Tag Archives: The Dark Tower

The Wind Through the Keyhole by Stephen King (Dark Tower, Book 4.5)

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Synopsis:
On their way to Calla Bryn Sturgis, Roland and his ka-tet take shelter from a starkblast, and Roland tells the story of his first quest after killing his mother, and within it tells a fairy tale about a brave boy who tangles with a demonic trickster.

Review:
Oh, my, and it was good to hear Roland’s voice again, you say true and I say thankya. With the series complete, King didn’t need to add to his Dark Tower saga, but The Wind Through the Keyhole feels like it’s been there the whole time.

The framing story follows Roland, Eddie, Susannah, Jake, and Oy the billy-bumbler as they leave the Emerald City and follow the Path of the Beam towards the Dark Tower. Caught in a sudden, immense freezing storm called a starkblast, the ka-tet finds shelter. To pass the time, Roland volunteers a story in which he tells a story about a fictional starkblast and a boy named Tim Stoutheart.

In Roland’s story, he goes back to the time just after he killed his mother, when is father sent him out to a remote mining town where a skin-man is performing brutal murders in the form of an animal. One survivor holds the key to trapping the vicious monster, but Roland is inexperienced and may not have what it takes to bring peace to the town.

To wait out a terrifying night with the witness, a terrified young boy, Roland tells him a story that his mother used to tell him. Tim Stoutheart loses his father and his mother remarries. Her new husband is a brute, and when the Covenant Man comes to town, he gives Tim a token that unlocks a devastating series of events for Tim and his family. Tim, just a boy, must gather all his courage to take a magical journey into a forest populated by dragons, bad fairies, venomous pythons, mud people, and a wizard out of mythology.

Much has been made of the changes that happen offscreen between Wizard and Glass and The Wolves of the Calla (my personal favorite). Eddie, Susannah, and Jake become true gunslingers and we don’t really see how it happens. This is King’s answer. Becoming a gunslinger, in the end, simply means choosing to be a gunslinger. That’s how Roland and Tim Stoutheart survive their tales. It’s like they put on an identity, and when they succeed, it’s like they’ve never not been gunslingers. And that’s what Jake, Susannah, and Eddie will have to do.

The three stories are deftly embedded and the whole thing moves and I just didn’t want it to end.

The Dark Tower by Stephen King

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Synopsis:
Roland the gunslinger reaches the Dark Tower he’s been pursing for a thousand years.

Review:
Obviously there’s a lot more to The Dark Tower, book 7 in Stephen King’s epic series of the same name, than my one sentence synopsis implies. But essentially, that’s it. And, honestly, was Roland’s not reaching the Tower ever an option for King? The suspense has never been “will he?” but “what will it be like?”

But before Roland can reach the tower, he and his ka-tet (a former junkie, a legless woman, a kid, and a talking dog) have to save the world. And to do so, they need to save Stephen King himself from the car accident that nearly took his life in 1999. If King dies, the Tower falls and all of the universe will wink out of existence forever.

In every other version of America that Roland and co. have visited, the existence of the Tower and Roland’s quest have been unknown. Here, Roland goes to a version of New York City where his own Tet Corporation is protecting the rose that called to him from the empty lot. It’s a bit disconcerting to hear regular people using Calla-lingo and referring to things like Gan and the Prim and the can toi. It’s almost like seeing the story in its underwear. For me, it takes me out of the world of the story in a way that not even King’s inclusion of himself did.

Roland also has to face down his nemeses, the Crimson King and his bastard son Mordred. A bit anticlimactic, almost rushed–but King more than redeems himself with the nightmarish Odd’s End sequence. And the poignancy of the shattering of the ka-tet has depth and resonance to spare. King executes all of the emotional elements beautifully.

So what does it all mean? Well, ka is a wheel, and time is a face on the water. But like Ray Bradbury knew, one tiny breath can topple an empire. Am I satisfied by the ending? That’s not really the point. Do I think it’s the right ending? Yes. I may not like it, but I don’t think King could’ve ended it any other way, not with the cosmology and theology operating in the series. I don’t at all agree with his conception of ka, the cruel bitch that makes suckers of us all. I would love to see Roland’s journey rewritten in a universe with a good and sovereign God rather than fickle ka. It’s an interesting thought exercise.

I’m now curious to reread some of his post-Tower works to see if King fully exorcised Roland’s ghost, or whether he’s still on the path of the Beam. I did borrow the first two comic book compendiums from my brother, but I’m not going to read them. I don’t like comic books or graphic novels, and I’m not interested in reading Roland’s story in chronological order.

I think that might be my last reread of the Dark Tower series. (I doubt that’s true, but I’m not keeping the books in my permanent library.) Ultimately, the darkness of the meaning of the series overshadows the myriad pleasures I take from the storytelling.

