The Road to The Dark Tower (50 page)

One of the real King’s frequently asked interview questions is: What happened to you as a child to makes you write the things you do? King expresses frustration with the premise behind this question. He finds modern society tiresomely Freudian and claims to be more Jungian in his philosophy, subscribing to the notions of race and cultural archetypes rather than overbearing importance of childhood trauma. His regular references
to spiders throughout the series may be his way of poking fun at pop psychology.

So there you go, an easy lesson in the psychology of fiction: take an imaginative boy, add a few dead chickens, pop in one common spider, stir well, and bake for roughly forty years. Result? Low men with red spots between their eyes (bloody circles that never heal), and one spider princeling. [DT6]

Very few of the things King has written since starting the
Dark Tower
series in 1970 were just stories. The Calvins, who research his books for Tet Corporation, believe he is leaving messages in his books in the hope they’ll reach Roland and help him gain his goal. Roland planted this suggestion in King’s mind when he hypnotized him during the summer of 1977.

King thinks he is either the creative force known as Gan, or possessed by Gan. “Maybe there’s no difference,” he tells Roland and Eddie. [DT6] Greedy old ka demands more from him beyond just turning aside from Discordia. Ka comes to him and he translates it. He hates ka for making him do some of the things he writes.

He is being carried by the tidal wave that runs along the Path of the Beam, a wave he may be creating himself. Jake thinks of him as a telecaster. He’s not thinking things up, like the key and the scrimshaw turtle. He’s just broadcasting them. He didn’t make the ka-tet; he facilitated it.

His life is a constant battle with ka and the story it wants him to write. When he opens his eyes to Roland’s world, the Crimson King sees him more clearly and turns his attention to him. He stopped writing the series at the end of
The Gunslinger
because he didn’t want to be the creative force, but also because he was afraid.

The
Dark Tower
series was going to be his epic, but the story and its hero got away from him and its scope exhausted him. By the end of
The Gunslinger
he was no longer sure of Roland’s nature—was he hero or antihero? He abandoned his plans for the series, but Roland hypnotizes him to return to it when he hears the song of the Turtle. Over the next twenty years, he works on it in bursts, but he finds it harder and harder to return after each book.

Arachnophobia

What should a reader make of all the spiders, some with more than eight legs, that appear throughout the series? Are they an unconscious manifestation of King’s childhood experience in the barn? The ones Roland encounters in the basement of the way station are disturbingly large, have eyes on stalks and have as many as sixteen legs. The lobstrosities are described as looking like a crossbreeding of prawn, lobster and spider. Instead of the Queen of Spades, the playing card Roland knows is the “Bloody Black Bitch Queen of Spiders.”

Eddie speaks of the halls of the dead “where the spiders spin and the great circuits fall quiet one by one.” He mistakenly associates the Dr. Doom masks with Spider-Man, when he was actually primarily in the
Fantastic Four
comics.

Bloated spiders bite Jake on the hand and the neck in the house where he passes back through to Mid-World. The bridge over the River Send has steel cables “like the web of some great spider.”

Roland’s horse in Mejis is afraid of spiders, and Rimer is described as a “disgusting spider of a chancellor.” Susan Delgado is afraid of biting spiders among the oil fields outside Hambry and pretends that one had frightened her to explain her delay while spying on Rhea of Cöos. “I hate the look of them,” she tells Rhea, who bears a mark beside her mouth that looks like a spider bite and whose cat looks like it has been crossed with a spider.

Viewed from the Little Needle, the train station at Thunderclap contains a spiderweb of tracks. Todash highways radiate from New York “like some crazy spider’s web,” and the members of Roland’s ka-tet think Susannah’s baby might look like a spiderling, which it does in one of its forms, for it is a “were-spider.” In the Dogan near the Calla, Jake wonders how many generations of spiders had been born in a skeleton’s empty cavity. In the banquet hall where Mia feeds, she sees a dead black widow spider in a goblet. Roland tells the people of Calla about the plague that befell the blossy trees in Gilead when he was ten; the trees were covered in a canopy of spiderwebs.

Spiders extend beyond the
Dark Tower
series. The creature in
It
is best visualized as a spider, and Rose Madder’s face turns into “a spider’s face, twisted with hunger and crazy intelligence.” The Fisherman in
Black House
stashed Ty Marshall in another dimension “like a spider stashing a fly.” The original version of the
Creepshow
screenplay specified spiderlike bugs instead of cockroaches for the final story, “They’re Creeping Up on You,” and the beast in “The Crate” was also described as spiderlike.

Finally, while Roland is plucking a rose outside the Dark Tower to make pigment for Patrick, thorns slash through his glove like it was nothing more than cobwebs, severing one of the remaining fingers on that hand. The spider’s last bite.

In the late 1980s, he finally hears the song his wife has been singing and gets sober. After that, the only thing they argue about is the dangerous route he takes on his long walks.

By 1997, he knows the rest of the story and realizes he’s going to have to tackle the three remaining books all at once. It means swimming across deep water to the other side, and there’s a chance he may drown. He
decides against returning to the Tower, but he can’t separate it from his writing. His undermind is always thinking of it.

Walter tells Mordred that King was a “damnably quick writer, one with genuine talent” who “turned himself into a shoddy (but rich) quick-sketch artist, a rhymeless Algernon Swinburne.”
³⁶
After reading four or five of his books, Irene Tassenbaum decided King wasn’t a very good writer. However, when Roland asks, “If he’s not very good, why didn’t you stop at one?” she concedes the point. “He is readable, I’ll give him that—tells a good story, but has very little ear for language.” Roland tells her that he hears the right voices and sings the right songs.

