The Road to The Dark Tower (6 page)

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.