Song of Susannah by Stephen King (The Dark Tower)

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Synopsis:
Roland’s ka-tet disperses through New York City in various whens, trying to save the rose, find author Stephen King, and save the Tower–quite possibly from Susannah’s demon baby.

Review:
Book 6 in Stephen King’s epic series, Song of Susannah is the darkest, bringing some of the darkest scenes in all of King’s writing.

It’s also a relatively short book, though no less dense than Calla or . The early books seem almost minimalist in comparison with the baroque tapestry that the plot becomes in these late books. I’m utterly amazed at the skill with which King keeps all of the different threads clear for the reader, even when dealing with complex issues of time travel and other dimensions.

As I mentioned before, this book is SCARY. I really freaked myself out the other night when I got to the scene where Jake and Pere Callahan enter Susannah/Mia’s hotel room and fall under the glammer of Black Thirteen. It was about 11pm, and I was reading in bed with my little book light. Superfast Toddler was asleep in her bed, which is right next to ours because she still nurses at night. At the peak of the scene, she wakes up–which is my cue to turn off my book light & climb into her bed to nurse her. However, this time she used her superstealth so that when I turned back after putting my light & glasses in the drawer she was sitting right over me in the pitch black and she just whispered “Mommy.” I about jumped out of my skin!

There’s a long way to go before the climax of the series. For some reason, my memory put Fedic and the Breakers in this book, but I’m wrong. Song of Susannah feels very much like a transitional book, more of a collection of great scenes than one big story.

Wolves of the Calla by Stephen King (The Dark Tower)

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Synopsis:
Roland and his company prepare to defend a town that sees half of its children kidnapped and “roont” once a generation.

Review:
Wolves of the Calla is still my favorite of the Dark Tower books. I think it’s because it has the best standalone story of the bunch. Calla Bryn Sturgis, the town, has the feel of the American frontier, and watching Roland, Eddie, Susannah, Jake, and Oy prepare to do battle against the kidnapping Wolves is fraught with suspense, tension, and action.

I had forgotten all about Pere Callahan, whose story takes the B-line here. Callahan, of course, was one of the main character’s in King’s ‘Salem’s Lot, and his introduction marks the beginning of the intertextuality that will pervade the rest of the series. I’ve never had a problem with King’s insertion of himself into the story, because I think it works with what he’s trying to accomplish. But I remember being nervous the first time I read Calla, worried that he was about to wreck the series I’d become so heavily invested in.

I don’t want to get ahead of myself, so I’ll save a lot of my thoughts for the next book. But this rereading of Calla was no less enthralling than past reads, and I still get goosebumps when Roland dances the commala. I think this book contains some of King’s finest writing, and that’s saying a lot.

The Waste Lands by Stephen King (The Dark Tower)

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Synopsis:
On his quest to the Dark Tower, Roland the gunslinger and his companions move through a ghastly post-nuclear landscape in search of a train that is certainly alive and not certainly safe.

Review:
Whenever I start reading The Waste Lands, my heart aches waiting for Roland and Jake to be reunited. In my opinion, Jake is one of King’s best characters. Of course, he’s twinned with Jack Sawyer from The Talisman, and I think that I can’t help but bring those associations with me to the read. (Speaking of, this retread through The Dark Tower is totally making me itch to re-read The Talisman and possibly even Black House, though the latter was dark in a way that I don’t think I could handle now that I’m a mom.)

I tend to glaze over during the Lud sequences, I think because I know that they don’t matter to the mythology in the same way that Shardik and Blaine do. I do love the element of chaos brought by the Tick-Tock Man. It’s here that King’s theology begins to come together, with the notion of ka (destiny) butting heads against the equally potent random. King is thoroughly uncomfortable with putting his protagonists in the hands of either pure fate or pure chance, and it’s the working out of this tension that gives the series its intellectual depth. Theologically I can’t agree with him, but his notions do make for great storytelling.

Blaine terrifies me. That is the truth.

The Drawing of the Three by Stephen King (The Dark Tower)

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Synopsis:
The gunslinger steps into the lives of three different New Yorkers, and must figure out how they fit into his quest before he dies of an infection.

Review:
The contrast between The Gunslinger and The Drawing of the Three always astonishes me. As King puts it in his introduction, in book 2 of the Dark Tower series the story really takes off. I always spend the first few chapters mourning the elegiac tone of the first book, but soon am swept away by the power of King’s characterizations.

Eddie’s story always gets me, mostly because of the subtle poignancy of his relationship with his older brother Henry, the “great sage and eminent junkie.” Couple that with a drug deal plotline that takes Scarface to a supernatural plane and I just devour the first huge chunk of The Drawing of the Three. The shootout at Balazar’s is one of King’s finest sequences, expertly plotted and staged and visualized.

