by Vincent, Bev
18 “The Politics of Limited Editions,” part 1, Castle Rock Newsletter, vol. 1, no. 6, June 1985.
19 Since this comes from a fictionalized journal, these comments do not necessarily reflect King’s real views.
20 “The Politics of Limited Editions,” part 1, op. cit.
21 In the coda at the end of Song of Susannah, the fictional King considers the possibility that he may retire, or at least ease up considerably, when he finishes the Dark Tower series.
22 “The Politics of Limited Editions,” part 1, op. cit.
23 Ibid.
24 King says in “The Politics of Limited Editions” that Pet Sematary had a rolling gross of about $7 million.
25 “The Politics of Limited Editions,” part 1, op. cit.
26 Donald M. Grant in Castle Rock Newsletter, vol 1, no. 12, December 1985. A third printing was issued with new cover art in 1998 as part of a boxed set containing the first three volumes of the series, and a revised and expanded edition was published by Viking in 2003.
27 First and second printings currently garner about $500 and $200, respectively. The signed/limited first edition typically sells for several thousand dollars.
28 “The Politics of Limited Editions,” part 1, op. cit.
29 Introduction to Robin Furth, Stephen King’s The Dark Tower: A Concordance, Volume I, Scribner, 2003. No sinister inferences should be made concerning the author’s initials. In The Unseen King [Starmont Press, 1989], Tyson Blue says that a handwritten fragment of the book was part of a notebook auctioned at a World Science Fiction Convention in 1986. It sold for $5,200.
30 This was long before the Internet era popularized the notion of a FAQ.
31 Castle Rock Newsletter, vol. 1, no. 10, October 1985.
32 Walden Book Report, December 1997.
33 A line he borrowed from the Charlie Sheen movie Terminal Velocity.
34 “He’d be the only one to do pictures for two of the books, but since he was there at the beginning, it’d be great if he was there at the end.” (www.stephenking.com, June 2002)
35 Tyson Blue, The Unseen King, Starmont Press, 1989.
36 Ibid.
37 Grant has continued this matching number/lottery system throughout the publication history of the Dark Tower books, extending it to other King limited editions they have published, like Desperation and Black House.
38 The station’s call letters are derived from King’s The Dead Zone. Careful listeners can hear traffic sounds—transports, especially—in the background of this recording.
39 Muller was involved in a career-ending motorcycle accident in 2001. George Guidall, host of the Wavedancer Foundation Benefit to raise money for Muller’s medical bills, recorded the final three Dark Tower books and the revised The Gunslinger. King had already dedicated Wolves of the Calla to Muller before his accident, calling him the man “who hears the voices in my head.” Muller narrated numerous other King novels, including The Green Mile and Black House, as well as books by John Grisham, Peter Straub, Pat Conroy and many others.
40 Castle Rock Newsletter, vol. 5, no. 3, March 1989.
41 Introduction to Robin Furth’s Concordance, Volume I. Op. cit.
42 In 1998, Grant issued a slipcased edition of the first three books to help relieve inventory of excess copies of The Waste Lands. This set contained a third printing of The Gunslinger (with new cover art), a second edition of The Drawing of the Three (with new illustrations throughout) and a first edition of The Waste Lands.
43 Larry King Live, CNN, August 29, 1994. The novel was either Rose Madder (1995) or Desperation (1996).
44 Stephen Spignesi, “A Piece of SKIN,” SKIN newsletter, issue 1.7, November 1994.
45 The Green Mile: The Two Dead Girls, introduction, March 1996, NAL.
46 The speech was part of a two-day symposium called “Reading Stephen King: Issues of Student Choice, Censorship, and the Place of Popular Literature in the Canon.”
47 It ended up being fifteen hundred pages in manuscript. The Dark Tower manuscript was “only” eleven hundred pages.
48 alt.books.stephen-king, November 21, 1996.
49 The language is classic King. “So solly, Cholly!” appears in Wizard and Glass. Two expressions, “pissing and moaning” and “put it on your T.S. List and give it to the chaplain,” appear in From a Buick 8, and the first phrase also shows up in Black House.
