100 Books #98 - Stephen King's THE DARK TOWER

Well, thank Bog that's over.

I'll tell you what: for a while there, I was going to let that sentence be my whole review. The Dark Tower, also known as last 1050 pages of the enormous Dark Tower saga, was pretty rough going for me. Mostly in terms of sheer annoyance.

Unlike most of the series' true fans and Constant Readers -- and I know a lot of them, online and in meatspace -- I never really bonded with the characters, mostly because, as I've complained of in all of my other posts about these books, these characters never really came to life for me.* Oh, they came close, every single one of them. But it always seemed like just as soon as they were doing so, the author yanked hard on their puppet strings and made them dance to his tune instead of their own. I've come to expect that from King, but after watching him do that for hundreds and thousands of pages, to the same five main characters and a host of secondaries, I'm punchy and exhausted and annoyed as hell and want to punch the man in the crotch.

But then there's the ending. And let me tell you this: I dug the ending. Oh, not the wish fulfillment happy ending in Central Park, but what we learn in the coda. Seriously: after wading through all the muck of these last several books, that was really the only ending that would have earned my respect. Well done, Mr. King. I might even call you Sai King. Just this once.

*So no, I didn't cry or anything when anybody died. In large part this is probably because not a single death in this book is a surprise (well, except for one, and that one, that was just cheap. Hundreds of thousands of pages of shit-eating grins and traps and henchmen attacks and BOOM, a brand new player pulled off the bench in the last book gits him? UGH). I've complained of my ribs being sore from all the digging references to other elements of pop culture (Harry Potter. UGH); now my head is sore from its having been beaten over the head in advance of every death. Kate. Yeah. Hey, Kate. Kate. So and so is going to die. Are you ready for so and so to die, Kate? Because so and so is gonna die. And it's really going to be tragic. And it's going to make you sad. I'm really not sure you're ready. Because I'm not kidding. So and so is going to die. Hey, Kate, do you get it yet? So and so is gonna die. STOP STOP STOP.

100 Books #93 - Stephen King's SONG OF SUSANNAH

Someone -- I forget who, and it may be several someones, the way ideas like this get spread -- has observed that the current proliferation of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction is more or less exactly contemporaneous with the entry of millions of Baby Boomers into their retirement years, their golden years, the years in which previous generations been put out to pasture to enjoy their remaining years in contemplative peace (if they're lucky) before going gently -- or not -- into that good night. The Boomers are fighting it like never before, of course. And so, taking the observation about the spate of fictional apocalypses a little further, it represents the Boomers' collective freak-out that they, too, might die someday, and this an expression of their inability to imagine the world moving on without them. Apres nous, le deluge.

Increasingly, this is how the Dark Tower series is looking to me. For all that the first novel. The Gunslinger, was written when King was a very young man (just 19 years old),  the series as a whole, and especially Song of Susannah (I haven't read the final book yet, obviously), feels like King having a vast and rather elegant freak out of his very own: not just "the" world but all the worlds are disintegrating, as they have been practically forever* but the horrible and final end is going to happen now. Unless the ka-tet -- Roland, Eddie, Susannah, Jake and Oy -- can reach the Dark Tower in time and do something as yet unknown there to stop it all from falling apart.

That's all pretty standard fantasy/quest novel stuff. What makes this feel like a giant Baby Boomer freak-out to me is what King, the king of all Baby Boomer pop fictioneers**, has done in this novel in particular -- namely, writing himself and his obsessions right into the narrative. Yes, this includes the blue Dodge Caravan that famously struck and could have killed him in June of 1999, and which famously prompted him to finally finish this series lest he George R.R. Martin us and leave it unfinished forever due to his finally finding a bucket to kick as most of us suspect Martin is probably going to do with A Song of Ice and Fire. Whereas in previous Dark Tower novels King ingeniously tied a lot of his most beloved stories together and made them into satellite/spin-offs of his grand DT mythos, here he has made himself all but an early stand-in for the Tower, the Fisher King whom Eddie and Roland must seek out, query and assist in order to further their own quest. The closer they get, the better they feel. Everything seems wonderful, even the clouds are more beautiful, and they start wondering if King is really just a man at all.

I mean, check out how they speak of him as they approach:

"Is he immortal, do you think? Because I've seen much in my years, and heard rumors of much more, but never of a man or woman who lived forever." "I don't think he needs to be immortal. I think all he needs to do is write the right story. Because some stories do live forever."

Excuse me while I discreetly retch just a little.***

Anyway, Song of Susannah and all of its tying in is all kind of impressive, as technical achievements go, but it's also all a bit twee. My ribs are already bruised and sore from all of the digs they've taken in the hundreds of pages of DT I've already read. This time King's elbow drew blood. Dude, pop culture and literary references are fun to tease out and play detective over, but not when the fun of figuring them out for myself is taken away. And an overwhelmingly self-indulgent, explicit self-portrait of the author, however tongue-in-cheek, taking such prominence in a story just makes it all that much worse.

