The Road to The Dark Tower (3 page)

Several times over the next two decades, King labored to clarify his position—that he’s not Scheherazade, a captive storyteller, subject to the whims of his audience, spinning tales to save his life. Ultimately, he decides how and if he will present his creations. “To
write
and to
make
has always been an act of necessity to me; to
show
has always been an act of need, and may express some deep insecurity in myself.”
²⁰

Recent reports of King’s impending retirement underlined this schism by highlighting the difference between writing and publishing. When asked to confirm these rumors, King usually responds that he might retire from publishing, but couldn’t imagine not writing.
²¹

But in 1985, King still saw publication as a necessary part of the creative process. “A novel in manuscript is like a man with one leg and a novel which has been printed and bound is like a man with two. . . . To not publish is to see the book as a creation which has been willfully crippled.”
²²

Even at this relatively early point in his career, King didn’t need to publish for financial reasons. But he had dangled the hamburger in front of hungry readers and learned, to his chagrin, that some of them were angry. “I tried to find a middle ground between publishing in a trade edition where I would be unable to control the number of copies printed, and not publishing at all, which I find an offense to the work.”
²³

King had less sympathy with booksellers who claimed that his decision to not publish
The Gunslinger
in a widely available trade edition deprived them of income. If the book had been released traditionally, it would have generated a “rolling gross” on the order of several million The Road to the dark tower dollars.
²⁴
This money would have profited King and his publisher but also printers, secretaries, salespeople, distributors and booksellers.

If the idea of a writer having an economic responsibility to publish what he writes seems absurd to you, I can assure you it does not seem at all absurd to the booksellers of America, or to a writer himself after he has been told that his seemingly whimsical decision to publish a book in a small-distribution format had actually taken the bread out of children’s mouths or might have been a contributing cause to the closure of an independent small-town bookstore that might otherwise have turned the corner . . . or at least staggered on a while longer before collapsing.
²⁵

After discussing the situation with Donald M. Grant, King authorized a second printing of
The Gunslinger
equal in size to the first. He sent out a form letter (see next page) to people who had mailed him seeking the novel.

The second printing shipped in January 1984 and was out of print by the end of the year. The book’s text and layout remained unchanged from the original printing. Other than the copyright page information, the only difference was that a four-color process was used for the endpapers of the first printing, and for the second printing a single-color process was used.
²⁶

Starting in 1985, the
Castle Rock Newsletter,
published by King’s assistant and sister-in-law, Stephanie Leonard, was readers’ main forum for up-to-date information about King in the mid-to-late 1980s. It also served as a place for them to vent. In letters to the editor, they advocated for a mass-market edition of
The Gunslinger.
Some thought fans were paying too much for the limited edition on the secondary market, and many weren’t able to read the book at all because they couldn’t afford it or were unable to locate a copy.

Even the second printing was fetching as much as $100 by early 1986. It was the first King item to penetrate beyond the book market, showing up in comic book stores, displayed under glass. Some experts speculated that—with so many carefully preserved copies in print—
The Gunslinger
would eventually lose its “inflated” resale value.
²⁷

I was a little bit horrified by what happened afterward when the book became a collector’s item and the price jumped. It hadn’t
been my intention to see these books climb from $20 to $50 to $70 to whatever. I wanted to do something about it, and Don Grant, who was upset, wanted to do something about it. We talked on the phone one night and I said, “What if you publish another five hundred or five thousand?” Don sighed. And I said, “That would be like pissing on a forest fire, wouldn’t it?” Don agreed.
²⁸

KING HAD ALREADY WRITTEN SECTIONS of the next cycle of stories, originally titled
Roland Draws Three,
by the time
The Gunslinger
appeared in 1982. The first forty handwritten pages of the book vanished, and he still doesn’t know what happened to them.
²⁹

He confessed in the afterword to
The Gunslinger
that his vision of the overall arc of the epic was unclear. He didn’t yet understand exactly what had befallen Roland’s world, the nature of Roland’s confrontation with Marten, how Roland’s friends Cuthbert and Jamie died or who Susan was. But he hadn’t forgotten entirely what was on the missing pages or what he intended for the story.

