Since this essay will represent my first contribution to this new site, I thought it would be most appropriate to document my own personal history with the massively popular centerpiece to the Stephen King universe.
The Dark Tower.
It's interesting how some memories just stay with you. There seems to be little reason to it but I can still see clearly in my mind the day in question. I was with my dad at a grocery store in Florida. Not exactly the place where you would expect to trip over a great book. I made my way over to the circular wire rack of books as I often did, more often than not to ogle the risqué covers on the various bodice-rippers. I was thirteen, after all.
On this day, I was in for something different. It was there that I saw the cover that would set me on a path that would last for decades.
The Drawing of the Three.
The cover hooked me right away. I had no idea what was going on or what the book was about but I was determined to read the thing. And it was only as I began the initial chapters, wondering who the hell Roland was and how he had ended up alone on this beach that I became aware that this was the second installment in a series.
Now in 2018 this would be no problem. Especially if you're on a phone or tablet. You just pop onto Amazon and grab the first book. For a thirteen year old kid in 1989, this was a bit more of a hurdle. And at the time, there wasn't really any such thing as the Dark Tower “series”, it was just these two books. I wasn't going to be making it to an actual bookstore any time soon and because I was staying out of state with my dad, I didn’t have access to a good library. So I made the decision to just go for it and hope I would be able to follow along.
While I had to guess a bit early on what was going on in the story, King does a good enough job planting enough context to make things easy enough to figure out. And I would identify Drawing of the Three as the true start to the series, where most of the primary actors are established as well as the drive of the narrative. As such, I found it absolutely possible to enjoy it without having read The Gunslinger.
That being said, of course I wanted to get my hands on a copy as soon as was possible. And when I did, a passing interest became an obsession. I was in for the long ride - the epic quest to the tower of towers.
I think the scene in The Gunslinger that brought me fully on board was the gunfight in the town of Tull, early on.
The opening of the book can be a little hard to track. It opens with Roland in the desert, hot on the trail of the Man in Black. From there we go into a flashback to an encounter he had with a farmer, isolated on the wasted land and within that we have another flashback, in which we find the story of Tull. It’s a narrative technique that can be difficult to pull off. But it’s one that King seems to like to go after, where the narrative voice takes a dramatic shift. Off the top of my head, I recall him using it in Wind Through the Keyhole as well as his novella “N” and “The Breathing Method.”
He does justice to the story here and the payoff is this great scene in which Roland is attacked by an entire town. The action is intense and I love the imagery of Roland firing with each hand and then somehow reloading each gun, one-handed. I know the film adaptation was pretty unpopular but one thing I liked in particular was how they represented Roland’s nearly supernatural abilities with the guns of his father.
The Gunslinger is short but functions perfectly like that first free joint that gets you hooked. It deftly demonstrates and establishes the premise of the series, a complex hero of a kind. Roland challenges, almost dares us to believe in him, even though we don’t really understand or trust him. And with this book leading into Drawing of the Three, it’s the perfect one-two punch to lead in to the whole saga.
And that’s how it existed for me for several years. Two books that I read again and again. Junior High passed me by and I moved on into High School. And even though it was a time when I was starting to transition away from Stephen King, the day I was walking past the B. Dalton bookstore stopped me in my tracks.
Coming soon: the third book in Stephen King’s Dark Tower saga
I was about as excited as I could get. Other than Timothy Zahn’s Star Wars trilogy which was also ongoing, there was little else in popular culture that I was so hooked in to. I filled out the card to pre-order my copy and went straight home to start digging through the furniture for loose change. However many months away if was, the wait was torture.
And it wasn’t just for the story. The early books of the series were released along with some beautiful interior artwork, pieces that really shaped Mid-World on a visual level for me. The imagery, combined with the prose made for excellent storytelling.
I was into the first pages of Wastelands, pretty much as soon as my feet hit our apartment floor. It was phenomenal. The two travelers who had joined up with Roland’s quest had clearly developed their gun skills, under the close and sometimes severe tutelage of Roland. The action was great and I thought King was extremely clever in how he represented the fraying of Roland’ sanity and how that tied directly into the boy, Jake, in his world.
Now I will concede that the story of what happens to Roland and Jake at the outset doesn’t really make sense. But for the sake of the drama and tension of the plot, I’ll let that one slide. The scene in which Jake is brought into Mid-World is one of my favorites from the series.
I appreciated how things began to take on a global momentum in this book. I still didn’t really know where all this was going but at least I felt like a structure was starting to form. And the book builds up to a quick-paced finale that is amazing. King created Blaine the Mono, one of his more entertaining and maniacal characters, in my opinion.
My sinking feeling as the end of the book neared was that King was going to leave everything unresolved. And like a gripping finale to a season of great TV, this left me dropping the book in frustration while at the same time loving every word that had brought me there.
I couldn’t resolve my feelings of being both angry and satisfied at the same time. You have to understand that I had waited years for this volume and I had to expect that it would be years again before I found out what happened in the passenger carriage of that psychotic train.
Still, I powered through. It’s not like I had a choice. I watched King’s books come out to the market, none of them relating to the Dark Tower (as far as I knew). During this time, Insomnia was released, which had some content relating to the Tower but at the time I never read it. I waited patiently as high school dwindled away and I made the move to college.
And it was only then, after years of patience that I was finally rewarded with Wizard and Glass, the fourth book of the series.
And it was here that my Tower quest took a turn.
I hated Wizard and Glass when it came out. I just didn’t connect with the story or the writing. As a reader, I was barely a teenager when I had been introduced to Roland and his grand quest. I was now an adult. And as such, preferences naturally change. Also, the story didn’t interest me. While I got the satisfaction of a conclusion to the cliffhanger, what I wanted was a continuation of the quest of our band of gunslingers. Not a story from Roland’s youth.