50 “An Excerpt from the Upcoming Wizard and Glass,” Penguin Books, 1996.
51 It entered the Wall Street Journal list at number 3 on September 4, 1997, and debuted in a tie for the number 12 position of the New York Times list on September 21, King’s fiftieth birthday. It dropped off the list the following week, but the Plume paperback debuted in first place two months later.
52 Walden Book Report, December 1997.
53 Interview with Joseph B. Mauceri, The World of Fandom, March 2001.
54 “On Being Nineteen (and a Few Other Things),” Viking, 2003.
55 Edward Bryant in Locus magazine, October 1997.
56 The Gunslinger, introduction, Viking, 2003. King’s response: “Thanks for the sympathy, guys.” [Interview with Paula Zahn, CNN, October 31, 2003.]
57 Peter Straub, interview with Jeff Zaleski, Publishers Weekly, August 20, 2001.
58 www.stephenking.com, August 21, 2001.
59 Vancouver Sun, January 11, 2002. The desk also has two secret drawers. Pierobon often uses language-based decoration in his work as a way to communicate with whoever uses the piece. Pierobon, obviously not a Dark Tower fan, said he didn’t know the significance of the quote.
60 AOL chat, September 19, 2000.
61 www.stephenking.com, August 21, 2001.
62 www.stephenking.com, June 2002. In Song of Susannah’s coda, fictional King expresses his disappointment with falling sales figures for the Dark Tower books and hopes that they improve once the series is done.
63 The Mitch Albom Show, September 30, 2002.
64 Ibid. The first draft of the manuscript has a completion date of October 3, 2002.
65 The Phil Hale artwork in The Drawing of the Three came from the second Grant edition, previously only available as part of their gift set.
66 Interview with Ben Reese, published on Amazon.com in May 2003.
67 Wolves of the Calla clocked in at 736 pages, compared to 780 pages for Wizard and Glass, though the Viking hardcover reissue was only 672 pages long.
Chapter 2
THE GUNSLINGER (RESUMPTION)
The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.1
Welcome to the weird, weird west.2
The fictional Stephen King encountered by Roland and Eddie in Song of Susannah describes the first sentence of The Gunslinger as possibly “the best opening line I ever wrote.” [DT6] It simultaneously introduces the protagonist, his adversary and the setting in a few well-chosen words.
King wrote this sentence and the rest of the story that would become “The Gunslinger” not long after he graduated from the University of Maine at Orono in 1970. At the time, he had written—but hadn’t yet published—a few novels. His print appearances were limited to short stories in men’s magazines and articles and columns in the campus newspaper. He decided “it was time to stop goofing around and get behind the controls of one big great God a’mighty steamshovel, a sense that it was time to try and dig something big out of the sand, even if the effort turned out to be an abysmal failure.” [DT1, afterword]
The young author could never have envisioned that he was embarking on a journey that would bracket his long and prosperous publishing career or that the gunslinger’s quest would consume nearly thirty-five years of his life.
At the time of its publication, The Gunslinger was significantly different than anything else he had written. Though his books often featured characters with otherworldly powers, the settings were familiar—a small town in Maine, a Colorado hotel, suburban Pittsburgh or, as in The Stand, the sprawling canvas of America. He believed
that people responded to supernatural or fantasy elements when they’re wedded closely to reality.3
In later years, King would dabble more in the fantastic with books like The Talisman and The Eyes of the Dragon,4 but in The Gunslinger he ranged beyond modern America for the first time.5 Within the first few pages it’s clear that the gunslinger isn’t traveling in familiar territory. A postapocalyptic version of Earth, perhaps. A land that has “moved on,” though he doesn’t explain what this implies. For all its strangeness, the setting contains familiar elements: humans, donkeys, tombstones, revolvers, Jesus and the omnipresent Beatles song “Hey Jude.”
Before J.R.R. Tolkien started writing The Lord of the Rings, he spent much of his life creating the fictional universe populated by hobbits, elves and orcs. He knew the culture, languages and history of Middle Earth intimately. King, by his own admission, knew very little about Roland, his background or his destiny when he finished the stories that comprise The Gunslinger.6 The Dark Tower itself isn’t mentioned until almost the middle of the book.
