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| My Dark Tower boxed set and reference works |
Becoming a huge fan of Stephen King's Dark Tower series is one of the stranger things that has happened to me in the last few years. Plenty of strange things have happened to the world in the last few years, but that's another story.
I read the first two books way as a teenager and then set aside the series for over 20 years. Then in 2017, after hearing from a lot of people how much they liked the series, I decided to try it again. I read the first two books to get ready for the 2017 movie. I didn't hate the movie, but I was oddly intrigued by the books. You can see what I thought about the movie and the first two books here. I wasn't completely hooked until I picked up the third and fourth books. And definitely by finishing the fourth book (the longest in the series), I was hooked and finished the series in several months. I was reading other stuff, too. I'm not a binger by nature, but I could easily have read the whole series back-to-back.
In January 2019, I finished book 4.5 (yes, that's a thing I'll explain in a future post) after having read the seven main books. Usually I read a series, and I might think about it occasionally, but for some reason the Dark Tower has sunk into my mind in a way few series do. I listen to podcasts (especially Dark Tower Palaver), participate in Dark Tower discussions in Facebook groups, and follow a Dark Tower quotes Twitter account. I have become, in the parlance of the series and its fans, a Tower junkie.
So, a re-read was inevitable. I decided to put it off until this summer (I may say more about that soon after I hopefully receive some good news). I prepared by buying the boxed set of all eight books (pictured above and below).
I also purchased two reference works: The Dark Tower Companion by Bev Vincent and Stephen King's The Dark Tower: A Complete Concordance by Robin Furth. Now, I am an academic in my day job, so this level of studious nerdery is not unknown to me. But I don't usually go there with things I read for fun. This is getting serious.
Somehow I let the boxed set sit unopened for a few months, stealing an anticipatory glance at it every so often. But a few weeks ago I decided it was time. I opened the plastic wrap and started on the first book. How did it go? Read about it below!
One question: Which trip to Tower is this for me? Dark Tower fans often say things like, "This is my third trip to the Tower." But this isn't exactly my third trip, even though it's my third time reading the first two books. Does it make sense to say this is my second and one-fourth trip? Or should I just say this is my second trip? Or is this another mystery of ka?
Book 1: The Gunslinger
I hate it when people say this about other long series, but I'm going to say it, anyway: to really appreciate The Gunslinger you really have to have read most or all of the other books. At least in my case, I can say I greatly appreciated The Gunslinger now that I understand some of the confusing stories and references. But what really enhances it for me is that I've been immersed in the world of the Tower already, so my appreciation for this short and bizarre introduction to it is so much deeper.
This is my third time reading The Gunslinger and definitely my favorite time. My advice: if you are new to the Dark Tower and can't manage to plod through this one, jump to the second one and see if that gets you hooked. The Gunslinger will still be there waiting for you later. It may seem like a weird Western/fantasy hybrid, but it's so, so much more.
Also, I much more deeply appreciated the language of The Gunslinger this time. This has a somewhat more... experimental? literary? evocative? ... quality to the writing than much of the rest of the series. The second book especially feels much more like the Stephen King we've all come to know and love, whereas The Gunslinger, even the revised edition from 2003 that I read, feels like an earlier, weirder King. And I love it.
And however you feel about The Gunslinger, Tower junkies have to admit it has some of the best lines of the series, if not in all of 20th century American literature, from "The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed" to "Go then. There are other worlds than these" and more. The man in black's dizzying description of the multiverse of universes as grains of sand in the Mohaine desert with the Tower holding it all together... that would make the whole book worthwhile for me even if the rest of it wasn't so cool.
See also my Goodreads review.
Book 2: The Drawing of the Three
A lot of my basic impressions are the same as they were last time. While I still agree that The Drawing of the Three is much more like King's other work than The Gunslinger and may provide a better entry into the series for some readers, it's still pretty weird. And more of the unique style you really only find in Dark Tower books is there than I noticed last time, which is probably because I've now read the rest of the series and have grown to love that style (other Tower junkies will know what I mean... in fact, the phrase "Tower junkie" comes from this book!).
We start off with one of the most unforgettable images in the series: Roland on the beach with the "lobstrosities." His quest for the Dark Tower appears uncertain, and then he finds a mysterious door...
It was really nice to meet these characters again. Eddie provides an essential item that Roland completely lacks: a sense of humor. But also something Roland doesn't display often: a sense of humanity. And of course they are united in their addictions and the struggles that creates in maintaining humanity as an addict (on that count one might argue that Eddie fares much better than Roland). Meeting Eddie reminds me how vital he is to the series, providing those bits of humor and humanity just when we need them while remaining a true Gunslinger.
Detta/Odetta is even more complicated. I'm still a bit uneasy about King writing a disabled Black woman, but maybe because I've read the whole series and seen how well she's developed later I'm less concerned than I was in 2017. I still understand why some might have reservations (I do think King puts her through a lot, but then he's not particularly easy on any of his protagonists). It did seem more obvious to me this time that the Detta character is supposed to be a stereotype, although she has a fierceness to her that finds its way into Susannah the Gunslinger as well.
One could maybe read this character through the lens of W. E. B. Du Bois's account of double-consciousness, especially insofar as Detta represents an interior projection based on white people's stereotypes and expectations. To stretch that a bit further from Du Bois's context, consider also the scenes where Roland is controlling people from the inside (double-consciousness in a more literal sense more like you see in Jordan Peele's Get Out).
The way Detta/Odetta later becomes Susannah is something I still don't completely understand, at least intellectually, but it makes sense in a deeper, almost mythical way, like she joins the humanity of Eddie through the Odetta side and the single-minded survival drive of Roland through the Detta side. This makes for a nice ka-tet in which each character is unique but also linked to the others in ways that unfold over the next several books, which makes me excited to keep reading.
And then we have Jack Mort, one of the most chilling characters King has created (and that's saying something). I especially love the scenes of Roland steering Mort's body around New York City. The taxi cab scene shows that Roland can be unintentionally hilarious. They even echoed another Mort/Roland scene in the ill-fated 2017 film, which for the record, I didn't hate, especially once I figured out that it wasn't strictly-speaking an adaptation.
I think the Dark Tower will always work better in book form. Although I definitely would have watched it, I'm guilty to admit that I'm a little relieved that Amazon didn't go with the TV series based on book four. Anything remotely faithful to the source material would be unintelligible to a general audience, while anything with mass appeal will disappoint fans of the books (most Dune adaptations fail for the same reasons). Besides, you can never please a junkie, much less a Tower junkie.
Getting to the end of book two makes me immediately want to jump into book three: The Waste Lands. I have a few other things to read first, but it won't be long...
But why am I drawn to these books, especially with everything going on in reality right now (it's June 2020 so I'm writing this amidst a pandemic and unrest about police and Black lives here in the US). I think it's that the multiverse of those books is horrific and confusing in its own ways, but the turnings of the wheel of ka make sense in an oddly comforting way during our own horrific and confusing times in this dimension.
Long days and pleasant nights.
See also my Goodreads review.
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