I would really like to visit the universe next door, where King's magnum opus went through the hands of a really serious editor who was committed into making these books the real towering achievements they could have and should have been. In that universe, these stonkingly amazing characters are allowed to be themselves, to tease out or create meaning from the world(s) around them, to discover what they needed to do and the tools they need to do it organically and never once descend into that most annoying of all hack fictional tropes of wondering if they are characters in a novel. In that universe, these books vibrate in glory on their own merits entirely and become cultural touchstones on the order of, well, on the order of all of the works King so desperately wants them compared to that he all but shouts every time he ganks something from one of them "See how I referenced the Wizard of Oz here you guys, isn't that cool?" "Hey look, Magnificent Seven!" "Dudes! JFK was totally a Gunslinger. You guys, you guys, JFK."****

As it is, I appear to be stuck in this one, where true greatness is buried in cruft. The greatness is so very great that it shines through the cruft in a lot of places, but buried it remains. I know a lot of people who love these books so much that they read them over and over and over again and find new wonders to behold every time, on the order of how I keep finding new ways to enjoy Lord of the Rings and The Anubis Gates and Middlemarch and all of the oeuvres of Philip K. Dick and Joseph Conrad and Gene Wolfe. And bully for them, I say.

But I'm pretty sure that once I've finally finished these books, and I have but one left to go, now, I'm never going to want to revisit these universes again.

My ribs may never fully heal.

*But, as Susannah's latest alternate personality informs her, men had managed to shore everything up when magic left the world by building machines to do the work of magic and spells, assuming that there would always be men like themselves around to keep the machines, and thus the universe, going. Foolishly, of course; in King's as in so many universes, man is only a pale and crappy imitation of God, whose creations never last and are tainted by original sin and a lot of other craptrap. I mean claptrap. Or do I? For all that King has Roland asserting that he doesn't believe in any gods, we're still very much in King's famous medieval morality play in genre fiction's clothes, here.

**I, at least, can think of no other novelist of his generation who has so thoroughly woven that generation's pop and high cultural tropes into his work. He is famous for larding up his work with references to Boomer-era music (in which his taste is impeccable, if he can be forgiven by Beatles haters like myself for his overwhelming adoration of their stuff), in particular (check out EssJay's fantastic Stephen King playlist over at Insatiable Booksluts and remember this is just a taste of what he's done).

***I must say, though, as "writer meets his characters in 'real life'" scenes go, this one isn't bad. It contains a nice excursis on how characters come to be, bubbling up from the writer's psyche as if they were real beings with pasts and identities and goals and longings and regrets, for whom the writer feels like a mere amanuensis. But this emphasized for me, of course, what a shame it is that King never felt he could trust his characters to enact his plots, even though both elements are coming from the same place. That said, though, it was more than a little amusing to see King treating himself-as-character the same way he treats all of his other characters. Tee hee.

****Which, I get it. JFK's assassination was a shocking and transformative event that traumatized everybody who was alive then. It was a turning point in history. It may have changed our world forever. But I'm sick to my eyeballs of being reminded of that all of the time. Sooner or later, every Boomer artist has his or her say about it to borrow its importance to make his or her art that much more important. The effect of this, though, is not to enshrine this event and its effects on American life, but to cheapen it. And, for me at least, JFK's assassination is about as cheapened as a historical event could possibly get (don't even get me started about all the conspiracy theories and whatnot about it. Enough already, people). I could very gladly live out the rest of my life without ever encountering it in novel, film or art exhibit ever again. Which is to say that I have absolutely zero plans to read King's 11/22/63. I'm pretty sure that if there is a Hell and I wind up going there, Bob Dylan will be reading aloud from its pages to me for all eternity, and hey, why allow for spoilerage?

100 Books #88 - Stephen King's WOLVES OF THE CALLA

After two entire novels that are supposedly part of this giant, sprawling series but that did pretty much nothing to advance the plot, it is a great relief to be "back on the Beam" in the parlance of these Gunslingers and their world. I find this a little ironic, since an element that has annoyed me about this series is precisely the kind of thing the Beam represents: the author appearing to mistrust his characters so much that he has to keep sending them message dreams and cripple them with artificial obsessions and things they "just know", of which the Beam -- sort of like a ley line except even the clouds in the sky move according to its dictates, to make sure everyone keeps going the right way -- but it is so.*

