the Tower’s fall, has amassed hostage workers known as Breakers to speed up the destruction of the Beams supporting the Tower. Reaching the Tower and somehow fixing what has gone wrong is the quest Roland has chosen, or that fate chose for him.
Getting Roland and his followers, his ka-tet, to the Tower has been Stephen King’s lifelong work.
This book is the first to examine the series in its entirety. Chapter 1 follows its long and harrowing road to publication, from the time King wrote its famous first line in 1970 until the publication of The Dark Tower in late 2004.
Each book—including both the original and the revised versions of The Gunslinger—is examined individually in the following seven chapters, and the nonseries novels and stories with strong ties to the Dark Tower mythos are discussed in chapter 9. Chapter 10 explores the series’ major characters.
Chapter 11 considers the epic nature of the quest, identifies some of King’s literary influences and explores ka, while chapter 12 reflects on art and creation from King’s perspective as both the author of the seven Dark Tower books and as a character within them.
After some concluding remarks that consider the Dark Tower series as King’s magnum opus, appendices chronicle the factual publication timeline for the series and the fictional timeline of events in Roland’s world and in the various versions of Earth he and the members of his ka-tet travel. A glossary of Mid-World terms, a list of online resources and the text of Robert Browning’s mysterious poem “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” complete the appendices.
Come with me as we cross a blazing desert, traverse mountains and the beach that lies beyond, cross corrupt bridges, ride an insane train, shoot it out with deadly Wolves, skip between worlds, preserve a vacant lot in Manhattan, battle to free the Breakers and cross the desolate lands laid waste by the Crimson King until we join the last gunslinger at the top of a hill, when he sees the object of his lifelong quest for the first time.
I promise to treat you better than Roland treated many whose paths crossed his.
ENDNOTES
1 “Slade was a peace-loving man at heart, and what was more peace-loving than a dead body?”
2 “Friend, smile when you say that.”
3 “I guess you can’t win them all,” he says after accidentally shooting an innocent bystander.
4 King pronounces Roland’s last name “dess chain.” It’s likely that the mysterious and solitary gunslinger Shane who befriended a young boy influenced King’s choice of this name.
5 www.simonsays.com, Scribner’s Web presence, June 2003. Extracted from a press release issued February 2003.
6 “The Gunslinger,” The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, October 1978. This is King’s description of the Tower in the author’s note at the end of the story in its first appearance.
Chapter 1
THE LONG JOURNEY TO THE TOWER
[T]ell me a story, one that has a beginning and a middle and an end where everything is explained. Because I deserve that. . . . Jesus, you guys can’t stop there!
He was wrong, we could stop anyplace we chose to.
[FB8]
He who speaks without an attentive ear is mute.
[DT7, dedication]
The publication of Pet Sematary in 1983 was notable for several reasons. First, it was a book Stephen King had frequently told interviewers was too terrible to see in print. Second, the name on the spine was Doubleday, a publisher King had left several years earlier.
Of most significance to King’s Constant Readers, though, were three words on the author’s ad-card, opposite the title page. Near the bottom, squeezed between Cujo (1981) and Christine (1982), was this entry: The Dark Tower (1982).
What was this? A Stephen King novel no one had heard of? This innocuous listing initiated a twenty-year obsession by readers around the world who frequently clamored for the next installment in Roland Deschain’s quest to reach the Dark Tower.
In 1983, bookstores had no record of The Dark Tower. No one—it seemed—knew how to acquire this mysterious volume. This was before the Internet era; information wasn’t yet a mass-market commodity. Fan communities weren’t interconnected. Today, a curious reader encountering such a puzzle could post a query to a newsgroup or scan fan pages and official Web sites via a judiciously phrased search engine request. Searchable inventories of independent and chain bookstores across the continent are available online. Internet-based auction sites routinely offer out-of-print and rare editions.
Back then, such resources didn’t exist, so King and his publishers (past and current) were bombarded with letters, all asking the same thing: “How can I get The Dark Tower?” Doubleday reportedly received more than three thousand letters.1
The book that caused such a stir had a rather inauspicious genesis. King showed a couple of fantasy stories he had written to his agent, Kirby McCauley, who thought he might be able to sell them.2 In October 1978, shortly after the hardcover release of The Stand, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (F&SF) published “The Gunslinger,” which opened with the line, “The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed.” The forty-page novelette ended with a parenthetical doxology from King:
* * *
“Thus ends what is written in the first Book of Roland, and his Quest for the Tower which stands at the root of Time.”3
* * *
The promise of more to come.
The second installment didn’t appear until the April 1980 issue of F&SF. After another yearlong hiatus, the final three segments of the story that would become The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger appeared in rapid succession in February, July and November 1981.4
The fifth installment, described as the last story in the first cycle, contained the following harbinger above the title: “The series will be published in a limited hardcover edition by Donald M. Grant in the spring of 1982.” This was the first announcement of the book that would, two years later, cause such a clamor.
King originally had no plans to republish these stories. Not only was the tale set in an unfamiliar world—a departure from his previously published books—it was incomplete. In “The Politics of Limited Editions,” King says the stories were well received, but F&SF’s audience was somewhat different than his normal readership.
Donald M. Grant, Publications Director at Providence College, owned a small press that issued lavishly illustrated fantasy novels, including the works of Robert E. Howard.5 In 1981, while at Providence College on a speaking engagement, King praised the books Grant had produced over the years. At dinner, Grant asked King if he had anything that would lend itself to a Donald M. Grant edition. King suggested the Dark Tower, and the publisher immediately recognized the series as the kind of project he could do and sell.6 King rescued the wet and barely readable manuscript from a mildewy cellar and tweaked the stories for publication.7
Getting Michael Whelan to illustrate the first book was a stroke of good fortune. Whelan was an award-winning illustrator who had previously created drawings for the limited edition of Firestarter.8
Ads announcing the Grant edition appeared in only a few places, including volume 5 of Whispers magazine in August 1
982,9 the Stephen King issue, which featured artwork inspired by The Gunslinger. The cover illustration was “Nort the Weedeater” by John Stewart, and six other Gunslinger-inspired Stewart works appeared in a folio section of the magazine.10
Whispers editor Stuart David Schiff’s news section said, “[Grant] has just produced what might possibly be the most important book from a specialty press.” He goes on for more than half a page praising the book’s merits, its production quality and Michael Whelan’s illustrations, finishing with the following advice: “Do not miss this book.”
Alas, most people did.
The ten-thousand-copy first printing11 of The Gunslinger was the largest small-press edition in history12—this from an author whose later first-edition printings would run to seven figures. Grant’s previous pressruns had been 3,500 books or less. The ad in Whispers doesn’t mention the signed edition, but Schiff’s editorial states that this version, limited to five hundred copies, would be available for $60, compared to $20 for the trade edition.
THE STORY THAT WOULD BECOME CENTRAL to Stephen King’s body of work and his career had its genesis almost a decade before the first story appeared in F&SF, when King and his wife-to-be, Tabitha Spruce, each inherited reams of brightly colored paper nearly as thick as cardboard and in an “eccentric size.” [DT1, afterword]
To the endless possibilities of five hundred blank sheets of 7" x 10" bright green paper, King added “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” by Robert Browning, a poem he’d studied two years previously in a course covering the earlier romantic poets. “I had played with the idea of trying a long romantic novel, embodying the feel, if not the exact sense, of the Browning poem.” [DT1, afterword]13