Well, that
was an experience. I read The Stand a long time ago, and probably another King
or two, but I remember his writing being sort of normal. Disgustingly good, but
normal. The Gunslinger isn’t. It’s wonderful and horrible, captivating and
boring, meaningful and incomprehensible.
I picked up
the first two Dark Tower books about ten years ago, read maybe twenty pages and
put them in a box, never to be seen again. But when I went to see Wonder Woman a few weeks back, I saw the
trailer for the new Gunslinger film,
and figured I should give it another go. So I did.
Did I enjoy
it? You can probably guess the answer to that one. Yes and no. Will I read the
next in the series? Yeah, absolutely. I won’t be able to help myself.
Partly, that’s
due to King’s writing. His sentences are like no one else’s, and at times he
strings them into prose poems that make me feel like my head is about
to spin off. Sometimes, I suspect, he gets so carried away his own head spins
off, and the meaning is lost in the clouds, but it’s so well written I don’t
really care.
It’s also
due to the fact this is so totally unlike anything I’ve read before. A steady
diet of normal works just fine for me, but it's probably good to
shake up my brain once in a while.
I’m not
going to tell you what this book is about, because that would ruin it for you. It’s not really a story so much as a voyage of discovery. You
start out wondering what the hell is going on, and very gradually, mostly in
flashbacks, you get some of the answers. And a lot more questions.
In the lengthy
introduction to this revised edition (yes, he revised the novel in 2003, adding
about nine thousand words and making who knows how many changes), King reveals
what inspired it. The short answer is The
Lord of the Rings and The Good, The
Bad and The Ugly. That’s all you need to know, and all you really want to
know, before starting.
King is
famous for his method of writing by the seat of his pants. He writes to see
where the story takes him. Sometimes it takes him to great heights, while at
others he seems lost (like the gunslinger himself) in the desert or under a mountain,
waiting for something interesting to happen. The novel’s saving grace is that
when something interesting does happen, it really
happens.
The worst part, for me, was a long stretch in the dark—so long
even the characters lost track of time—that reminded me of one of my least favorite
books, Rex Stout’s Under the Andes
(unfavorably reviewed HERE). It also didn’t help that there’s a whiny,
snot-nosed kid in it. Whiny, snot-nosed kids should be banned from fiction.
Forever.
I’m curious
to see how this will work on screen. A good screenwriter can probably patch together
enough scenes to resemble a story. At least there’ll be plenty of shooting.
There are seven
numbered volumes in The Dark Tower series and an eighth that slips in between. If
I read them all, will everything make sense? Can my brain take that much
shaking up? Will my head spin off before I make it to book III? Alas, more
questions than answers.
I believe most
of the artwork shown here, by Michael Whelan, is from the 1981 first edition,
now commanding five or six hundred bucks on eBay. One of these pics is from the cover
of the third edition, and another was the basis of the cover for first trade
paperback. I own none of the above. Along with my lost-in-a-box later
pb, I have only an ebook.
