Tuesday, July 13, 2004
The Dark Tower
I finished the sixth book in Stephen King's The Dark Tower series, Song of Susannah, several weeks ago and I've thought on and off about a review but I've had a hard time figuring out what to say. I though it was fantastic but it's the sixth book in a series that has been going on for over 20 years. I think that it's safe to say that if you've been reading the books as they came out, you like the series and you're going to read the rest of them. I got talking to a friend at work about The Dark Tower. She had read some early King novels the creeped her out and had not read any since. She had not heard of The Dark Tower and I was explaining what it was about (kind of hard to do). In particular I let her know that it's not a horror story at all, but an epic and unique fantasy. She was interested so I lent her The Gunslinger. Instead of a review of the sixth book, what I'd like to do here is get you interested as well.
Stephen King certainly evokes a reaction from most people. There are many fans, but also many that look down their nose at his writings. Last year the National Book Foundation awarded Stephen King with the Distinguished Contribution To American Letters Award. That announcement was greeted with a op-ed piece in the Boston Globed titled Dumbing down American readers:
I confess that I am a Stephen King fan. I remember the Book Club edition of the Stand that my Mom got when I was a kid - how I fell into the incredible and scary world of that book. I went through the other works page at the beginning of Song Of Susannah and counted 50 books written by King. That's a lot I know. I have read 17 of them:
'Salem's Lot
The Shinning
The Stand
The Dead Zone
Firestarter
The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger
Danse Macabre
Christine
Pet Sematary
The Talisman
The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three
The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands
Insomnia
The Green Mile
The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass
The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla
The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah
(To many links there! Here is a Stephen King Amazon link.)
The pattern here is quite clear. I've read most of this early works and about the time of Pet Sematary I stopped reading every novel just because Stephen King wrote it. The exception though is The Dark Tower. I feel quite strongly that it, along with The Stand and possibly 'Salem's Lot, will still be read one hundred years from now. The Dark Tower is quite different from anything else King has written and anything else I have read. It is an epic fantasy on the order of The Lord of the Rings, but with a radically different setting and style. If fact the story has taken us through many diverse settings from an Old West motif to the New York of the present. It is the story of a quest that neither we nor the pilgrims on the quest completely understand. We they believe that literally EVERYTHING depends on their success.
After reading the trade paperback edition of The Gunslinger I have kept up with this series reading each book as soon as I could. In fact, one of the prizes of my library is a first edition of the hardcover version of The Waste Lands. The print run on this was something like 30,000 and I happened to be in the right place at the right time. Through the long delays between each book I, on more than one occasion, had the thought "I sure hope he doesn't die before he finishes the Dark Tower." Then, in 1999, between the fourth and fifth book, a van hit him. I certainly felt horrible about it...but also felt horrible about him not finishing The Dark Tower. The accident was certainly a wake up call for King as well. He knew the series was important both to his readers and to him and set to work finishing it. The final book will be published in September. As we finally approach "the clearing at the end of the path" I look forward to it with longing and also with fear. It is quite strange to think about The Dark Tower being finished. It has been one of my favorite stories for more than half my life and for all that time it has been unfinished. I didn't know how it would turn out. Now, with only one book to go, I have NO IDEA how it will turn out. I wonder if I will prefer it that way.
I hope I've conveyed the emotions that I have for these books. As I handed The Gunslinger to my friend it was very much with envy. My first time was so long ago that I don't even remember when I read it or really what I felt. But I can imagine my feelings now, reading that classic first line: "The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed." I urge you to try it out as well.
Stephen King certainly evokes a reaction from most people. There are many fans, but also many that look down their nose at his writings. Last year the National Book Foundation awarded Stephen King with the Distinguished Contribution To American Letters Award. That announcement was greeted with a op-ed piece in the Boston Globed titled Dumbing down American readers:
The decision to give the National Book Foundation's annual award for "distinguished contribution" to Stephen King is extraordinary, another low in the shocking process of dumbing down our cultural life. I've described King in the past as a writer of penny dreadfuls, but perhaps even that is too kind. He shares nothing with Edgar Allan Poe. What he is is an immensely inadequate writer on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, book-by-book basis. The publishing industry has stooped terribly low to bestow on King a lifetime award that has previously gone to the novelists Saul Bellow and Philip Roth and to playwright Arthur Miller.My goodness!
I confess that I am a Stephen King fan. I remember the Book Club edition of the Stand that my Mom got when I was a kid - how I fell into the incredible and scary world of that book. I went through the other works page at the beginning of Song Of Susannah and counted 50 books written by King. That's a lot I know. I have read 17 of them:
(To many links there! Here is a Stephen King Amazon link.)
The pattern here is quite clear. I've read most of this early works and about the time of Pet Sematary I stopped reading every novel just because Stephen King wrote it. The exception though is The Dark Tower. I feel quite strongly that it, along with The Stand and possibly 'Salem's Lot, will still be read one hundred years from now. The Dark Tower is quite different from anything else King has written and anything else I have read. It is an epic fantasy on the order of The Lord of the Rings, but with a radically different setting and style. If fact the story has taken us through many diverse settings from an Old West motif to the New York of the present. It is the story of a quest that neither we nor the pilgrims on the quest completely understand. We they believe that literally EVERYTHING depends on their success.
After reading the trade paperback edition of The Gunslinger I have kept up with this series reading each book as soon as I could. In fact, one of the prizes of my library is a first edition of the hardcover version of The Waste Lands. The print run on this was something like 30,000 and I happened to be in the right place at the right time. Through the long delays between each book I, on more than one occasion, had the thought "I sure hope he doesn't die before he finishes the Dark Tower." Then, in 1999, between the fourth and fifth book, a van hit him. I certainly felt horrible about it...but also felt horrible about him not finishing The Dark Tower. The accident was certainly a wake up call for King as well. He knew the series was important both to his readers and to him and set to work finishing it. The final book will be published in September. As we finally approach "the clearing at the end of the path" I look forward to it with longing and also with fear. It is quite strange to think about The Dark Tower being finished. It has been one of my favorite stories for more than half my life and for all that time it has been unfinished. I didn't know how it would turn out. Now, with only one book to go, I have NO IDEA how it will turn out. I wonder if I will prefer it that way.
I hope I've conveyed the emotions that I have for these books. As I handed The Gunslinger to my friend it was very much with envy. My first time was so long ago that I don't even remember when I read it or really what I felt. But I can imagine my feelings now, reading that classic first line: "The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed." I urge you to try it out as well.
1 Comments:
i subscribe to the all consuming feed and as i scanned it today i thought you know let me see what other people have said about song of susannah, that brought me to your blog, wow! powerful stuff, and what struck me was how close it is to how i feel and felt, i felt very guilty for my first thoughts when i heard about his accident. i knew that he had lived and my first thought wasn't that he might die before finishing the story, it was that *i* might die without finishing the story, deeply depressing to me at the time. and now i think what if he hadn't got hit, would the story be any different, did he rush them? no way to know i guess
i've been reading the gunslinger saga for about half my life as well, in my perfect world king writes the last book when i have just a few months to live, we're going to finish the story in sept, and have a long life of not having anything even close to as powerful as the story of roland to read. sad sad sad.
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