by Vincent, Bev
Courage he must have found in abundance. In October, during a conference at the University of Maine in Orono,46 King read an excerpt, announcing that the first draft was more than 1,400 pages long and dealt mostly with Roland’s childhood.47
King’s twin books Desperation and The Regulators were released simultaneously in September 1996. Initially, they were bundled together with a battery-powered night-light. However, once supplies of the night-light were depleted, King suggested to his publisher that they could replace them with a small booklet containing the first two chapters of Wizard and Glass. Fans squealed with delight and shrieked in consternation. The next Dark Tower book was on its way, but to get this freebie they had to buy two hardcover books many already owned.
By now, the Internet had numerous places where fans could express their opinions. One of the most active was a USENET newsgroup called alt.books.stephen-king, which was occasionally monitored by King’s publisher, Viking. Through them, he learned of reaction to his gift. His publisher posted the following message to the newsgroup on King’s behalf.
Gentle Readers:
It’s reached my attention that there’s been a fair degree of pissing and moaning about the Wizard and Glass booklet which comes with a dual purchase of Desperation and The Regulators. I swear to God, some of you guys could die and go to heaven and then complain that you had booked a double occupancy room, and where the hell is the sauna, anyway? The major complaints seem to be coming from people who have already bought both books. Those of you who bought the double-pack got the light, right? A freebie. So whatcha cryin’ about?
The booklet was my idea, not the publisher’s—a little extra for people who wanted to buy both books after supplies of the famous “Keep You Up All Night” light ran out. If you expect to get the booklet IN ADDITION to the light, all I can say is sorry, Cholly, but there may not be enough booklets to go around. If you bought the two books separately, because there weren’t any gift packs left (they sold faster than expected, which is how this booklet deal came up in the first place), go back to where you bought them, tell the dealer what happened, show him/her your proof of (separate) purchase, and they’ll take care of you. If they get wise witcha, tell ’em Steve King said that was the deal.
If you’re just jacked because you want to read the first two chapters of Wizard and Glass, wait until the whole thing comes out. Or put it on your T.S. List and give it to the chaplain. In any case, those of you who are yelling and stamping your feet, please stop. If you’re old enough to read, you’re old enough to behave.
STEVE KING48
King’s frustration with reader demands rings out loud and clear—so much so that many people refused to believe it was genuine.49 The hue and cry was all for nothing as it turned out—Penguin posted the excerpt on their Web site two months later.
In the introduction to the preview—which he calls “a signal of good faith” for readers who have waited five years since the previous installment—King quotes Susannah from The Waste Lands. “It is hard to begin,” she thinks while preparing to challenge Blaine the Mono in a game of riddles. Returning to the Dark Tower series has often been hard for King. “And sometimes scary, too.”50
Wizard and Glass proved to be the longest book of the series—so long that the 780-page signed/limited edition from Donald M. Grant was split into two volumes. The first copies shipped on August 9, 1997. Betts Bookstore, an independent seller in Bangor specializing in King editions, sent a truck to the publisher’s warehouse to speed up their delivery process. A trucking company lost or damaged about a third of the dust jackets for the deluxe signed edition, delaying its release until the end of September.
For the first time, Grant made a significant number of the forty-thousand-copy limited trade edition available to nationwide chain bookstores. Wizard and Glass became the first book from a specialty (that is, small-press) publisher to appear—albeit briefly—on the New York Times hardcover bestseller list.51 The trade paperback from Plume appeared in November with a first printing of 1.5 million copies.
The dedication begins: “This book is dedicated to Julie Eugley and Marsha DeFilippo. They answer the mail, and most of the mail for the last couple of years has been about Roland of Gilead—the gunslinger.” Shortly after the book was released, King reiterated his plan to continue working “until the cycle is done and then, that way, I can walk away from it.”
It’s always been my intention to finish. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about Roland and Eddie and Detta and all the other people, even Oy, the little animal. I’ve been living with these guys longer than the readers have, ever since college, actually, and that’s a long time ago for me.52
He intended to start work on the fifth installment in 1998 so that he could finish while he “still drew breath” and “before I can hide my own Easter eggs,” King’s expression for senility.
Wizard and Glass was the last Dark Tower book readers would see in the twentieth century, but it wasn’t Roland’s final appearance. Robert Silverberg proposed an anthology of novellas by famous fantasy writers, where the stories were to be set in the author’s best-known fictional universe. They were to be stand-alone tales so people unfamiliar with the associated works could enjoy the collection. King accepted Silverberg’s invitation to write about Roland “in a moment of weakness.”53 Though novellas allow a writer to be more expansive than short stories do, he had trouble keeping “The Little Sisters of Eluria” to a manageable length. “These days, everything about Roland and his friends wants to be not just long but sort of epic,” he wrote in the story’s introduction when it was reprinted in Everything’s Eventual.
Another novella released in F&SF in early 1997, “Everything’s Eventual,” would ultimately turn out to be a Dark Tower story, though no one realized it at the time. The venue should have been a clue. Almost every story King has published in that magazine has been related to the
Dark Tower.