I wasn’t equipped at the time to really appreciate how brilliant the story was. Now that I have the entire saga in my head, Wizard and Glass has become my favorite of the series. But at the time, I was so disappointed in the book that I swore off the series. Being let down by a book is one thing. Being let down by a book you’ve waited years for is an awful experience. I didn’t have another heartbreak in me.
So as such, I decided to wait until the eventual day when the series was completely finished. From where I stood, it could have easily been another decade until that happened. It ended up being not quite that long but still, I closed off that box in my heart and did the best I could to put Roland out of my mind.
And I was successful in that endeavor, if nothing else. I actually remember when the last books of the series started to come out. That King had finished and that the three books would be released in rapid succession. Still, I had so closed myself off from him that I wasn’t even roused enough to go to the bookstore for my copy. I wasn’t reading at all and not even the conclusion to this series that had been such a part of my life was enough to shake the cobwebs loose.
It would be years before it finally occurred to me that the hour plus a day I was spending in the car commuting to work could be used for listening to books on tape. I had never particularly enjoyed them before. Honestly, they had always come across to me as cheesy and overdone, terrible voice acting making the most basic books sound overwrought. Still, this was the perfect way for me to start sneaking reading back into my life. And I went straight to the classics. King. Crichton. Grisham. Clancy. I was far enough separated from college that I had shed any illusion that I was destined for an academic career and I made probably one of the most important decisions of my adult life.
I decided to let books be something that brought me joy again.
And even then, it still didn’t occur to me that all those Dark Tower books were out there waiting for me. I didn’t hear Roland in the next room, tapping his feet impatiently, giving me that twirling gesture with his fingers and wondering why the hell I hadn’t come to my senses.
One day at the library, while browsing for new books, it was just by chance that I came across Wolves of the Calla. Book five. The continuation from where I had left off so many years ago. It was like some higher power had reached down to put me back on the path of the Beam.
The gunslingers were calling.
It didn’t feel right to just pick up where I had left off. For as many times as I read those books in high school, too much time had passed. I had lost all sense of the story and I was still yet to even read book four. So I decided to do things right. The library had all seven books available in audio format. I went right back to the beginning and started the entire epic over again.
The man in black fled across the desert.
The biggest change came when I got to Wizard and Glass. I think I was more prepared to accept the book for what it was, knowing that the next volume would be there waiting when I finished. So even though I still thought the concept of the book was too much of a departure from the pacing of the series, I gave it a shot. And I figured out pretty quickly how great of a book it is. And I got through to the end in good course, poised to finally take the final steps of the journey.
It’s hard to separate out the last three volumes into individual books as I think they are best interpreted as one single installment. I believe this is how King wrote them essentially and I also realize that he has been taken to task for how quickly these books were released. I get it. When you start out with four books that spanned decades and then finish the series in a flurry that barely covers a year, the charge is going to fly that you were just rushing in order to finish. Certainly there had been rumblings about him retiring so it wouldn’t be outlandish at all to suggest that he was more invested in wrapping the thing up so that he could turn out the lights and close the store.
Still, I couldn’t disagree more. Sure, the books came out quickly but we have no way of knowing how long he took to write them. And if decades of publishing has demonstrated anything, it’s that he doesn’t seem to need that much time to execute his ideas. Once the concept has percolated, he seems to be able to get it on the page in efficient fashion. And considering that he described basically the climax of the series at the end of Insomnia, published ten years earlier, it had clearly been on his mind.
And it’s one thing to say that you aren’t a fan of the choices King made with the story. I can respect that. Certainly the investment of so much time in a series will make you feel strongly about it. But I think it goes too far to argue that the writing itself is flawed. Say what you will about the story. Looking at the books from a global perspective, I thought that the craft and execution of the last three books was the most refined of the entire series. Wastelands and Wizard and Glass are my favorites. But books five through seven are where I feel the most like I’m reading a series. The plot for the books are complex, with storylines diverging and reconnecting, deftly handled by a master of an author. Roland’s quest becomes a flurry of plot movement and once you get through the slow burn of Wolves of the Calla, we are off to the races.
It was a mixture of emotions for me as I approached the end of the final book, a hearty serving of tragedy, as character after character seems to fall to various heroic deaths. Losing a vital character in a book is always a hard thing to deal with. But add to this the fact that I had been with these characters for decades and it made this book in particular even harder to get through. I don’t quite know how it’s possible to both love and despise a book at the same time but somehow I had reached that state. I felt the compulsion to keep turning the pages because I needed to find out where this was all going while at the same time dreading what could possibly be lurking.
Endings are impossible. Especially for an epic saga that has burned so much time and ink. And I was genuinely skeptical as to whether or not King was going to find an ending that was satisfying and made sense. And while there were any number of conclusions for characters in this book which I did not agree with, such as Walter or Mordred or even the Crimson King, I still clung to my faith that it was all building up to something great.
And as for the ending? It has been debated and proven unpopular with many a fan, but for me I think this was the perfect resolution to the series. The only way I can think of which can allow for as happy an ending as is possible while at the same time still providing a harder shot to the gut. The proof of how cursed a character Roland really is.
You would think I would be tired of it by now, for the number of times I have read this saga and for as much thought and time as I have devoted to it. Still, the Dark Tower has been a huge part of my life from an early age all the way up until now. And I don’t see myself letting go anytime soon. Truth be told, just the act of writing out this essay makes me kind of want to go back to book one and start the quest all over again. Because you never know what hard packed truth and justice may come calling from that many ago, in a world that has moved on.
The man in black fled across the desert.
And I think I might just follow.