All of which basically means that Wolves of the Calla is probably my favorite of these damned things since The Drawing of the Three, although I found nothing in it that could replace the Lobstrosities in my heart. Our ka-tet has come across a town -- really one of many towns and settlements in a well-cultivated agricultural region, all of which share a unique problem -- that sort of, kind of, thinks that maybe it needs their help, but doesn't really want to commit to asking for that help because of the trouble it might stir up. It's a classic plot from Samurai stories to the medieval tales of chivalry to westerns, given an interesting twist here by its placement within the Dark Tower arc, and by the mystery of what exactly these "Wolves" are that plague the Calla by somehow changing the reproductive norms of these communities so that twins are rampant and singletons extremely rare, the better to carry off one of each pair sometime in childhood, do something unspeakable to him or her, and send him or her back a complete simpleton with a tendency towards giantism. The children are collected a little more frequently than once a generation; the people only get 30 days warning of their coming via an android (named, of course, Andy) who just suddenly knows one day that they're enroute. He's given the latest warning just in time for Roland, Eddie, Susannah, Jake and Oy to happen along.

What really made this one stand out for me is the same kind of thing that almost redeemed Wizard and Glass: King's amazing ability to create amazing podunk cultures (though, again, the folk speech of the Calla is wearying, full of "if it do ya fines" and "I begs" and excessive use of the do+infinitive construction, e.g. "if you do want to eat" "he did dance that dance"**) complete with intricately fascinating agricultural/fertility rituals. This time around we encounter something called The Rice Song, which joyously celebrates the life cycle of the paddies in song, labor, movement and dance, the dance having at times an intriguing supernatural element as made stunningly plain when our man Roland, taking up what manifests as a heretofore unknown but deeply important traditional role, performs on stage, half Green Man, half "Boot Scootin' Boogie", all uncanny. It's an arresting scene.

Accompanying this new version of King's version of the whole fertility/death cult thing is, well, the death side of it, which is in the hands of the women, at least until they shriek a prayer to the Rice Goddess and fling it with deadly accuracy. Do not mess with the ladies of the Calla, y'all. Do not.

And speaking of women, there is an extremely well-handled sub-plot involving the unintended consequences of everybody doing what they had to back in The Waste Lands to bring Jake back into the Gunslinger world, and the Black Loc-nar that has been hidden in the Calla all this time by one Father Callahan of Salem's Lot fame, which sub-plot lends extra tension to a main plot that, for once, is not lacking in tension really at all, but I'm not complaining to have it there.

What I might complain a bit of, if I thought it would do any good, is the nugatory pop culture references that got dumped in again. They're ladled out rather than dumped on this time, which is an improvement, but all they accomplished for me is to drag me out of the story to rub at my sore ribs, still tender from all the Oz-reference digging they got at the end of Wizard and Glass. And no, I'm not talking about all the Salem's Lot stuff. That's kind of cool. I was expecting Wolves of the Calla to be many things, possibly even many awesome things, and I was right so to expect, but I was not expecting it to also be a sequel to Salem's Lot. Which it kind of is and kind of isn't. The weird ways King found to inter-relate that story with this one made my jaw drop, and made the ghost of the 12-year-old Kate who first read SL jump up and down and point and yell happily. Bravo, there. Bravo.

And of course there's a damned cliffhanger, which must have driven all of you original Dark Tower nerds crazy, but which I get to have resolved for me right away. Song of Susannah is already sitting in my Kindle awaiting my pleasure. But first, I need another break from this stuff. Maybe even some nice non-fiction.

*And of course, it was their Mighty God-King who yanked them off the Beam, so, irony squared, as such.

**These are not direct quotations, just examples I made up. I don't ever want to read this kind of dialogue again, not even to hunt up actual examples. Just ugh.

100 Books #85 - Stephen King's THE WIND THROUGH THE KEYHOLE

My experience of reading The Wind Through the Keyhole is one only a Dark Tower newbie could have, and so I decided to have it.

This novel -- practically a novella next to its gargantuan cousins -- was published just this year, but is meant to be "shelved" between the fourth Dark Tower book, Wizard and Glass, and the fifth, Wolves of the Calla. Which is to say it takes place, insofar as its outer loop of storytelling can be said to take place, between Roland's ka-tet's visit to the off-kilter Emerald City that turned the last ten percent or so of WaG into one giant in-your-ribs Wizard of Oz reference, and their arrival outside the Calla crescent whereat they get called on to be gunslingers in the good old fashioned sense. Like WaG, The Wind Through the Keyhole tells us a story of Roland's past, but nested within that story is another story, called "The Wind Through the Keyhole" which is a sort of Roland-world fairy tale presented in full as told by Roland to a child in the middle of the story from his past as told by Roland to Eddie, Susannah, Jake and Oy.

Got that? Good.