Roland dislikes and distrusts King, though, believing the author has turned lazy and relies on ka to protect him against trouble. When King decides to avoid the song of the Turtle in 1999, the ka of the rational world has had enough of his frittering and conspires to kill him. Roland and Jake must counter ka’s will and save his life. If they don’t, King will die in a fatal auto-pedestrian accident at the age of fifty-two in the most important version of reality.

At some point, the song of the Turtle became Jake’s death song. King can’t ignore the song, for that would be to abandon “the trail of bread-crumbs he must follow if he is ever to emerge from this bewildering forest of plot he has planted”—if, indeed, he is the one who planted it. He regrets that Jake died—is sorrier about him than about Eddie, although Eddie was always his favorite character.

Jake sacrifices his life so King, though badly injured, will live to finish the tale. Afterward, he tells Roland he wished he could write, “And they lived happily ever after until the end of their days,” but he’s not God and he must write the story no matter how the tale falls.

King tells Roland to save his hate for someone who deserves it. “I didn’t make your ka any more than I made Gan or the world and we both know it. Put your foolishness behind you—and your grief—and do as you’d have me do. Finish the job.”

He’s prepared for reader reaction to Jake’s death when the books are published. When the little boy in
Cujo
died, one reader sent him a dog turd via first-class mail.

The Tower’s earliest readers have known Jake Chambers for twenty years. Yes, some of them will be wild, and when he writes
back and says he’s as sorry as they are, as surprised as they are, will they believe him? Not on your tintype, as his grandfather used to say. He thinks of Annie Wilkes shouting at Paul Sheldon, calling him the God to his characters. He doesn’t have to kill any of them if he doesn’t want to. [DT7]

Three years later, the accident is a distant memory, but not the pain. He’s suffering a mild version of post-traumatic stress disorder, and part of his memory of the accident has been blinded white, hidden by Roland’s hypnotic suggestion. He considers hypnotherapy to recover the lost memories, but never follows through.

As he nears the end, King grows weary of the journey. The trip has been long and the cost high. No great thing was ever attained easily, he reflects. A long tale, like a tall Tower, must be built a stone at a time.

“It is the tale, not he who tells it,” Stevens the butler once said in “The Breathing Method,”
³⁷
[DS] but he who tells it plays a crucial role in the process, too. “I can stop now, put my pen down, and rest my weary hand, although probably not forever; the hand that tells the tales has a mind of its own, and a way of growing restless.” [DT7]

¹
AOL chat, September 22, 1998.

²
www.stephenking.com
, June 2002.

³
Stephen King, personal communication, October 2003. He didn’t elaborate on this surprising revelation.

⁴
Charles Burnside, the serial killer who delivers Breakers to the Crimson King in
Black House,
has a similar worry. “What if there’s more to pay for the things he has done over the course of his long career? . . . What if such a place [as the Big Combination] waits for him?” [BH]

⁵
Jake remarks that “with Roland, you were always in school. Even when you were in the shadow of death there were lessons to be learned.”

⁶
In the revised edition of
The Gunslinger,
Roland is better at estimating Jake’s age.

⁷
The
R
doesn’t stand for “Roland” or anything else. His middle name is just an initial.

⁸
This is a Manni prayer, but the sentiment is reminiscent of
The Green Mile
.

⁹
Eddie Cantor was a silent movie star and comic singer famous in the early years of the twentieth century. He died in 1964, which would be around when Eddie was born (he was about thirteen in 1977).

¹⁰
Estevez and Lowe have starred in adaptations of King stories, Lowe most recently in a remake of
’Salem’s Lot
.

¹¹
Though some text references put him at twenty-one, he seems to be twenty-three in the early part of the series and is described as twenty-five in
Wolves of the Calla
.

¹²
Her name is either Selina [DT2] or Gloria [DT3].

¹³
When Jake sees Eddie deliberately losing to Henry at basketball, he muses, “I think your little brother has been playing you like a violin for a long time now, and you don’t have the slightest idea, do you?”

¹⁴
He’s a year older than Cuthbert was when he died on Jericho Hill.

¹⁵
In
Song of Susannah,
Odetta says that the A train never stopped at Christopher Street. “It was just another little continuity mistake, like putting Co-Op City in Brooklyn.”

¹⁶
An actress in
Gone with the Wind
.

¹⁷
“Susan” and “Susannah” both mean lily—it is interesting to note that calla is a kind of lily.

¹⁸
King told Janet Beaulieu of the
Bangor Daily News
that he’s interested in whether or not there are powers of evil that exist outside ourselves.

¹⁹
This is where Callahan’s story ends in
’Salem’s Lot
.

²⁰
Callahan dubs his two assailants Lenny and George after characters from Steinbeck’s
Of Mice and Men
. King often mentions this novel and it’s one of the books Ted Brautigan leaves for Bobby Garfield in
Hearts in Atlantis
.

²¹
In an interview in
Prevue
magazine in May 1982, King discussed the plot of his then-planned sequel to
’Salem’s Lot
. He said Father Callahan, who no longer considered himself a priest, was working in a soup kitchen in Detroit when he got word things weren’t over in ’Salem’s Lot. Twenty years later, part of that vision came true.

²²
Reminiscent of how Dayna Jurgens escaped from Randall Flagg in
The Stand
.

²³
The head of the ’Salem’s Lot ka-tet.

²⁴
Reminiscent of Ralphie Anderson’s fairy-saddle birthmark in
Storm of the Century
.

²⁵
Ubris,
1969, and
Moth,
1970;
The Devil’s Wine,
Cemetery Dance Publications, Tom Piccirilli, ed., 2004.