King relies on his innate and subconscious understanding of the story to carry him through to the end of this epic quest, believing that the story will come to him when summoned. It is an act of faith both on his part and on that of the readers who join Roland on the journey from the Mohaine Desert to End-World and the field of roses surrounding the Dark Tower.
The Gunslinger is also quite different from the subsequent Dark Tower books. King metes out information about the gunslinger reluctantly, allowing the landscape to prevail instead of paying his usual attention to creating sympathetic characters. He doesn’t even name his protagonist for nearly a hundred pages.7 Artist Michael Whelan said that, though he found the book engaging, he sometimes had trouble working on the illustrations because the novel’s mood was oppressive and unremittingly bleak.8 Reviewer Edward Bryant said, “The Dark Tower series has a fundamental quality of strangeness which may account for why it is less popular than his other books.”9
Some of King’s faithful readers abandoned the book without finishing it. Others suggested that readers new to the series start with The Drawing of the Three, relying on that book’s argument to fill in the background. Those who followed this advice probably have a far different understanding of Roland from those who traveled with him across the desert and through the mountains in pursuit of the man in black.
Ultimately, even King recognized The Gunslinger as a stumbling block to some seeking entry into Roland’s universe. “I had a lot of pretentious ideas about how stories were supposed to be told,” he said.10 In the new foreword, he confesses to “apologizing for it, telling people that if they persisted they would find the story really found its voice” in the next book. While editing the last three books in the series, he took a break and revised The Gunslinger completely. When asked if someone who had already read the original version would want to get the new edition, King said, “I guess if you were a completist you would, but otherwise maybe no.”11
“The beginning was out of sync with the ending.” He felt he owed it to the potential reader and to himself to go back and put things in order. “The idea was to bring The Gunslinger in line with the material in the new books as well as the material in the first four. The other thing I wanted to do was to rewrite to some degree for language because I always felt it had a different feel than the other books because I was so young when I wrote it. The material is about an additional 10% (about 35 manuscript pages) with changes on almost every page.”12 The increased length amounts to about nine thousand words,13 but not all of the changes are additions. King deleted some passages nearly a half page in length.
Director Mick Garris compares the first night of his miniseries The Shining to winding up a clock. Not much of consequence happens, but the characters are developed and fleshed out and hints of what has been and what is to come are carefully established. The Gunslinger is similar—it sets the stage and the mood for what will follow. However, Roland’s universe is winding down rather than up. “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.”14
Guided by ka, the mysterious force shepherding him toward success, the gunslinger uses people and discards them after they’ve served their purpose or if they stand in the way of his goal. In the abstract, his actions are understandable. Saving all of existence is surely worth sacrificing a few people.
The opening section, “The Gunslinger,” covers a period of nearly two months, taking the as-yet-unnamed gunslinger15 from Pricetown through Tull and southeast16 into the desert, where he encounters Brown, a young hermit who owns a precocious talking raven named Zoltan.17
However, King begins the story five days after Roland departs from Brown’s hut. He experiences a brief spell of dizziness because he has just been returned to the desert after reaching the Tower and found lacking, though his awareness of this fades from his mind quickly. Through a series of flashbacks, he reminisces about his recent history. Readers don’t know his greater purpose or origin, only that he has been pursuing the man in black across the desert for some time. What the gunslinger wants and why the man in black is fleeing remain a mystery.
In Song of Susannah, King says he liked how the story seems to be going backward, starting with Roland, slipping back to Brown, then to Tull and finally to show Nort the Weedeater being resurrected by Walter. “The early part of it was all told in reverse gear.” [DT6]
The gunslinger’s sole companion is a moribund mule that he bought in Pricetown before reaching Tull. The arduous desert journey has drained the animal to the point where the gunslinger can no longer ride it. This isn’t the first beast of burden he’s ridden into the ground. In the opening paragraphs of “The Little Sisters of Eluria,” which takes place many years earlier, Roland’s horse, Topsy, is on its last legs as well.