So this novel really doesn't advance the Dark Tower plot one bit, but it's not meant to. It's meant to deepen and extend the mythology of Roland and his world a bit, while leaving the door (or keyhole) wide open for more of the same if there is demand. Or maybe even if there isn't. I can sort of imagine King spending his twilight years adding more and more volumes like these to his baby until new readers of the Dark Tower find themselves in a sort of Zeno's Paradox, chasing the last volume and its revelation and proper ending, but never quite getting to it because every step forward leads to a half-step forward and then a quarter-step forward and so on. Nor need all of them take place between WaG and WotC, Bog help us. And future wags will no doubt refer to these Dark Tower 4.5s and 4.7s and 5.12s and whatever as King's Silmarillion. Which will likely lead to much wailing and gnashing of teeth on the part of people like my friends who originally read this series one book at a time, waiting years between them, for just the original seven, and who then want everybody else to read them, except now there are like 17 of them plus the ones that King's children cobble together out of his random jottings on various flash drives and whatnot left posthumously behind...

On the other hand, maybe King pere et fils will show some restraint. I suspect a lot depends on how well this book has been received. Judging from Goodreads, the answer to that question is farily well, though some fans are annoyed that its nature partakes more of WaG fan fiction than of the series as a staggering whole. Absolutely none of the perceived lacuna between the plots of WaG and WotC (which I am reading now and does seem to feature a staggering advancement in Roland's apprentices' skills and in the Schroedinger's Fetus that is just hand-waved as "some stuff happened between the novels") is filled; it's all just tangential texture.

But so back to how my experience in reading The Wind Through the Keyhole is something only newbies can have. I'm going to take a stab in the dark and say that, based on what I've gleaned via King's bad habits of sending his characters message-dreams and whatnot that I've complained about elsewhere and of ham-handed foreshadowing generally, that most, if not all, of Roland's apprentices are not going to make it to the finish line. I might be wrong; I'm trying hard to avoid spoilers (and driving my friends crazy because I'm not reading these novels fast enough to suit them and they want to talk about them with me at great length, the darlings. Sorry, sweetnesses; I'm just not enough of a fan to want to devour these straight through without some breaks with other books) and so hope not to found out whether I'm right or wrong until the end. But, reading between the lines as I decided whether to read this or Wolves of the Calla next, I got the distinct impression that original readers of the series found it jarring or bittersweet or just plain weird to see characters with known fate/dooms walking around and learning and talking like they still had futures. For the, you know, 20 or so pages in which they appear in this book, anyway. As I said, I'll never know that experience. For me it's just the WaG mixture as before, except in that, glory be, no stupid teen romance in this one. For which I am grateful.

The stories themselves, especially the central fairy tale, have a lot of charm to them, a quality that seems to me rare in most of King's other work. There are still elements of peril and horror and heartbreak, to be sure, but somehow even depictions of, e.g. shredded bodies in the Roland-story of the terrible shape-shifter besetting a mining town, have kind of a light, fond touch. This is King putting an extra layer of delicious buttercream frosting on an already too-rich cake. He's having such fun, and buttercream is yummy; why stop him? Just, you know, don't let him totally encrust the thing with candy flowers and crap, okay?

But now I'm definitely hitting a wall of Dark Tower fatigue. Oy.

100 Books #82 - Stephen King's WIZARD AND GLASS

Just as when I read The Drawing of the Three and found that my favorite bit was the sideshow, Roland versus the Lobstrosities, in Wizard and Glass I find that the coolest part is in the beginning, in which the ka-tet matches wits against Blaine the Pain, the Suicidal Riddle-philic Capattack Train (we'll call him BPSRCT for short). There's just something about high-stakes riddling, I guess. Also, BPSRCT is quite seriously, and horrifically fun, threatening and torturing its captive/passengers in a way that reminded me very strongly of AM, the over-the-top malevolent computer in Harlan Ellison's short story "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream." You know BPSRCT would have abracadabra-ed Roland into an immobile blob of flesh if it could have.

I would gladly have read much more of that craziness, but 'twas not to be. Now, I sure have been curious about Roland's backstory, because he's just so capable and mysterious, but I really do have to be careful what I wish for because WOW.

Mostly, the backstory is OK. I am unimpressed with the framing of the narrative -- ostensibly, Roland is telling the story to his companions as they all sit around a campfire, but we get the good old crappy third person omniscient narrator who knows precisely what everyone is thinking and feeling every moment and has to tell us all about it. I wouldn't mind this absurdity so much, except in that King won't allow us to forget it; indeed, seems to delight in rubbing our noses in it, as in an "interlude" exactly halfway through the book, which has Eddie wanting to know how Roland "can know every corner of this story" and Roland's response is a cheap and cheating "I don't think that's what you really want to know, Eddie." Here it's King addressing the reader, basically, and telling her to "let it go, nerd." This ticked me right off, and my constant simmering annoyance at this spoiled my enjoyment of a story that I would probably otherwise like quite a lot. And the thing is, the thing is... doing this was completely unnecessary. I'm inclined to think that  the Dark Tower fans were more than ready, as I was, to get some of Roland's backstory and would have been perfectly happy to just get a straight-up non-sequential novel about Roland's first big adventure, without the hand-waving at framing it as a campfire discussion during which time also just happens conveniently to stretch so that the night is exactly as long as the many, many, many hours it takes for Roland to "tell" his story. Seriously, why bother?

