The Road to The Dark Tower (5 page)

Despite concerns that he might not write again, King penned
Dreamcatcher
longhand during his rehabilitation and completed
On Writing
shortly thereafter. When Peter Straub suggested incorporating portions of the
Dark Tower
mythos into
Black House,
their sequel to
The Talisman
, King told Straub, “I’m glad you said that, because I don’t know if I can keep it out. At this point, everything I write is connected to it.”
⁵⁷

In August 2001, a month before
Black House
appeared, King announced that he had returned to the land of the gunslinger and intended to publish the remaining three books all at the same time. While he didn’t commit to a firm publication date—“Well, that’s ka, isn’t it?”—he estimated the books would appear in about two years, “depending on all the usual variables, like sickness, accidents, and—scariest of all—a failure of inspiration. The only thing I know for sure is that all these old friends of mine are as alive as they ever were. And as dangerous.”
⁵⁸
He told
Amazon.com
, “I felt like if I didn’t finish this time I never would.”

In preparation for his reentry to Mid-World, King purchased a new desk for the office in his winter home in Florida. The custom creation of Vancouver furniture designer Peter Pierobon, the desk had
ALL THINGS SERVE THE BEAM
written in raised Gregg shorthand script on its black leather surface.
⁵⁹
Instead of rereading the first four books, he listened to Frank Muller’s audio narrations and hired a research assistant to document everything important from the published books and related stories.

To repay readers for their patience, King posted the prologue to the as-yet-untitled fifth volume on his Web site. He originally planned to call the book
The Crawling Shadow,
but later decided it was “sort of corny.”
⁶⁰
“I was younger then,” he joked. This time there would be no complaining that the preview cost anything or was unavailable to anyone—except those without Web access.

The six-year gap between the publication of the fourth and fifth installments of the series equaled the longest interval between books. “[I]n my own defense, all I can say is that it’s never easy to find the doorway back into Roland’s world,” he wrote.
⁶¹

In June 2002, King updated fans about the status of the series.

It’s easily the biggest project I’ve ever taken on, and I’m throwing in everything I have. Including a little craft, actually . . . You have to remember that this project spans over thirty years of my life, and a lot of other books I’ve written have this as their basis. I feel a little like Cal Ripken, making his farewell tour of all the stadiums in the American League. But in the quiet room where I work, no one’s cheering. I just hope some of them will when they read the pages. You have to remember that, for most Steve King readers, Roland the gunslinger’s never been a priority. The Dark Tower books are . . . well, they’re different.
⁶²

By then he had finished the first drafts of
Wolves of the Calla
and
Song of Susannah,
as well as the first third of
The Dark Tower,
a total of 1,900 manuscript pages. Confessing to burnout, King said he would be taking at least a month off before completing the final book.

While writing, King listened to the most boring, repetitive music he could find. He told Mitch Albom, “I’ve been working on these
Dark Tower
books for about fifteen months now and all I’ve been listening to is
Lou Bega Mambo No. 5. I’ve got a vinyl recording that’s got four versions of Mambo No. 5—there’s the radio version, there’s the dance mix, there’s a coupla instrumental [versions].”
⁶³

By early July, he was back at work on the 1,100-page manuscript that would see readers—and the author—through to the end of the epic. At each stop while promoting
From a Buick 8
in September, he updated his progress. Fifty pages left to go, he told a group in New York. Thirty-five, he told fans in Michigan. And while being interviewed by Mitch Albom for his radio show, King said he was down to the final two or three pages. “I wanted to finish it at home—I didn’t want to finish it in a hotel room in Dearborn,” he said, so he held off completing the book until he got back to Maine a few days later.
⁶⁴

King told Albom his tour in support of the
Dark Tower
books would probably be his farewell tour. He planned to get out and spread the message to the people who had been holding back, telling them that the whole story was now available.

In early October, the three books were done in first draft, a stack of manuscript pages that took up more than five reams of paper. King had reached the end of his story. For fans, another year would pass before they could return to Mid-World and the surprises King had in store for them.

An excerpt from
Wolves of the Calla
appeared in the anthology
McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales,
edited by Michael Chabon, in February 2003. Titled “The Tale of Gray Dick,” this vignette gave readers insight into what was being depicted in Bernie Wrightson’s cover art, which started making the rounds of the Internet in April.

In May 2003, King’s official Web site got a face-lift, adding a section devoted to the
Dark Tower.
Flash animation, audio excerpts and artwork samples previewed the remaining books. Both Scribner and Viking followed suit with sections of their respective Web sites devoted to the
Dark Tower.
This spirit of cooperation continued between these two corporate rivals when they cosponsored a contest where the grand prize was a chance to meet King in New York.

Viking released new hardcover editions of the first four books on June 23, 2003, featuring a new introduction by King.
⁶⁵
Trade paperback editions from Plume followed one day later, and the NAL mass-market paperbacks appeared throughout the fall. The paperback versions of
Wizard
and Glass
contained the
Wolves of the Calla
prologue, a rare instance in which one publisher promoted a book to be released by a rival company.

The new edition of
The Gunslinger
was revised and expanded. King completely rewrote the first book to bring it in line with the remaining books, feeling that its language and tone were vastly different from the others. He told an interviewer at
Amazon.com
that the original version seemed like it was trying too hard to be “something really, really important.”
⁶⁶
A week after it was reissued,
The Gunslinger
made number 17 on the
New York Times
hardcover best-seller list, not bad for a twenty-year-old book, especially considering the trade paperback and mass-market paperback editions of the new edition were available within a week of the hardcover release.

