The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger | |||||||||
Stephen King | |||||||||
Donald M. Grant, 224 pages | |||||||||
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A review by Matthew Peckham
Since that nascent period, I have read the next three books in the series more than once, or twice (the most recent, Wizard and Glass,
was published by Donald M. Grant in October 1997), completed an M.A. in English Creative Writing, and come to prefer Wolfe, Borges,
Bradbury, Peake, Ellison, Moorcock, Gaiman and Moore to Tolkien, Brooks, Rice, McKiernan, Jordan and their respectable, but predictable
ilk. I've changed degrees, colleges, careers, colleagues, wives, and through it all, this series remained, something I can pick up and
admire in defiance of its reliable critics.
Like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust, The Dark Tower cycle has been in production most of King's writing life,
beginning in March 1970 just before he graduated college, to today and just a few months away from the publication of the final three
volumes (totaling seven) over the next 16 months. Faust was Goethe's chef d'oeuvre, and King likewise refers to The Dark Tower series
as his magnum opus, mining material and characters from several of his earlier works like Salem's Lot and The Stand to
create a self-referential smorgasbord of interlocking ideas and symbolic junctions for sleuthing critics (or iconic dissertation
writers, depending on whom you talk to). As King himself described in a recent interview, "there also came a time when I realized
everybody from all these books, their courses are changed by the pull of the Tower." And so it goes, with King pulling in everything
from collaborative epics like The Talisman and Black House, to standalone shorts in Robert Silverberg's Legends
and Michael Chabon's Thrilling Tales. All told, there are six supplementary books and three short stories which orbit like
satellites -- peripheral glimpses through the past into the literary vortex at the coalescing center of King's creative universe.
The Gunslinger was originally published in serial form in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
between October 1978 and November 1981 alongside short stories and novelettes by luminaries like Larry Niven,
Thomas Disch, Algis Budrys, Isaac Asimov, Nancy Kress,
John Brunner, and others. Readers of the tale (which clocks in at a mere 224 pages in a large font and wide margins) had to wait three years
for the finish line, and it ended unresolved, without the hero reaching his fabled Tower.
In 1982, those five fledgling parts were collected into one book and published in a trade hardcover edition by Donald M. Grant to the
tune of 10,000 copies. The whole thing might well have ended there, except for the fans who clamored for a second printing when they
discovered it in the 'other works by Stephen King' section of Pet Sematary. A second printing of 10,000 additional copies of
the Grant trade hardcover was green-lighted and quietly slipped out, but the dam finally broke in 1988 with the publication of the
Plume Trade Paperback edition, complete with the original multi-Hugo-award-winning artist Michael Whelan's full-color illustrations.
The story begins "the man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed," and proceeds to tell us the tale of Roland of
Gilead, the world's last gunslinger, and his quest of quests to find the Dark Tower and set whatever is wrong with his world, perhaps
all worlds, right.
For a man who admitted in Danse Macabre that "if I find I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot
horrify, I'll go for the gross-out," The Gunslinger is like a wild glimpse into the mind of the better writer, the one who knew
how to scribe all along but also realized he could make one hell of a good living churning out "spine-tinglers"
like Carrie or Pet Sematary. I don't mean to hack on King's early stuff, or some of the later flops (mostly ghastly
concoctions like "The Ten O'Clock People" in Nightmares and Dreamscapes, ironically published alongside one of the better
poems I've ever read, "Brooklyn August"), but somehow I doubt King himself would entirely disagree. Even Harlan Ellison and Ernest Hemingway
sold some popular stinkers.
The writing itself is still quintessential King, the occasional streaming ticks that turn singsong phrases like "beans, beans the
musical fruit" into strange recurring mantras, snippets of popular American rock 'n roll songs whacked out of time and place but
nuzzled fondly by Kingian nostalgia, and the tendency for the narrative voice to intrude by batting a character's thoughts around like
a shuttlecock. Except here it comes together and functions in a way that's more likely to leave the careful reader awestruck by the
bricklayer prose than eyeball rolling at tawdry theatrics and snarled plottng.
Unlike much of King's better known material, The Gunslinger is difficult to categorize. There are elements of science fiction,
the speculative projection of some broken-down future time in a multi-dimensional branch universe (though how it directly relates to
our own is only loosely revealed in iconic references to restaurant slogans and Beatles songs) and mysterious adumbrations concerning
twentieth century American technology that has somehow infected (or been infected by) ancient history in Roland's world. There are
elements of dark fantasy, the invocation of spirits (tied to science, the use of drugs to enhance the "speaking" trance), magic,
mysticism, and the blasted post-apocalyptic landscape like something out of a frenzied Bosch nightmare. And it wouldn't be King
without at least some horror element -- in this case a tango with the undead in a root cellar, or a dark crawl through an ancient
cavern by rail on a handcar, replete with scabby mutants.
Mostly, though, it's a western.
Part of it is the hard-boiled narrative voice of the gunslinger himself, the True Grit meets The Wild Bunch golem-obstinate
plodding mythology of the stone cold American West and its packs of nomadic noble killers. Make no mistake, though, this is far more
McMurty's Lonesome Dove or Eastwood's Unforgiven, than John Ford's Duke, eschewing the romantic nonsensical
coping mechanisms of the spaghetti westerns and potboiler dime novels that once cluttered American culture in a vain attempt to blot
out a sordid colonial history of madness and massacre.
The other part of it is the one-third fount of inspiration King cites, the 1855 Robert Browning poem "Childe Roland to the Dark
Tower Came" (which cribs its title from Edgar's song in King Lear, which in turn cribs its title from a Scottish ballad
entitled "Childe Roland" as well, perhaps, as the 12th century French epic "Song of Roland") which King recalls being assigned in a
sophomore undergrad course. Like the overarching theme of the poem -- the ultimate knight's crusade, innenwelt and umwelt, and
if you're in Harold Bloom's camp, a quest for ultimate affirmation and simultaneous annihilation -- King's ascending "knight" is on
a spiritual self-quest externalized through a landscape ravaged by projection and memory.
Ellen Datlow has referred to King as sui generis. Read into that whatever you will, Datlow is precisely correct in its most
simple interpretation -- King defies categorization. And while I tend to find a lot of his more well-known material dramatically
less interesting, I can't think of a cycle that better fits Datlow's classification than The Dark Tower series. Whether
it transcends itself, bats average, or flops altogether remains to be seen, but for now readers of speculative fiction owe it to
themselves to see another side of the inimitable Mr. King.
Disclaimer: There's an interesting little twist on the tale to which you need to pay attention, if for some crazy reason this review
convinces you to go out and pick up a copy of book one -- hold up a minute. It turns out King has recently re-written the entire
first book and expanded it by roughly twenty percent. According to the recent Amazon.com King interview, "I always thought that
one was different from the other ones in that it was written when I was so young. It always seemed to me like it was trying too
hard to be something really, really important. So I tried to simplify it a little bit." By the time you read this, the revised
version will already be on store shelves (and the SF Site comparative review forthcoming).
Matthew Peckham is the pen name of Matthew Peckham. He holds a Master's Degree in English Creative Writing and is currently employed by a railroad. |
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