The Road to The Dark Tower (10 page)

King’s decision to revise a twenty-year-old book is certainly controversial
⁵⁰
but not unprecedented in King’s publication history. He frequently updated short stories when preparing them for collections. During the process of restoring excised material that had been removed from
The Stand
prior to its 1977 original publication, he moved the story ahead a decade and rewrote sections. Of
The Gunslinger
, King says, “It actually seemed not so much like a luxury . . . but like a real necessity, to say, ‘Let’s make this book more readable; let’s make it more exciting; let’s pick up the pace a little bit and really try to draw readers in.’ ”
⁵¹

His revisions create a situation not unlike the one Roland finds himself in at the start of
The Waste Lands
. He has two slightly different versions of his past: the reality where he encountered Jake in the desert and the one where the way station was empty. With
The Gunslinger,
there is a reality where Walter may not be Marten, Roland doesn’t learn about the Crimson King and his trek takes him south instead of southeast.

King’s changes occur on almost every page. Some are simple reworkings of awkward, self-conscious writing—“hollow blather,” as he calls it in the foreword. He removed most adverbs—following his own advice in
On Writing
—and clarified numerous cases of pronouns with uncertain antecedents. In the original version, Roland occasionally spoke in 1970s slang, saying things like, “Dig?”

King changes dialogue in numerous places to adopt the distinctive language used in later books, things like “if it do ya fine,” “say thank ya,” and “thankee-sai.” He replaces the seasons with their Mid-World equivalents, Fresh Earth and Reaping, for example. Anonymous characters, like Cort’s predecessor and the gunslinger who hangs Hax, are given names. Obscure references (“like a Kuvian night-soldier”) are gone.

A second level of changes could be called “bug fixes,” addressing continuity errors that crept into the story. Roland no longer reads magazines in Tull—unlikely since paper is such a scarce commodity. References to electric lights are replaced with “spark lights.” Alain Johns is frequently called Allen in the original. King addresses the temporal confusion pertaining to the span of Roland’s quest, which was alternately either measured in decades or millennia, by being less specific.

The third types of changes are those where King introduces elements
that he hadn’t yet conceived in the 1970s. Gilead is never mentioned in the original version, nor are Arthur Eld, the Crimson King, Sheemie, the Manni,
⁵²
taheen, Algul Siento, bumblers or the commala dance. He foreshadows the loss of Roland’s fingers and the ka-tet’s discovery of the Beam (Allie notes that the clouds all flow in a particular direction). Sylvia Pittston’s sermon presages both Roland’s discovery of the jawbone at the way station and his meeting with Walter at the Golgotha.

King also strengthens Jake’s character through the subtle use of dialogue. The boy was often passive and silent in the original, but he now speaks his mind more frequently. Jake understands what he is to Roland, and he spares no occasion to let the gunslinger know he’s aware. King deletes narrative descriptions of the boy with negative connotation, things like “with dumbly submissive sheep’s eyes” or a scene where he compares the boy’s pounding chest to the beat of a chicken’s heart.

Roland’s relationship with Allie in Tull is subtly more intimate, too. When Allie warns Roland that the hostler is likely to make things up if he doesn’t know them, Roland thanks her and she is touched beyond measure, unable to remember the last time someone who mattered thanked her. Roland also shows his concern for her when he counsels her to forget Walter’s message, to banish the word “nineteen” from her mind rather than use it to access Nort’s memories of what happened to him in death.

Finally, King injects a number of hints about the cyclical nature of Roland’s existence, adding the sense of dizziness brought about by his shift backward in time. Walter frequently mentions how Roland never manages to get it right, though the gunslinger doesn’t understand. “What do you mean, resume? I never left off.” King also draws more attention to Roland’s missing horn, a crucial factor in the series’ final pages.

He thought of that momentary dizziness earlier in the day, that sense of being almost untethered from the world, and wondered what it might have meant. Why should that dizziness make him think of his horn and the last of his old friends, both lost so long ago at Jericho Hill? He still had the guns—his father’s guns—and surely they were more important than horns . . . or even friends.

Because of its dry, dark tone, the original version of
The Gunslinger
, like a threshold guardian, turned away many who wanted to join the quest.
King’s revisions create a more internally consistent series of books for newcomers to the series. Whether it succeeds in its primary goal of being more accessible to readers who might have been turned away by the original remains to be seen.

¹
Unless otherwise specified, all quotes in this chapter are from
The Gunslinger
.

²
Inscription King often uses when signing copies of
The Gunslinger
.

³
Walden Book Report,
July 2003.

⁴
Peter Straub and King finished writing
The Talisman
around the time Grant published
The Gunslinger. The Eyes of the Dragon
was probably written around the same time, as it was first published in 1984.

⁵
The science fiction Bachman books
The Running Man
and
The Long Walk
notwithstanding. In 1982, few people knew about these books or that they were by King.

⁶
“But what of the gunslinger’s murky past? God, I know so little. The revolution that topples the gunslinger’s ‘world of light’? I don’t know. Roland’s final confrontation with Marten, who seduces his mother and kills his father? Don’t know. The deaths of Roland’s compatriots, Cuthbert and Jamie, or his adventures during the years between his coming of age and his first appearance to us in the desert? I don’t know that either. And there’s this girl, Susan. Who is she? Don’t know.” [DT1, afterword]

⁷
In the original version of the novel, Roland is first identified by name when he is in the cellar of the way station. King obviously knew his name before that because he mentions it in a teaser at the end of the “The Gunslinger” in F&SF magazine in 1978. In the revised and expanded edition, Roland’s name first appears at the end of the first section, about a third of the way through the book.