His plans to complete the Dark Tower series were thwarted by reality. In 1997, he left Viking, his publisher since 1979, for Scribner. A three-book contract left little room in his schedule for the Dark Tower, though the series’ influence would continue to be felt in books like Bag of Bones and Hearts in Atlantis.
King continued to get letters asking for more Dark Tower, including one from an elderly woman with cancer begging him to tell her the ending before she died. Another letter came from a fan on death row who promised to take the secret to the grave. As much as King may have wanted to respond to either letter, he couldn’t. He didn’t know yet where the story would take him. “To know, I have to write.”54
In 1997, one reviewer,55 marveling at the scope of the series and the length of time it took to reach the midpoint, implored readers to pray for the author’s continued good health. His advice was eerily prescient. King’s accident in 1999 almost spelled the end of the Dark Tower. During his From a Buick 8 book tour, one fan told King that news of the accident made him think, “There goes the Tower, it’s tilting, it’s falling, ahhh, shit, he’ll never finish it now.”56
Despite concerns that he might not write again, King penned Dreamcatcher longhand during his rehabilitation and completed On Writing shortly thereafter. When Peter Straub suggested incorporating portions of the Dark Tower mythos into Black House, their sequel to The Talisman, King told Straub, “I’m glad you said that, because I don’t know if I can keep it out. At this point, everything I write is connected to it.”57
In August 2001, a month before Black House appeared, King announced that he had returned to the land of the gunslinger and intended to publish the remaining three books all at the same time. While he didn’t commit to a firm publication date—“Well, that’s ka, isn’t it?”—he estimated the books would appear in about two years, “depending on all the usual variables, like sickness, accidents, and—scariest of all—a failure of inspiration. The only thing I know for sure is that all these old friends of mine are as alive as they ever were. And as da
ngerous.”58 He told Amazon.com, “I felt like if I didn’t finish this time I never would.”
In preparation for his reentry to Mid-World, King purchased a new desk for the office in his winter home in Florida. The custom creation of Vancouver furniture designer Peter Pierobon, the desk had ALL THINGS SERVE THE BEAM written in raised Gregg shorthand script on its black leather surface.59 Instead of rereading the first four books, he listened to Frank Muller’s audio narrations and hired a research assistant to document everything important from the published books and related stories.
To repay readers for their patience, King posted the prologue to the as-yet-untitled fifth volume on his Web site. He originally planned to call the book The Crawling Shadow, but later decided it was “sort of corny.”60 “I was younger then,” he joked. This time there would be no complaining that the preview cost anything or was unavailable to anyone—except those without Web access.
The six-year gap between the publication of the fourth and fifth installments of the series equaled the longest interval between books. “[I]n my own defense, all I can say is that it’s never easy to find the doorway back into Roland’s world,” he wrote.61
In June 2002, King updated fans about the status of the series.
It’s easily the biggest project I’ve ever taken on, and I’m throwing in everything I have. Including a little craft, actually . . . You have to remember that this project spans over thirty years of my life, and a lot of other books I’ve written have this as their basis. I feel a little like Cal Ripken, making his farewell tour of all the stadiums in the American League. But in the quiet room where I work, no one’s cheering. I just hope some of them will when they read the pages. You have to remember that, for most Steve King readers, Roland the gunslinger’s never been a priority. The Dark Tower books are . . . well, they’re different.62
By then he had finished the first drafts of Wolves of the Calla and Song of Susannah, as well as the first third of The Dark Tower, a total of 1,900 manuscript pages. Confessing to burnout, King said he would be taking at least a month off before completing the final book.
While writing, King listened to the most boring, repetitive music he could find. He told Mitch Albom, “I’ve been working on these Dark Tower books for about fifteen months now and all I’ve been listening to is Lou Bega Mambo No. 5. I’ve got a vinyl recording that’s got four versions of Mambo No. 5—there’s the radio version, there’s the dance mix, there’s a coupla instrumental [versions].”63
By early July, he was back at work on the 1,100-page manuscript that would see readers—and the author—through to the end of the epic. At each stop while promoting From a Buick 8 in September, he updated his progress. Fifty pages left to go, he told a group in New York. Thirty-five, he told fans in Michigan. And while being interviewed by Mitch Albom for his radio show, King said he was down to the final two or three pages. “I wanted to finish it at home—I didn’t want to finish it in a hotel room in Dearborn,” he said, so he held off completing the book until he got back to Maine a few days later.64
King told Albom his tour in support of the Dark Tower books would probably be his farewell tour. He planned to get out and spread the message to the people who had been holding back, telling them that the whole story was now available.
In early October, the three books were done in first draft, a stack of manuscript pages that took up more than five reams of paper. King had reached the end of his story. For fans, another year would pass before they could return to Mid-World and the surprises King had in store for them.
An excerpt from Wolves of the Calla appeared in the anthology McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, edited by Michael Chabon, in February 2003. Titled “The Tale of Gray Dick,” this vignette gave readers insight into what was being depicted in Bernie Wrightson’s cover art, which started making the rounds of the Internet in April.
