The Dark Tower Companion: A Guide to Stephen King’s Epic Fantasy (4 page)

King said that he accepted Silverberg's invitation to write about Roland in a moment of weakness. It took him a while to come up with a story. He started with a series of images: the pavilion from
The Talisman
in ruins. Whispering women who were ghosts or vampires. Nurses of death instead of life. Once he got started, though, he had trouble keeping it down to novella length. “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
in 2002.

It is impossible to pinpoint exactly when this story takes place in Roland's time line. In the Marvel adaptation, Robin Furth places it a year after the battle of Jericho Hill. According to the text, Roland looks at least twenty years older than the teenager he encounters.

Roland is wandering around in Mid-World, trying to find a clue that will lead him to the Tower. The world is moving on, so he isn't surprised to arrive at a ghost town. Eluria isn't completely abandoned—there are mutants in the area, the product of something toxic in the mines beneath the Desatoya Mountains—but there are also signs of recent habitation, including a fresh body in a horse trough. The mutants pose a threat, but Roland won't shoot them without provocation. He pays for this error in judgment when they overwhelm him, almost ending his quest for the Dark Tower before it really gets started.

He wakes up in a hospital tent, suspended in a harness, in pain. The female voices he hears make him remember Susan Delgado, the first woman he ever loved, though he was only fourteen at the time and she was just sixteen. He's in the care of the Little Sisters and, while they appear human, he soon discovers that they are terrible creatures who are attended by scuttling black bugs known as little doctors. The bugs heal their patients so the Little Sisters, who are vampires, can feed on them. The only thing saving Roland is the religious medallion hanging around his neck, which he took from the dead body in Eluria.

The boy in the bed next to Roland is John Norman of Delain. Roland pretends to be John's brother—it is James Norman's medallion he's wearing. The Normans were part of a caravan that was waylaid by slow mutants as they passed near Eluria. The mutants have an uneasy alliance with the Little Sisters. The mutants supply the Little Sisters with their living victims, but they get to keep the provisions they steal from them. The Little Sisters have no need for material goods.

The Little Sisters drug Roland's food but are thwarted by the gold charm. The youngest of them, Jenna, befriends Roland. She wears the Dark Bells that give her the power to summon the little doctor bugs, acquired through lineage. The eldest of the group, Sister Mary, resents that Jenna has this honor, which she feels is rightfully hers.

The Little Sisters enlist the help of one of the smarter slow mutants to remove John's medallion, leaving Roland as the only remaining food. Because Roland is kind to Jenna, she decides to help him. She gives him a stimulant to counter the sedative, returns his guns and decides to leave with him. She no longer wishes to partake of a blood diet, but she is damned already.

She summons the little doctors to destroy one of the other Little Sisters who tries to intervene, and they make good on their escape. When Sister Mary catches up with them, Roland has no weapons to use against her. However,
ka
, the indomitable force that wants Roland to succeed on his quest, sends a dog bearing a cross-shaped patch of fur to kill Sister Mary. The dog
doesn't exactly come out of nowhere—Roland first saw it in the town square in Eluria—but almost. Later, in a dream, the dog leads him to the Dark Tower.

Jenna collapses into a swarm of the little doctor bugs when she tries to leave with Roland. The other Little Sisters will pull up stakes and go on. They have survived for a long, long time and will presumably continue in a new setting. Roland heads west. He has no tangible destination in mind yet—he has not yet found the trail of the man in black or one of the Beams that will guide him to the Tower. All he can do is search.

S
tephen King was only twenty-one years old when he wrote the most famous and memorable opening line of any of his books: “The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.” In a dozen words, he introduces readers to two characters and the setting, and creates a sense of action and conflict. One man is fleeing, another is pursuing. Because the story and the book are titled
The Gunslinger
, readers will assume (correctly) that the unnamed gunslinger is the protagonist.

Though King began writing the Dark Tower series in late 1970, none of it was published for the better part of a decade, when the five stories that make up
The Gunslinger
appeared in
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
(
F&SF
) between October 1978 and November 1981.

Because the tale was incomplete and set in an unfamiliar world, King had no plans to collect the stories until Donald M. Grant asked whether he had anything that might be suitable for his small press.
The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger
was issued in 1982 as a signed, limited-edition and limited-trade hardcover without much fanfare outside of the fantasy community. The book, illustrated by Michael Whelan, was dedicated to Ed Ferman, the editor at
F&SF
, thanking him for taking a chance on the stories.