I slow down a bit when I get to Odetta/Detta, because King takes Detta to such an odious place that I need to look away. I can’t get too close to her. And because I know Jake is coming (though not until the next book), I end up rushing through the Jack Mort stuff. I love watching Roland work Jack Mort, giving the first hint of the diplomat that we’ll find in later books, but knowing that we’re not going to stay with Jack keeps me from getting too invested in that chunk. Reading it now, knowing the ending, I’m struck by how little of the Jack Mort stuff ends up figuring into the larger mythology. He’s pretty much just a plot device at best, filler at worst, a way for King to take a long time getting where he intends to go. I wouldn’t advocate cutting it, but I do wonder how those scenes would’ve played out had they been written closer together with the later books.

The Gunslinger by Stephen King (The Dark Tower)

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Synopsis:
The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.

Review:
I’ve read The Gunslinger about nine or ten times by now, having discovered it when I was still in college and there were only three books in the series. I was instantly captivated by how different the book was from anything else I’d ever read, by King or otherwise. The Gunslinger felt like an open text, fraught with possibilities, and I had no idea where King would take the story. The absence of explanation in the minimalist storytelling kept me rereading sentences and paragraphs, searching for the key to unlock King’s mythology.

This is my second re-reading since the trilogy was completed. The last time was probably 2005 or 2006, sometime before I started this blog. Despite the fact that King has now finished the series, the book still retains it’s allure, hinting at a larger story that can only be grokked by grabbing at slippery corners sideways. (Could be something to do with the way King finished the story, but I’ll save that for a later post, say true and I’ll say thankya.)

It’s not hard to spot the scenes that were added at a later date, since they reference specific events from books that were far from plotted when King first poured out Roland’s tale from the most uncensored part of his unconscious. However, they are integrated well and feel like they belong.

A friend of mine observed that The Gunslinger reads like the work of a young, inexperienced author with a story too big for his skills. I agree, mostly–I mean, King has admitted as much so far be it from me to contradict an author’s assessment of his own work. But I don’t think The Gunslinger has the same youthful awkwardness as the framing device in Carrie, for example, and it’s refreshingly free of the logorrheic attention to detail that plagues his later works (not that I really mind). To steal a term from genetics, The Gunslinger is a sport, a book that isn’t like anything else that King has ever written, even like the other books in the Dark Tower series. It’s a metaphysical western, with its pretensions mitigated by King’s imagination. It’s not my favorite book in the series, but in many ways I think it’s King’s best book.

The Alphabet Meme

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Picked this meme up from Melanie, in honor of two YA books I read for work this weekend.

The goal of this is to list favourite authors according to last name (with a representative fave book as well).

Atwood, Margaret — Cat’s Eye
Bronte, Charlotte — Jane Eyre
Card, Orson Scott — Ender’s Game
Dragonwagon, Crescent — The Year It Rained (with Paul Zindel)
Eager, Edward — Half Magic
Forster, EM — Howard’s End
Gibson, William — Neuromancer
Hobb, Robin — Ship of Magic
Ishiguro, Kazuo — And Never Let Me Go
Jackson, Shirley — Hangsaman
King, Stephen — The Gunslinger
Lewis, CS — Till We Have Faces
Martin, George RR — Game of Thrones
Novik, Naomi — His Majesty’s Dragon
Oates, Joyce Carol — Blonde
Percy, Walker — The Last Gentleman
Queenan, Joe — If You’re Talking to Me, Your Career Must Be in Trouble
Rendell, Ruth — Judgment in Stone
Smith, Wesley — Culture of Death
Tolkien, JRR — The Return of the King
Undset, Sigrid — Kristin Lavransdatter
Vine, Barbara — A Dark-Adapted Eye
Wharton, Edith — Twilight Sleep
X — I’ll read the next book someone recommends by an author whose last name starts with X.
Yancey, Phillip — Where is God When It Hurts?
Zarr, Sara — Story of a Girl

Top 20 Meme

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Picked this up from Becky:

The rules: Top twenty favourite books in no particular order. Don’t think about it for too long. Take twenty minutes only to compile your list. Bold the ones you’ve read, or reread, since you’ve started blogging. Include novels, non fiction and plays.

1. The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
2. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
3. Peyton Place by Grace Metalious
4. Wolves of the Calla by Stephen King
5. Ship of Magic by Robin Hobb
6. Till We Have Faces by CS Lewis
7. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
8. Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson
9. Arcadia by Tom Stoppard
10. Asylum by Patrick McGrath
11. Rebecca by Daphne DuMaurier
12. Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy
13. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
14. Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson
15. Private Demons by Judy Oppenheimer
16. Bird by Bird by Anne LaMott
17. The Cloister Walk by Kathleen Norris
18. Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
19. The Long Emergency by James Howard Kunstler
20. Birth at Home by Sheila Kitzinger