In May 2003, King’s official Web site got a face-lift, adding a section devoted to the Dark Tower. Flash animation, audio excerpts and artwork samples previewed the remaining books. Both Scribner and Viking followed suit with sections of their respective Web sites devoted to the Dark Tower. This spirit of cooperation continued between these two corporate rivals when they cosponsored a contest where the grand prize was a chance to meet King in New York.
Viking released new hardcover editions of the first four books on June 23, 2003, featuring a new introduction by King.65 Trade paperback editions from Plume followed one day later, and the NAL mass-market paperbacks appeared throughout the fall. The paperback versions of Wizard and Glass contained the Wolves of the Calla prologue, a rare instance in which one publisher promoted a book to be released by a rival company.
The new edition of The Gunslinger was revised and expanded. King completely rewrote the first book to bring it in line with the remaining books, feeling that its language and tone were vastly different from the others. He told an interviewer at Amazon.com that the original version seemed like it was trying too hard to be “something really, really important.”66 A week after it was reissued, The Gunslinger made number 17 on the New York Times hardcover best-seller list, not bad for a twenty-year-old book, especially considering the trade paperback and mass-market paperback editions of the new edition were available within a week of the hardcover release.
In July 2003, Scribner published Volume I of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower: A Concordance by Robin Furth, King’s research assistant. The book arose from her work ensuring continuity between the early novels and the remainder of the series. Volume I detailed characters, places and events in the first four books. The Calvins (the fictional Dark Tower scholars who work for Tet Corporation) would probably have produced a similar work.
Donald M. Grant published the deluxe signed editions of the remaining three books, but their limited trade edition was reduced to 3,500 copies. These artist’s edition—featuring different dust jackets from the trade hardcover and signed by the respective artist—were released early enough to be the official first editions. Scribner and Grant jointly and simultaneously issued unlimited trade hardcovers, the first time new Dark Tower books were widely available in hardcover.
In November 2003, Wolves of the Calla broke a twenty-year tradition: It was the first Dark Tower installment shorter than the one that preceded it—950 manuscript pages compared to 1,500.67 After a first printing of six hundred thousand copies, the book went back for a sixty-thousand-copy second-printing prepublication and a third printing of seventy-five thousand books was ordered the day after the book was released. A week later, the publisher ordered a fourth printing.
Song of Susannah, one of the series’ shortest installments, followed in June 2004, and the final book, The Dark Tower, was published on King’s birthday in September of the same year, with the second volume of Robin Furth’s concordance appearing simultaneously.
Trade paperbacks followed approximately six months after the individual hardcover releases and mass-market paperback publication is scheduled to begin in 2006.
The Dark Tower’s long and arduous road to publication has at last come to its end.
ENDNOTES
1 According to the quasifictional journal at the end of Song of Susannah.
2 NewsNight with Aaron Brown on CNN, June 24, 2003.
3 The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, October 1978. Roland’s name doesn’t appear in the story, only in this endnote.
4 An intriguing aside—the November issue contained a story by Larry Niven and Dian Girard called “Talisman.”
5 King mentions Grant’s editions of Howard’s novels in Wolves of the Calla. Grant was awarded a life achievement World Fantasy Award in November 2003, the weekend before Wolves of the Calla was published.
6 Garrett Condon, “King’s ‘Other’ Publisher Well-Kept Collectors’ Secret,” originally in the Hartford Courant, August 28, 1987. Reprinted in Castle Rock Newsletter, Volume 3–4, No. 11–1, December 1987/January 1988.
7 Introduction, Stephen King’s
The Dark Tower: A Concordance, Volume I, Robin Furth, Scribner, 2003.
8 When The Gunslinger was released, Whelan was already a three-time World Science Fiction (Hugo) Award winner for Best Professional Artist and two-time World Fantasy Award winner for Best Artist. By 2002, Whelan had won the Hugo Award an unprecedented fifteen times after thirty-two nominations.
9 This issue of Whispers also contained the first appearance of The Shining’s excised prologue, a piece that remained a rarity for fifteen years, until an abridged version was published in TV Guide in 1997.
10 In his editorial, Stuart David Schiff is unsure what art will illustrate the magazine’s cover, as Stewart’s illustration, sent out for four-color separation, was lost somewhere in transit. As a backup, Donald M. Grant and Michael Whelan gave Schiff permission to use one of the Grant edition illustrations, but the Stewart pictures must have materialized at the last minute.
11 Approximately 1,500 were misbound, affecting the order of the pages. [Fear Itself, Tim Underwood and Chuck Miller, editors. Underwood-Miller press, 1982.]
12 Darrell Schweitzer, “Collecting Stephen King, part I,” Castle Rock Newsletter, vol. 1, no. 10, October 1985.
13 In a Today Show interview with Matt Lauer [June 23, 2003], King said he didn’t understand what the poem meant but he loved the “gorgeous mystery of it.”
14 Referenced in The Art of Darkness, Douglas E. Winter. The essay discusses King’s experience with The Dark Tower backlash.
15 The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, he told an audience at Yale in April 2003. He also told them he was flying high on mescaline at the time.
16 “On Being Nineteen (and a Few Other Things),” Viking, 2003.
17 The Gunslinger was not listed on the ad-card in Christine, King’s other 1982 hardcover release.