“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”
So begins a saga began by author Stephen King in 1970 and finished seven volumes and 34 years later in 2004. I can’t fully explain why Roland and ka-tet’s story is important to me, yet it is. My own journey is neither as exciting or harrowing as that of the gunslinger, Eddie, Susannah, Jake and Oy but it has been a journey. One that spans 16 years, 3 continents, a marriage and 2 children. As the story of The Dark Tower (movie) unfolded and grew I became an adult.
My first encounter with The Dark Tower was in a small bookshop near the Aarhus Domkirke in Denmark. It was 1988 and I was having an amazing year as a 16 year old exchange student. Before leaving Australia on my first long-haul flight I purchased my first Stephen King book. Ironically King under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, and a collection of 4 short stories called The Bachman Books. Not much later a second book. IT (movie)—a story which is among the many Stephen King wrote that link in some way to the story of The Dark Tower.
As I stood in the bookshop near the cathedral I read the afterword to
The Gunslinger. Wow! Here we were after a meagre 240 pages and a possible 3000 to go. After reading The Gunslinger, I didn’t bother to read The Drawing of the Three although I had purchased both at the same time. Ka was not calling me at that time.
In 1991 the third volume of The Dark Tower was released. Titled The Waste Lands I decided I might revisit Roland and his world again. For the second time, Volume 1 was not great but 2-3 chapters into Volume 2 and I was hooked. By then I’d read much more of sai King’s writing and this was something else. I could sense the grandness of what he was writing and how much of himself was being put into it (helped along somewhat by the afterwords in each book).
I read The Waste Lands as fast as I could. It was in this book that the references to the other stories of King’s and elsewhere began to become apparent to me. And a cliff-hanger ending like I have never read the like of since. What next? No more books on the horizon and even the author didn’t know when (or if) he would finish. This was my second year of university and my first real girlfriend (now wife).
There was a present for me (from me) under the Christmas tree of 1997. Finally I would hear if Roland and company or the psychotic train Blaine would win the battle they had left hanging 5 years earlier. I did but only just. Most of the story was flashback to an earlier time in Roland’s life. No! I wanted to get to The Dark Tower myself. Retrospectives, no matter how important (it wasn’t until I re-read the whole series again this year that I realised where Volume 4: Wizard and Glass fitted in), were not getting us any closer to the Dark Tower. And I think I’m right in saying “us” rather than “them”. Much of Wizard and Glass was read in my room at the Arthur Andersen training facility in St Charles, just outside of Chicago.
At one stage Stephen King wrote that he did not know if he would ever finish The Dark Tower. He was almost right. On June 19, 1999 he was seriously injured when struck by a minivan while walking. My first thought was “No. He’ll never finish the story”. I bet I wasn’t the only one.
This year however, good news. The final three volumes of the series were released. Wolves of the Calla, The Song of Susannah and The Dark Tower now grace my bookshelf.1 All of these read in the months surrounding the birth of my second daughter.
“No need to live in trouble until trouble comes”
For many the end of the journey is not what you would expect. We (initially) don’t know what happens to Roland in the end and I was content with that. I loved every moment of the journey and if you can’t appreciate that then you may be disappointed.
I felt compelled to write something about this series and so I have. It must be ka’s will.
Take the journey. It is worth your time.
There they stood, ranged along the hillsides, met
To view the last of me, a living frame
For one more picture! In a sheet of flame
I saw them and I knew them all. And yet
Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set,
And blew.
Footnotes
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In 2012 we were graced with book 4.5, The Wind Through the Keyhole ↩