The gunslinger estimates how far behind the man in black he is by the freshness of Walter’s fires, analogous to Tuco from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, who chased the man with no name across the desert. From Brown’s vague estimate, the gunslinger believes he is gradually catching up but is still several weeks behind. Desperate for companionship, the gunslinger waits for Brown to question him; he has a need to confess. The events of Tull rest heavily on his heart and mind. Though he can be cold and calculating, ruthless in the pursuit of his goal, the gunslinger isn’t heartless. Sometimes he shocks even himself.
“Do you believe in the afterlife?” he asks Brown. “I think this is it,” the young man replies. It’s a perceptive comment, because Roland has probably visited Brown countless times before, having returned to the desert after reaching the end of his life. There is no clearing at the end of the path for him, but he is reborn via the Dark Tower, the Hall of Resumption.
Tull is dead, he tells Brown, daring the young man to ask more. Like a vampire, he needs an invitation to cross the threshold and tell his tale. Brown finally asks.
A tiny blot on an ugly countryside, Tull is a few short side streets crossing the main road at the bottom of a shallow hollow. The stagecoaches Roland met heading away from town are occupied, but the ones that pass him on the way to Tull are mostly empty. No one but the gunslinger comes here anymore. It’s a borderland with far less life than Calla Bryn Sturgis.
His greeting in Tull is “Hey Jude.” The gunslinger knows the piano player, Sheb, from Mejis, but only in the expanded version do they acknowledge their common past.
At the saloon, the gunslinger meets a dead man, Nort the Weedeater, poisoned from chewing devil grass and reanimated by the man in black.18
* * *
I See You, Lad
One of the first indications that there is some relationship between Roland’s world and our own comes when the gunslinger hears Sheb playing “Hey Jude” as he enters Tull. The song appears several more times over the course of the series. Eddie sings it on the beach at the W
estern Sea. Roland and Susan Delgado hear it the night they meet in Mejis. It plays from the speakers at Blue Heaven, and Stutterin’ Bill the robot plays it on a CD when he transports Susannah, Roland, Patrick and Oy to the Federal Outpost.
In Mid-World, the song begins “Hey Jude, I see you, lad.”
* * *
Nort is one of many traps left behind for the gunslinger by the man in black, whose name is revealed to be Walter o’Dim in the revised edition. Walter would likely be disappointed if his traps worked, but he sets them all the same. For the man in black, this pursuit is a game. He can run circles around the gunslinger, but Roland must chase, so the man in black must allow himself to be chased.
Nort speaks the High Speech, an ancient, dead language that the gunslinger hasn’t heard in centuries, perhaps even millennia, since his days in Gilead. This is the first hint of the gunslinger’s age and the malleability of time in his world. Whether Nort is as old as Roland—like Sheb—or if he learned the High Speech from Walter or while dead is unclear.
The gunslinger knows that stopping in Tull will make him lose ground on the man in black, but he seems unable to resist its allure, like Odysseus trapped on Calypso’s island in The Odyssey. He befriends Allie, the bartender, and spends a week in her bed. He is a ship becalmed, wanting to continue his quest but unable to catch a wind in his sails.
Allie provides him with a clue that, had he understood it, might have pointed him in the direction of the Tower. The clouds near Tull all flow in the same direction, southeast across the desert.19 Roland and Walter aren’t on a Path of the Beam, but they aren’t far away from one. The Beam is pulling them gently in the right direction, though Roland and, presumably, Walter aren’t conscious of it.
After five days, he learns of Sylvia Pittston, a corpulent preacher who believes she is carrying the Crimson King’s child.20 She’s yet another person who dates back to Roland’s days in Mejis—she traveled through that distant barony a year before he and his friends arrived. She springs another trap, preaching words Walter supplied to her. Calling the gunslinger the Interloper, she raises the town against him. Roland has no choice but to shoot the entire population. He reloads on the fly, a skill it took him years21 to learn, burning his fingers on the hot chambers. As he shoots, he screams.