The very cool first 100 pages or so of Wizard and Glass, the BPSRCT joyride through hell, could just as easily have been the very cool first 100 pages or so of Wolves of the Calla, and the rest of the very small amount of overall narrative progress could have been presented in that book, too. At least, I suspect so, not having read Wolves of the Calla yet.

Now, I know the poor souls who were waiting not-quite-GRRM-ian lengths of time for new books might not have been totally pleased to get a non-sequential fourth book for their pains, but then again, they might have appreciated it for having been rendered a better book overall. It's an unanswerable question, possibly, and maybe I don't have any "right" to speculate about it, reading these many years after the fact, with all of them available to me at the same point in time, but as someone who gets annoyed at things like bad narrative framing, my prejudice inclines me to favor this theory.

But enough of my narrative quibbles*, because Roland's backstory, except for all the tiresome teenagers-in-love-and-thinking-sex-is-only-for-them focus, is pretty good, if kind of bloated and slow. Having been manipulated by the forces of evil into earning his guns way too young, Roland and his two best friends get sent to a neighboring Barony to assess what it has to offer the Affiliation (the ragged remnants of civilization in which the boys grew up)'s War Effort, but really just to get them out of harm's way for a while to give them a little more time to grow up. But of course, they uncover dastardly doings as well as forbidden love. We get a trio of Scary Bad Guys, a few Corrupt Politicians (one of whom has made a binding contract with Roland's girlfriend Susan to get to satisfy his Grody Old Man lusts on her Lissome 16-Year-Old Beauty until she is pregnant. He saw her first; Roland is the interloper. But since said politician is a caricature instead of a character, it's all right that Roland steals his girl. Not that I give a damn about any of this. I roll my terrible eyes and gnash my terrible teeth at romances, especially annoying teenage romances, spoiling my quest stories), some Unhappy Aging Women Who Need To Get Laid and, my favorite bit, a Nasty Old Witch who has been engaged to babysit a mysterious sphere that is basically a pink Loc-Nar. Oh, she is awesome. By which I mean ridiculous, ineffective, thwarted, a sacrificial virgin way, way, way past her prime. Which means she is ridiculously entertaining.

And of course there are Roland's boyhood friends, Cuthbert and Alain, long alluded to but never seen until now. It's hard not to be fond of these lads, for all that they are just so overshadowed by Roland; Cuthbert is a big smartass, Alain kind of mystical and gentle, but they are bothmore than up to the task of keeping their friend on track And yes, they are basically stand-ins for Eddie (Cuthbert) and Susannah (Alain). Which leaves Jake as Susan. Um. Best not follow that line of reasoning too closely.

Redeeming all of this for me, at least, is the setting and the season. King's Old West town by the sea brims and shivers with archetypal power as it simmers through the summer and approaches harvest-time, which is celebrated in a ritual-cum-festival called Reaping that combines all of the fun and excitement of a quality county fair of yesteryear (surely King's own childhood) with all of the god-propitiating dread of ancient ceremonies like the burning of the Wicker Man and every fertility rite ever. But of course this particular year, with our three young strangers in town, a pink Loc-Nar in place, and serious war brewing on the frontiers, no one's going to get to enjoy it much this year. The passages concerning this occasion, preparations for it, anticipation of it, hints at its deeper meaning, are the best bits of Wizard and Glass saving the breathless madness of the train ride, and are the ones that remind me most of what I most love Stephen King for -- his short fiction. Ah, me.

Ah, I should have seen it coming, the pink Loc-Nar. King wasn't going to continue to allow his most fascinating creation ever to go on existing in his cussedly tough and independent way forever. At least Roland's promptings from God are more unusual and interesting than the usual message dreams and unexplainable knowledge. As a way for such an amazing character to suddenly gain a life-consuming obsession, it's fair enough, I suppose.

And so onward, if with a bit of a ragged rather than a lusty and excited cheer go I. Because if nothing else, these books are interesting in that they tie so many of King's others together, sort of the way Heinlein wound up stitching his together, and Greenaway his. Roland Deschains is Stephen King's Tulse Luper. And that's sort of cool.