In July 2003, Scribner published Volume I of
Stephen King’s The Dark Tower: A Concordance
by Robin Furth, King’s research assistant. The book arose from her work ensuring continuity between the early novels and the remainder of the series. Volume I detailed characters, places and events in the first four books. The Calvins (the fictional
Dark Tower
scholars who work for Tet Corporation) would probably have produced a similar work.

Donald M. Grant published the deluxe signed editions of the remaining three books, but their limited trade edition was reduced to 3,500 copies. These artist’s edition—featuring different dust jackets from the trade hardcover and signed by the respective artist—were released early enough to be the official first editions. Scribner and Grant jointly and simultaneously issued unlimited trade hardcovers, the first time new
Dark Tower
books were widely available in hardcover.

In November 2003,
Wolves of the Calla
broke a twenty-year tradition: It was the first
Dark Tower
installment shorter than the one that preceded it—950 manuscript pages compared to 1,500.
⁶⁷
After a first printing of six hundred thousand copies, the book went back for a sixty-thousand-copy second-printing prepublication and a third printing of seventy-five thousand books was ordered the day after the book was released. A week later, the publisher ordered a fourth printing.

Song of Susannah,
one of the series’ shortest installments, followed in June 2004, and the final book,
The Dark Tower
, was published on King’s birthday in September of the same year, with the second volume of Robin Furth’s concordance appearing simultaneously.

Trade paperbacks followed approximately six months after the individual hardcover releases and mass-market paperback publication is scheduled to begin in 2006.

The
Dark Tower
’s long and arduous road to publication has at last come to its end.

¹
According to the quasifictional journal at the end of
Song of Susannah.

²
NewsNight with Aaron Brown
on CNN, June 24, 2003.

³
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
, October 1978. Roland’s name doesn’t appear in the story, only in this endnote.

⁴
An intriguing aside—the November issue contained a story by Larry Niven and Dian Girard called “Talisman.”

⁵
King mentions Grant’s editions of Howard’s novels in
Wolves of the Calla.
Grant was awarded a life achievement World Fantasy Award in November 2003, the weekend before
Wolves of the Calla
was published.

⁶
Garrett Condon, “King’s ‘Other’ Publisher Well-Kept Collectors’ Secret,” originally in the
Hartford Courant
, August 28, 1987. Reprinted in
Castle Rock Newsletter,
Volume 3–4, No. 11–1, December 1987/January 1988.

⁷
Introduction,
Stephen King’s The Dark Tower: A Concordance,
Volume I, Robin Furth, Scribner, 2003.

⁸
When
The Gunslinger
was released, Whelan was already a three-time World Science Fiction (Hugo) Award winner for Best Professional Artist and two-time World Fantasy Award winner for Best Artist. By 2002, Whelan had won the Hugo Award an unprecedented fifteen times after thirty-two nominations.

⁹
This issue of
Whispers
also contained the first appearance of
The Shining
’s excised prologue, a piece that remained a rarity for fifteen years, until an abridged version was published in
TV Guide
in 1997.

¹⁰
In his editorial, Stuart David Schiff is unsure what art will illustrate the magazine’s cover, as Stewart’s illustration, sent out for four-color separation, was lost somewhere in transit. As a backup, Donald M. Grant and Michael Whelan gave Schiff permission to use one of the Grant edition illustrations, but the Stewart pictures must have materialized at the last minute.

¹¹
Approximately 1,500 were misbound, affecting the order of the pages. [
Fear Itself,
Tim Underwood and Chuck Miller, editors. Underwood-Miller press, 1982.]

¹²
Darrell Schweitzer, “Collecting Stephen King, part I,”
Castle Rock Newsletter,
vol. 1, no. 10, October 1985.

¹³
In a
Today Show
interview with Matt Lauer [June 23, 2003], King said he didn’t understand what the poem meant but he loved the “gorgeous mystery of it.”

¹⁴
Referenced in
The Art of Darkness,
Douglas E. Winter. The essay discusses King’s experience with
The Dark Tower
backlash.

¹⁵
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,
he told an audience at Yale in April 2003. He also told them he was flying high on mescaline at the time.

¹⁶
“On Being Nineteen (and a Few Other Things),” Viking, 2003.

¹⁷
The Gunslinger
was not listed on the ad-card in
Christine,
King’s other 1982 hardcover release.

¹⁸
“The Politics of Limited Editions,” part 1,
Castle Rock Newsletter,
vol. 1, no. 6, June 1985.

¹⁹
Since this comes from a fictionalized journal, these comments do not necessarily reflect King’s real views.

²⁰
“The Politics of Limited Editions,” part 1, op. cit.

²¹
In the coda at the end of
Song of Susannah,
the fictional King considers the possibility that he may retire, or at least ease up considerably, when he finishes the
Dark Tower
series.

²²
“The Politics of Limited Editions,” part 1, op. cit.

²³
Ibid.

²⁴
King says in “The Politics of Limited Editions” that
Pet Sematary
had a rolling gross of about $7 million.

²⁵
“The Politics of Limited Editions,” part 1, op. cit.

²⁶
Donald M. Grant in
Castle Rock Newsletter,
vol 1, no. 12, December 1985. A third printing was issued with new cover art in 1998 as part of a boxed set containing the first three volumes of the series, and a revised and expanded edition was published by Viking in 2003.