The Road to The Dark Tower (2 page)

Chapter 11 considers the epic nature of the quest, identifies some of King’s literary influences and explores ka, while chapter 12 reflects on art and creation from King’s perspective as both the author of the seven
Dark Tower
books and as a character within them.

After some concluding remarks that consider the
Dark Tower
series as King’s magnum opus, appendices chronicle the factual publication timeline for the series and the fictional timeline of events in Roland’s world and in the various versions of Earth he and the members of his ka-tet travel. A glossary of Mid-World terms, a list of online resources and the text of Robert Browning’s mysterious poem “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” complete the appendices.

Come with me as we cross a blazing desert, traverse mountains and the beach that lies beyond, cross corrupt bridges, ride an insane train, shoot it out with deadly Wolves, skip between worlds, preserve a vacant
lot in Manhattan, battle to free the Breakers and cross the desolate lands laid waste by the Crimson King until we join the last gunslinger at the top of a hill, when he sees the object of his lifelong quest for the first time.

I promise to treat you better than Roland treated many whose paths crossed his.

¹
“Slade was a peace-loving man at heart, and what was more peace-loving than a dead body?”

²
“Friend, smile when you say that.”

³
“I guess you can’t win them all,” he says after accidentally shooting an innocent bystander.

⁴
King pronounces Roland’s last name “dess chain.” It’s likely that the mysterious and solitary gunslinger Shane who befriended a young boy influenced King’s choice of this name.

⁵
www.simonsays.com
, Scribner’s Web presence, June 2003. Extracted from a press release issued February 2003.

⁶
“The Gunslinger,”
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction,
October 1978. This is King’s description of the Tower in the author’s note at the end of the story in its first appearance.

Chapter 1
THE LONG JOURNEY TO THE TOWER

[T]ell me a story, one that has a beginning and a middle and an end where everything is explained. Because I deserve that. . . . Jesus, you guys can’t stop there!

He was wrong, we could stop anyplace we chose to.

[FB8]

He who speaks without an attentive ear is mute.

[DT7, dedication]

 The publication of
Pet Sematary
in 1983 was notable for several reasons. First, it was a book Stephen King had frequently told interviewers was too terrible to see in print. Second, the name on the spine was Doubleday, a publisher King had left several years earlier.

Of most significance to King’s Constant Readers, though, were three words on the author’s ad-card, opposite the title page. Near the bottom, squeezed between
Cujo
(1981) and
Christine
(1982), was this entry:
The Dark Tower
(1982).

What was this? A Stephen King novel no one had heard of? This innocuous listing initiated a twenty-year obsession by readers around the world who frequently clamored for the next installment in Roland Deschain’s quest to reach the Dark Tower.

In 1983, bookstores had no record of
The Dark Tower.
No one—it seemed—knew how to acquire this mysterious volume. This was before the Internet era; information wasn’t yet a mass-market commodity. Fan communities weren’t interconnected. Today, a curious reader encountering such a puzzle could post a query to a newsgroup or scan fan pages and official Web sites via a judiciously phrased search engine request. Searchable inventories of independent and chain bookstores across the continent are available online. Internet-based auction sites routinely offer out-of-print and rare editions.

Back then, such resources didn’t exist, so King and his publishers (past and current) were bombarded with letters, all asking the same thing: “How can I get
The Dark Tower
?” Doubleday reportedly received more than three thousand letters.
¹

The book that caused such a stir had a rather inauspicious genesis. King showed a couple of fantasy stories he had written to his agent, Kirby McCauley, who thought he might be able to sell them.
²
In October 1978, shortly after the hardcover release of
The Stand, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
(F&SF) published “The Gunslinger,” which opened with the line, “The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed.” The forty-page novelette ended with a parenthetical doxology from King:

“Thus ends what is written in the first Book of Roland, and his Quest for the Tower which stands at the root of Time.”
³

The promise of more to come.

The second installment didn’t appear until the April 1980 issue of F&SF. After another yearlong hiatus, the final three segments of the story that would become
The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger
appeared in rapid succession in February, July and November 1981.
⁴

The fifth installment, described as the last story in the first cycle, contained the following harbinger above the title: “The series will be published in a limited hardcover edition by Donald M. Grant in the spring of 1982.” This was the first announcement of the book that would, two years later, cause such a clamor.

King originally had no plans to republish these stories. Not only was the tale set in an unfamiliar world—a departure from his previously published books—it was incomplete. In “The Politics of Limited Editions,” King says the stories were well received, but F&SF’s audience was somewhat different than his normal readership.