*But maybe not of my grammatical/philological ones. Because folks, 800+ pages of faux archaic dialect is annoying enough (as apparently our author knows, as he has one of his characters muttering to himself about how sick of it he is at one point), but the constant appearance of "thee" being used in the vocative case (i.e. as a form of address) and "ye" being used interchangeably with it ("ye" is in fact acceptable when used in the vocative, but it is a plural pronoun) purt'near drove me up the wall, pilgrims. I should, perhaps, count my freaking blessings that at least no early modern English conjugation errors (e.g. mixing up the second person forms like "hast" with third person "hath" like people so often do) accompany these spurious "thees." And yes, King made up this world and maybe the people with which he populated it just are not keen philologists themselves and would sooner shoot me than discuss with me such niceties, but that doesn't mean it isn't irritating as hell to a certain type of reader.

100 Books #79 - Stephen King's THE WASTE LANDS

More Dark Tower? Well, why not. I've got lots of other wonderful books on deck to take me into autumn and beyond, as well as lots of writing projects, but wondering what was going to happen next in this series (or, more accurately, still looking for what it is that has inspired such passionate devotion among so many of my friends) kept nagging at me. There are two ways to deal with something like this: bring all your force of will and energy to bear on shutting up the nagging, or just go with the flow and give in.

I gave in. I just wanted to know what this weird trio King has ginned up, a half-deranged gunslinger who has been tricked into tipping himself a little further towards all-deranged, an ex-junkie who is maybe poised to become a Big Damn Hero, and a crippled former schizophrenic who has decided to call herself the BDH's wife (and is herself possessed of plenty of BDH qualities), were going to do now that they're a team.

Well, first of all, they're going to travel some more. Big surprise. I can sort of picture Randall doing an impersonation of this trio similar to his impression of the plot of the Lord of the Rings in Clerks 2 (warning: f-bombs, which, duh, Clerks).*



And tell me he isn't right? A lot of both Lord of the Rings and this series so far has been walking. Dark Tower less so, though. Walking and shooting and taking over people's bodies by means of weird stand-alone hoodoo doors in the sand, let's say. But mostly walking.

But on their travels, ah, on their travels, such wonders do they encounter. Like Shardik, a seventy foot tall robot bear with a satellite dish sticking out of his head, who sneezes parasites and sets ex-junkie Eddie to wondering why the hell he's suddenly thinking of talking rabbits (the answer is, of course, Richard Adams). Two-headed bison grazing on the outskirts of an ailing town. Billy bumblers, which are sort of like badgers and sort of like mockingbirds and sort of like dachsunds. Melanin-deprived white bees bumbling around and building a deformed hive in a tree. And those are just the strange animals.

As an interlude, we also get to spend some time with Jake, an 11-year-old boy in the "real" world, specifically New York City in 1977, who is going mad for pretty much the same reason gunslinger Roland is. They met in the first novel, Jake and Roland, in unforgettable and haunting circumstances. Then in the second novel, Roland was tricked into preventing their meeting from ever happening; time travel is tricky that way. But now both are tormented by dual consciousnesses, sure on the one hand that they met and parted tragically, equally sure on the other that their story together never happened. Roland both has and does not have Jake on his conscience; Jake is Schroedinger's Kid.

And once the full team is at last gathered (I wonder how many times I'll say that through these seven or either novels? Because oh yes, one of the billy bumblers, rejoicing in the name of Oy, becomes a member of the party, too), which takes half the book, things stall out for a little while but then get going as the ka-tet** discovers the Beam, basically a ley line that will lead them straight to the Dark Tower if they keep on following it, and find themselves faced with one whopper of an obstacle: a giant city, which Roland calls Lud, that may or may not be deserted. The sound of drums rumbling in a specific rock'n'roll backbeat rhythm every night strongly suggests that it is not deserted, as do the rumors of war helpfully imparted by a village of very old people. And how can I not think of Ballard's High Rise here, with its characters' descent into madness and violence enacted almost exclusively at night? Ho ho!

But from there it all kind of devolves into a bog-standard post-apocalyptic obstacle course through the ruined city, dodging a murderous band here, discovering the "real world" history behind a "Roland world" ritual there, with a sideline in rescuing. I won't lie: I yawned a bit. But that might just be because I stayed up too late reading. Again. Because, fortunately, as the rescue plot spun out, so did a puzzle plot, one that felt straight out of a Benoit Sokal game. And I love Benoit Sokal games, you guys. Love.


Only, you know, instead of finding a way to drive off the birds and solve all the other puzzles in order to get the train going like Kate in Syberia, Eddie and Susannah have to feed riddles to their malevolent pink train to keep it from electrocuting them to death.

Bonus points to King for mathiness there, by the way.