⁸
The Art of Michael Whelan,
Bantam, 1993.

⁹
Edward Bryant,
Locus
magazine, Vol. 27, No. 6, December 1991.

¹⁰
NewsNight with Aaron Brown,
CNN, June 24, 2003.

¹¹
Interview with
Amazon.com
, May 2003. In an interview published on the Walden Books Web site, King said that eventually he would rewrite the entire series.

¹²
www.stephenking.com
, February 25, 2003.

¹³
Foreword to
The Gunslinger,
Viking, 2003.

¹⁴
Synopsis at the start of “The Way Station,”
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction,
April 1980. These synopses are interesting because they are King’s commentaries on the story while he was in the process of writing it. See appendix V.

¹⁵
King was inspired by the spaghetti westerns starring Clint Eastwood, who often went unnamed in those films. Jake Chambers makes the connection when he sees a movie poster featuring Eastwood on his way to Co-Op City.

¹⁶
South in the original edition.

¹⁷
The town is named after the rock group Jethro Tull, and the raven is named after a folksinger King knew at the University of Maine. Roland’s vision in the Wizard’s ball in Mejis included Brown and Zoltan, but he doesn’t remember most of what he saw.

¹⁸
During the scene where Walter raises Nort, he says, “Mistah Norton, he daid,” in a sardonic tone, mimicking the manager boy’s words in Joseph Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness:
“Mistah Kurtz—he dead.” Susannah—as Detta—echoes these words later, speaking first of Joe Collins (Dandelo) and then Eddie.

¹⁹
Roland’s course is changed from south in the original edition to emphasize the Beam’s proximity and influence.

²⁰
In the original edition, it is the man in black’s child she thinks she carries.

²¹
A thousand years according to the expanded version; twenty-five years in the original.

²²
The expanded version says, “unless it was the mythic city of Lud,” which is New York’s twin.

²³
In the original version, this is where Roland is named for the first time.

²⁴
King doesn’t shy away from sacrificing children in his books, for example: Pie Carver
(Desperation),
Ralph Glick
(’Salem’s Lot),
Gage Creed
(Pet Sematary),
Cary Ripton
(The Regulators)
and Tad Trenton
(Cujo).

²⁵
In the original version, Farson is the name of a place, but King mistakenly changes him to John Farson in subsequent books. In the revised edition, King corrects this error by changing the town of Farson to Taunton.

²⁶
Gilead is never mentioned in the original version of the book. When Roland and Eddie meet King in
Song of Susannah,
he says he hasn’t thought of the Gilead part when Roland introduces himself. On Earth, Gilead is a region of Jordan located between the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea, best known for the “balm of Gilead,” an aromatic gum used as a medicine, which is mentioned in Poe’s “The Raven.”

²⁷
Ten years in the original edition.

²⁸
The same place as Father Callahan’s cross-shaped scar and where the Crimson King’s minions bear open wounds that don’t bleed.

²⁹
In the Bible (Judges 13–16), Samson killed a thousand Philistines armed only with the jawbone of an ass. Sylvia Pittston refers to Samson in her sermon, and Aaron Deepneau mentions Samson’s riddle in
The Waste Lands
.

³⁰
Master’s Tea, Yale University, April 21, 2003.

³¹
In the revised edition, “another number comes later,” referring to the importance of 19 in the final three books.

³²
The original edition continued, “her mind is iron but her heart and eyes are soft.”

³³
Roland reflects on this when the subject of mescaline and hallucinogenic mushrooms comes up outside Calla Bryn Sturgis.

³⁴
In the original version he says he hasn’t seen New Canaan for twelve years, but in the revised edition, King changes this to “unknown years.” The confusion of time that makes up Roland’s life is something that even the Calvin scholars could never resolve.

³⁵
There were others, including Sylvia Pittston and Sheb from Tull, but they are now dead, too. Sheemie Ruiz from Mejis, who was with Roland when he and his fellow gunslingers set out on their quest for the Tower, is still alive, though Roland doesn’t know it. King mentions Sheemie in the revised edition, foreshadowing his importance not only in
Wizard and Glass
but also in
The Dark Tower
.

³⁶
Each of the New Yorkers who join Roland’s quest develops special talents shortly after his or her arrival in Mid-World. Jake’s is known as the “touch,” a talent he shares with Alain Johns, a member of Roland’s earliest ka-tet.

³⁷
Sloat, the villain, has enough moral awareness to raise the question, but he comes to the wrong conclusion.

³⁸
Revised edition. The original text is worded a little differently.

³⁹
Jamie in the original version.

⁴⁰
In the revised edition, the handcar—like many other machines in Mid-World—talks, but Roland soon silences it.

⁴¹
Roland often identifies crucial transitions in his quest: the end of the beginning, the beginning of the end, etc.

⁴²
The original version says five years too early. This is unlikely since that would make him nineteen, older than the average, but Roland is the most promising student Cort has had in decades.

⁴³
The original title of this section, “The Gunslinger and the Dark Man,” is changed to “The Gunslinger and the Man in Black” in the revised edition.

⁴⁴
In English, the word “palaver” usually refers to a discussion between people from different cultures or levels of sophistication, and can also mean misleading or idle talk. In Mid-World, though, it usually refers to a meeting where important information is to be exchanged.