Donald M. Grant, Publications Director at Providence College, owned a small press that issued lavishly illustrated fantasy novels, including the works of Robert E. Howard.
⁵
In 1981, while at Providence College on a speaking engagement, King praised the books Grant had produced over
the years. At dinner, Grant asked King if he had anything that would lend itself to a Donald M. Grant edition. King suggested the
Dark Tower
, and the publisher immediately recognized the series as the kind of project he could do and sell.
⁶
King rescued the wet and barely readable manuscript from a mildewy cellar and tweaked the stories for publication.
⁷

Getting Michael Whelan to illustrate the first book was a stroke of good fortune. Whelan was an award-winning illustrator who had previously created drawings for the limited edition of
Firestarter.
⁸

Ads announcing the Grant edition appeared in only a few places, including volume 5 of
Whispers
magazine in August 1982,
⁹
the Stephen King issue, which featured artwork inspired by
The Gunslinger.
The cover illustration was “Nort the Weedeater” by John Stewart, and six other
Gunslinger
-inspired Stewart works appeared in a folio section of the magazine.
¹⁰

Whispers
editor Stuart David Schiff’s news section said, “[Grant] has just produced what might possibly be the most important book from a specialty press.” He goes on for more than half a page praising the book’s merits, its production quality and Michael Whelan’s illustrations, finishing with the following advice: “Do not miss this book.”

Alas, most people did.

The ten-thousand-copy first printing
¹¹
of
The Gunslinger
was the largest small-press edition in history
¹²
—this from an author whose later first-edition printings would run to seven figures. Grant’s previous pressruns had been 3,500 books or less. The ad in
Whispers
doesn’t mention the signed edition, but Schiff’s editorial states that this version, limited to five hundred copies, would be available for $60, compared to $20 for the trade edition.

THE STORY THAT WOULD BECOME CENTRAL to Stephen King’s body of work and his career had its genesis almost a decade before the first story appeared in F&SF, when King and his wife-to-be, Tabitha Spruce, each inherited reams of brightly colored paper nearly as thick as cardboard and in an “eccentric size.” [DT1, afterword]

To the endless possibilities of five hundred blank sheets of 7" x 10" bright green paper, King added “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” by Robert Browning, a poem he’d studied two years previously in a
course covering the earlier romantic poets. “I had played with the idea of trying a long romantic novel, embodying the feel, if not the exact sense, of the Browning poem.” [DT1, afterword]
¹³

In an unpublished essay
¹⁴
called “The Dark Tower: A Cautionary Tale,” King says, “I had recently seen a bigger-than-life Sergio Leone Western,
¹⁵
and it had me wondering what would happen if you brought two very distinct genres together: heroic fantasy and the Western.”

After graduating from the University of Maine at Orono in 1970, King moved into a “skuzzy riverside cabin” and began what he then conceived of as a “very long fantasy novel,” perhaps even the longest popular novel in history.
¹⁶
He wrote the first section of
The Gunslinger
in a ghostly, unbroken silence—he was living alone—that influenced the eerie isolation of Roland and his solitary quest.

The story did not come easily. Sections were written during a dry spell in the middle of
’Salem’s Lot,
and another part was written after he finished
The Shining.
Even when he wasn’t actively working on the
Dark Tower,
his mind often turned to the story—except, he says, when he was battling Randall Flagg in
The Stand,
which is ironic since both Flagg and a superflu-decimated world became part of the
Dark Tower
mythos many years later.

In
Song of Susannah,
the fictional Stephen King claims that by 1977 he had given up on the story, daunted by its magnitude. It had become “too big. Too complicated. Too . . . outré.” Roland also concerned him. His hero seemed like he might be changing into an antihero.

DONALD M. GRANT released
The Gunslinger
in 1982. The first printing—then envisioned as the only printing—sold out based on word of mouth and their limited advertising in specialty magazines.

Then came
Pet Sematary
the following year
¹⁷
and the ensuing deluge of letters. The mail King received concerning
The Gunslinger
was occasionally rancorous, especially from readers who felt they had the right to read anything King published. “You must trust me about one thing: I did not include
The Dark Tower
on the ‘other works’ [page] in a mean spirit—picture if you will, a man teasing a hungry person with half a hamburger and then gobbling it himself. The inclusion was the result of complete
naivete.
It took the resulting flood of mail to make me uneasily aware that
I had either wider responsibilities in the matter of my completed work, or people
thought
that I did.”
¹⁸

This was probably King’s first indication that he and his readers might not always see eye to eye on the relationship between a writer and his audience. As Paul Sheldon in
Misery
learned, readers could be demanding, fans—fanatics—single-minded in their pursuit of all things King. The fictionalized version of himself is less restrained on the subject. “On the other hand, God and the Man Jesus, people are so fucking
spoiled
! They just assume that if there’s a book anywhere in the world they
want,
then they have a perfect
right
to that book. This would be news indeed to those folks in the Middle Ages who might have heard
rumors
of books but never actually saw one.” [DT6]
¹⁹