As always, though, it's Roland who makes the novel. A lot of the time, when I read Stephen King, my mind drifts off into a sort of speculation along the lines of how much it would suck to be a King character, goaded along mercilessly to serve the demands of the plot, haunted even in sleep by the remorseless and unavoidable promptings of his or her god, who is, of course, King himself. I am always at least half-conscious of the strings attached, can look above the stage and watch King yanking at them gleefully. It's all part of the fun of reading him, of course, watching him yank and twist and wiggle at the manipulator. But sometimes, one wonders what it would be like if his characters just got to be themselves, do what they would do, instead of always having to jump to respond to constant prophecies and visions, compulsions they "just have" and things they "just know."***

But then there's Roland, a most un-King-like figure, so tough and sere and scary I sometimes think that King himself is intimidated by him. Oh sure, Roland suffers and has suffered, but he suffers with gritted teeth, not giving an inch, not giving a flinch, ready to spit in King's eye, even when he has to give up his famous guns. He is, in other words, the only character I have encountered in these or any of King's books who seems capable of greeting King's dawn with a breath of fire and a raised middle finger. Of course, it would have to be on his left hand, since King took away his right middle finger, index finger, and thumb, right? Begging the question.

I must confess to a certain sort of psychic disconnect about him, though, because I keep expecting him to be the Roland of the Chanson rather than Shakespeare/Browning's Childe Roland, but that's my own problem. Stupid liberal arts education.

But so anyway, because I love Roland and the discomfiture he seems to elicit from his creator, and I love Eddie and Susannah and their weird romance and budding badassery, and sometimes even love Jake and Oy (I keep picturing the wee Jack Gleason that made his film debut in Batman Begins, and now graces us with his teenaged asshattery in Game of Thrones, as Jake), I am onboard for the next book wholeheartedly -- especially since it seems to offer the promise of lots of Roland backstory, which I do so long for.

I hope he's not plagued with too many burning bushes, though.

*But of course, Peter Jackson is unlikely to be tapped for the honor of adapting these books, if such a project ever actually comes to fruition, so it is equally unlikely that Randall will ever have cause to mock The Dark Tower. Somewhere, right now, EssJay is foaming at the mouth and screaming and cursing me like Gollum cursing Baggins at the very thought.

**Roland's word for his team; ka being more or less his version of karma, with an extra helping of necessity/destiny (because King seems unable to trust his characters to go where he wants them to go, do what he wants them to do, without such helpful little prompts), ka-tet invoking notions of a quartet as well as the Vonnegut-ian karass.

***Which is not to say at all that King writes unbelievable or one-dimensional or cardboard characters, because he totally does not. That's the thing. He creates these fully-fleshed out human beings out of his mind, something he has an honest-to-Bob gift for, but then, like a bad Greek god he  keeps sending them messages in dreams and other unsubtle nudge-shoves. Augh!

100 Books #78 - Stephen King's THE DRAWING OF THE THREE

This one wasn't quite what I was expecting the second Dark Tower novel to be, but really? That's a good thing. I wasn't sure I could endure another whole novel's worth of Old Testament desert trekking with Roland.

There's still plenty of moralizing to be had here anyway, of course, mostly about drug addiction, pushers and junkies and gangsters, oh my. For Roland, who confronted his nemesis (or at least the mouthpiece of his nemesis) at the end of The Gunslinger only to find his encounter took years, rather than hours, has won through to the beach with a slightly clearer understanding of his purpose, or at least the next task he has to complete in his quest to reach the titular tower. He has to gather allies. Or more Jack-type sacrifices. Or something.

So a decent chunk of this novel is spent coming and going between our own world and a weird interstitial wood between the worlds sort of place, the beach through to which Roland won at the end of the last book. Except the danger on this beach is not that he is going to fall asleep and forget what he was supposed to be doing. No, it's much cooler.

Damn, but I love the lobstrosities. Giant mutant crustaceans that creep forth from the waves at nightfall and pursue anything that moves with bizarre nonsense questions "Dod-a-chuck? Did-a-chum?" and can snap through anything with their claws and beaks. And yes, that includes people.

I think I could have read a whole (short) novel of just Roland versus the Lobstrosities, but that wouldn't advance the quest plot of the Dark Tower very much, would it? And so after pretty much losing to them, barely alive and minus some of the parts he was born with, Roland finds a door in the sand that opens into the mind and senses of someone in our world. First a junkie, Eddie, muling drugs back to New York City from the Caribbean: then a legless (and not in the sense of drunk) heiress and civil rights activist (another of Stephen King's oracular black women) with two personalities in one skull, Odetta/Detta; and then a man who brings a hilarious new literality to the term "pusher", Jack. These three figures' lives were bizarrely intertwined even before Roland came along to suck them out of their worlds (and times; Eddie comes from the 80s, Odetta from the 60s and Jack from the 70s) and into his.