King fictionalizes this stage in his development of the story in
Song of Susannah
when Eddie and Roland visit him in 1977. His character knows Roland, but he hasn’t created Eddie yet. He doesn’t know about Blaine or the implications of nineteen. “Except somewhere I do. Somewhere inside I know all of those things and there’s no need of an argument, or a synopsis, or an outline. . . . When it’s time, those things—and their significance to the gunslinger’s quest—will roll out as naturally as tears or laughter.” [DT1, afterword]

Once the world at large knew about the
Dark Tower
and a small percentage of King’s readership sampled
The Gunslinger,
clamoring for the next installment began, a tune that would haunt the author for the rest of his career. “When are you going to write the next book?” became one of his Frequently Asked Questions,
³⁰
posed at virtually every public appearance. The
Castle Rock Newsletter
reported that the top two questions in his fan mail were: 1) what is the
Dark Tower
and how do I find it? and 2) when will the next installment be published?
³¹

Before his appearance at Cornell University in 1994, King told one of the organizers, “Every one of [the five thousand people present] is going to raise their hand during the question-and-answer period and say, ‘When’s
the
Dark Tower
going to go on?’ ” When King established his official online presence in 1998, “When will the next
Dark Tower
book be released?” was near the top of his FAQ.

King told an interviewer, “I have three women who work in this office that answer the fan mail, and a lot of times they don’t tell me what’s going on with fan mail except for the stuff I pick up myself. But they put every Dark Tower letter on my desk. This is like a silent protest saying, ‘get these people off our backs.’ ”
³²
King calls these “pack your bags, we’re going on a guilt trip” letters.
³³

Still, in the mid-1980s, many of King’s readers were unaware of
The Gunslinger
and most of those who did know about it either couldn’t find or afford a copy.

In late 1985, the
Castle Rock Newsletter
announced a tentative 1986 publication date for
The Drawing of the Three.
It’s hard to imagine how King had the energy to delve back into Roland’s world after finishing the behemoth novel
It,
published in 1986, but he wrote the novel during the course of that year and had it in the hands of his publisher by early 1987, a productive year for him with the trade publication of
The Eyes of the Dragon, Misery
and
The Tommyknockers,
in addition to the
Dark Tower
book.

Michael Whelan wasn’t available to illustrate
The Drawing of the Three,
so Phil Hale—who had previously contributed to Grant’s limited edition of
The Talisman
—did the artwork, starting a tradition of having different artists for each novel except for
The Dark Tower,
which was also illustrated by Whelan.
³⁴

Donald M. Grant started taking orders for the book early in 1987, with ads in specialty publications such as the
Castle Rock Newsletter.
The book was delayed slightly when Hale asked the publisher to correct the color of the book’s internal plates, which gave King time to do a last-minute rewrite of several sections.
³⁵

The book was printed on thick buff-colored paper made in a mill in Brewer, Maine, across the Penobscot River from Bangor.
³⁶
Learning the lesson of supply and demand from
The Gunslinger,
the print runs of both editions were increased: eight hundred signed and thirty thousand trade. Unsurprisingly, the cost had increased as well ($100 and $35 postpaid, respectively), given five years’ worth of inflation and the fact that, at four hundred pages,
The Drawing of the Three
was nearly twice the length of
The Gunslinger.

Grant offered matching signed/numbered editions to anyone who had previously purchased copies of
The Gunslinger.
Unclaimed numbers—and numbers 501–800 that had no counterpart in the first volume—were sold on a lottery basis to people who sent in their names for consideration.
³⁷

The book’s dedication reads, “To Don Grant, who’s taken a chance on these
novels,
one by one,” mirroring the dedication to
The Gunslinger,
where King paid tribute to F&SF editor Ed Ferman for taking a chance on the stories making up that novel one by one.

The
Castle Rock Newsletter
published the first chapter of
The Drawing of the Three
in April/May 1987, accompanied by some of Hale’s artwork, and the book shipped shortly thereafter. By September the signed edition was out of print and being offered for resale at prices in excess of $500.

In early 1988, King recorded
The Gunslinger
for NAL Audio using the studio at his Bangor radio station, WZON.
³⁸
The six-hour, four-cassette package was the first of King’s novels to be released on unabridged audio, and the first to be recorded by the author. He repeated the process for the next two
Dark Tower
books before turning over the reins to professional audiobook narrator Frank Muller, who rerecorded the first three books as well as performing
Wizard and Glass.
³⁹

In September 1988,
The Gunslinger
finally became available to the masses in trade paperback from Plume. The large format allowed the publisher to include Michael Whelan’s illustrations without shrinking them to the size of a mass-market paperback.
The Drawing of the Three
followed in the same format in March 1989.

The five-year gap between publication of
The Gunslinger
and
The Drawing of the Three
set a precedent that would be followed for the next three volumes. In 1989, King announced that
The Waste Lands
was still two or three years away from release. “Of everything I’ve written,
The Drawing of the Three
is my kids’ favorite book, and they’re pestering me. . . . That’s the best incentive I know. Tell somebody a story who really wants to hear it.”
⁴⁰