When King listed
The Gunslinger
(as
The Dark Tower
) along with his other publications at the front of
Pet Sematary
in 1983, he set off an avalanche of inquiries about the book, which led to a second printing of the limited-trade hardcover, though in numbers too small to satisfy demand.
The Gunslinger
wasn't available to the general public until it was released as a trade paperback and an audiobook (narrated by King) in 1988.

Many years later, when he was preparing the final books in the series for publication, King admitted that about half of his readership hadn't read the Dark Tower. This was in part due to the fact that the series was long and—at
that point—incomplete, but could also be attributed to the fact that a lot of readers had problems with the first volume. It is very different in style and mood than the rest of King's work. The protagonist is sullen, dark, moody and driven. Some of the things he does in the name of his quest are hard to accept. King came to believe that the original version of
The Gunslinger
demonstrated the work of a pretentious young man exposed to far too many writing seminars. Its language and tone do not sound at all like the later books.

Because the book had never been copyedited and contained a number of continuity errors (Farson is a town in the first book, but a man in later volumes, for example), and because it was written long before he understood the entire scope of the series, King decided to revise
The Gunslinger
during a hiatus between editing
Wolves of the Calla
and
Song of Susannah
. If the Dark Tower series had been written in the same manner as his other novels, this would have been a natural part of the process. He would have gone back to the beginning to weave in elements of the story and its themes that weren't revealed to him until the series was complete. Readers can see how King's thinking about the story evolved early on by reading the notes that accompany the original publications of the short stories that make up
The Gunslinger
. In particular, he grapples with the man in black and his relationship to Walter and Marten.

The added material consists of about nine thousand words, or thirty-five pages of text. He reworked sentences and paragraphs and inserted foreshadowing, a prevailing sense of déjà vu and other details that hadn't occurred to him when he set the story down thirty years earlier. Gilead is never mentioned in the original version, nor are Arthur Eld, the Crimson King, Sheemie, the Manni, taheen, Algul Siento, bumblers or the commala dance.

Though the overall plot remains the same, some scenes have been expanded. The importance of certain characters changes. He follows his own advice from
On Writing
and removes most of the adverbs. These revisions, he says in the book's new foreword, were designed to give newcomers a slightly easier entry into the series.

Since the revised and expanded edition of
The Gunslinger
contains King's preferred text, for the purposes of this book, the original edition will be treated as a first draft and the differences between the two versions will be mentioned only when they are illuminating.

When the four existing Dark Tower novels were repackaged in 2003, they all bore new subtitles, each consisting of single word beginning with “re.” For
The Gunslinger
, the subtitle was “Resumption,” a word that is a vague clue, though its significance won't be revealed until much later in the series.

The linear story line of
The Gunslinger
is fairly simple. Roland Deschain buys a mule in Pricetown and arrives in Tull, where the man in black has set a trap for him after raising a man from the dead. Roland is forced to kill everyone in town, including a woman who became his lover. He follows the old stagecoach road southwest toward the desert and stops at a hut owned by a hermit named Brown, where he recounts his recent adventures. He follows the man in black's spoor, confident that he is getting closer, though he is still several weeks behind.

Almost out of water, he reaches a Way Station, where he mistakes the sole occupant of the abandoned inn for the man in black. However, it turns out to be a young boy named Jake Chambers, who was pushed in front of a car while on his way to school in Manhattan, died, and woke up in Roland's world. Jake joins Roland on a trek toward the mountains, where the gunslinger believes he will finally catch up with his prey. Roland seeks counsel from a succubus in a Speaking Circle and learns that Jake will need to be sacrificed if he is to attain his goal.

When they reach the mountains, they discover a tunnel that will take them through, following an old rail line. A group of slow mutants attacks, but Roland fends them off, rescuing Jake from their grasp. The farther they go, the more certain Jake becomes that he will die soon. He begs Roland to turn away and, for a moment, Roland almost agrees to do so. However, they see the light at the end of the tunnel, and Jake falls to his death on a decrepit trestle when Roland is forced to choose between rescuing him and speaking with the man in black.

The man in black and Roland hold palaver in a golgotha on the far side of the mountains, where much is revealed about Roland's quest and the nature of the universe. After they talk, Roland loses ten years of his life, but ends up on the coast of the sea.

Whereas most of King's novels tend to be about ordinary people thrust into extraordinary circumstances, Roland is no ordinary man. By the time
The Gunslinger
begins, he has been through major hardships. He's a desperate man on a demanding mission, traveling across a harsh environment. He is the last of his people. The world has moved on, people say, but it's not clear what that means. It might be a natural progression or it could have more ominous implications. King is stingy with the details about the cause of Mid-World's malaise—perhaps because he didn't understand them fully himself at the time.