There are shoot-'em-ups (Eddie's arc), struggles with multiple personality disorder in which one personality (Odetta) falls more or less in love with, and the other (Detta) keeps trying to kill, Eddie, and an elaborate improvised heist (Jack's arc). There is, to my delight, plenty of lobstrosity action. And there is an abundance of word play. The title is evoked several times in several ways, as is the idea of pushing and pushers, all very elegantly and slyly handled.

Overall, though, while the interlocking plots are all plenty interesting (especially the last, in which the question of how Roland is going to keep going after proflagate ammo expenditure and loss is answered) keeps all this interesting for me is the same as what keeps it interesting for everybody, I think: the figure of Roland, lean and tough, scrawny and scary, the crackest shot that ever drew a gun, the hero of every epic quest narrative stripped down to his barest essence and armed with some exquisite and powerful weapons. I've joined the Twitter game of arguing over who should play him if this series ever makes it to the big or small screen. Currently the favorite seems to be Daniel Craig, but Craig would have to pull a Christian-Bale-in-the-Machinist to do it, and that seems to have done lasting harm to Bale. But after what I've seen of that insane new IFC series Bullet in the Face, I think I have the best candidate yet: Max Williams, who wouldn't have to starve himself much to achieve the scrawniness and has just the right kind of menacing presence (when he's not chewing the scenery and firing off ridiculous one-liners, anyway). Your mileage will doubtless vary.*

*And I fully stipulate that my notion is simply born of the coincidence in time that had me watching this series while waiting for my Kindle to recharge so I could finish reading this book.

100 Books #75 - Stephen King's THE GUNSLINGER

I suppose it's always been lurking there at the back of my mind, this notion that what Stephen King writes isn't so much genre fiction as very old-fashioned morality plays with genre fiction trappings. It's there in the way his characters speak, so often in phrasings, if not phrases, that feel ripped right out of the Old Testament, and while yes, it is often his evil characters who speak the most like the old school Puritans of yesteryear, even that turning inside-out of the morality play's conventions doesn't change its essential nature.

I can absolutely picture King wandering around the desert landscapes and small towns of this and so many of his other books, accompanied by a small band, putting on these tales as shows, medieval style, his wife Tabitha banging on a tambourine somewhere in the background as he and their children cavort and caper and enact broad and simple narratives of judgment and redemption, exhortation and condemnation.

I don't know why I haven't really noticed this before now, though truth be told it has been many years since I read a Stephen King novel*; I prefer generally his short fiction, which, coincidentally (or maybe not) has a whole lot less of this feel to it on the whole. At any rate, the notion is inescapable in the pages of this first of his Dark Tower series, taking place as it does in a sort of afterlife of the entire world, thinly populated and despairing, through which our hero Roland strides pursuing the man in black and falling into his adversary's traps, traps that always seem to set Roland up as, and force him to be, the bad guy in order to defend himself and his mission.

And yes, everyone in it talks like a character out of 17th or 18th century New England, home of the Puritans, descendants of the people who were the most likely creators, performers and audiences for those original medieval and Tudor morality plays.

This would be a lot more tiresome than it is but for King's skill as a crafter of prose, at which he is simply nonpareil. "The wood seemed old, fragile to the point of elvishness; it was wood being transmogrified into sand," for instance. It's like a Marty Stupich photograph** made verbal, this stuff.

And then there's the last section of the novel, where our hero confronts his nemesis/mentor/foil/thing, the Man in Black, whom yes I buy as Randall Flagg from The Stand though I have as yet only seen the fun, fun (M-O-O-N My Life For You Oh Matt Frewer) miniseries of that book. But so, finally, I see what Stephen King has going on with his morality play. He's blowing his morality play apart here. He's writing his own personal version of Last Call***, wherein he invokes all the archetypes. All the archetypes, you guys. And no, I'm not just talking about the sacrifice and the tarot cards, although yes, I am talking about them somewhat.

Because really, the Man in Black is the Mandelbrot Man and I'm scared of him in a very existential way. Which is to say I get it, I get why my friends love this series so and why they urge me to keep on reading even through the annoying Puritan bits...

And so yes, I will be doing that soonish. But first I've got some beta-reading to do.

*And I'm only reading this one because my friends Sennydreadful and EssJay love it so.

**Marty Stupich, my dear, dear friend and once preserver of my very sanity, is the best photographer on this planet. The best. I know lots of greats and I retweet their work and love them to pieces but Martin Stupich is their overlord. If there is a god of photography, it is Martin Stupich. Worship him and send him all your remaining Kodachrome and other stock. Sing praise, gaudeaumus that Martin Stupich has blessed this world with his eye and camera. Am I adequately conveying his greatness in this footnote? MARTIN EFFING STUPICH, MOTHERFOLKLORES. Go click on the highlighted link if you haven't already. Oh Marty, you are the original reason I bless the evolution of the eye.

***And if you haven't read this book yet... how do you even understand anything I've ever talked about ever?