A Brief Guide to Stephen King (21 page)

Mister Mercedes
(Scribner, 2014)

Stephen King’s next novel, expected to be published in the 40th anniversary year of
Carrie’s
arrival, is currently titled
Mister Mercedes
, although King has noted that he’s not happy with that title. It was inspired by an incident he saw on local news when travelling from Florida to Maine, where a woman was determined to get revenge on another woman whom she had caught in bed with her husband. She learned that her target was applying for a job at McDonalds,
so went there, and drove her car into a group of jobseekers amongst whom the woman was hiding; after hitting the adulteress a couple of times, the driver got back in her car and reversed through the people, leaving two dead.

Mister Mercedes
follows a detective at the end of his career who didn’t get time to investigate a similar incident in which a masked man in a Mercedes is responsible for numerous deaths. Six months after retirement, he receives a letter from the perpetrator saying how much he enjoyed doing it – but he knows the detective will never catch him, because he doesn’t intend doing it again. King told
USA Today
that it also deals with a ‘deranged terrorist with a bomb’, noting its similarities to the Boston Marathon Bombing in April 2013, which he described as ‘too creepily close for comfort’.

King describes
Mister Mercedes
to fellow author John Connolly as part of his attempts to ‘write another kind of fiction – detective fiction . . . It forces you to hew the line, plotwise, and there are no supernatural short cuts. It doesn’t entrance me the way a good horror story does, but it’s interesting.’ Speaking to the
Guardian
, he admitted that ‘As you get older, you lose some of the velocity off your fast ball. Then you resort more to craft: to the curve, to the slider, to the change-up. To things other than that raw force.’

Revival
(Scribner, 2014/2015)

While promoting the TV version of
Under the Dome
in June 2013, King revealed that he was halfway through writing a new novel, currently entitled
Revival
. He has given little away, save that the main character is a ‘kid’ learning to play the guitar, but isn’t very good at it. The first tune he learns to play is ‘Cherry, Cherry’ by Neil Diamond, which, not so coincidentally, is the first tune King himself learned. King calls
Revival
‘a horror novel that references one of my idols, Arthur Machen’, who was the inspiration for the story ‘N’ in
Just After Sunset
.

The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger

(Donald Grant, June 1982; Viking, 2003)

‘The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.’ So begins the epic story of Roland Deschain and his quest for the Dark Tower. Stopping for the night, Roland tells a farmer how he pursued his enemy to the town of Tull, where he had to kill everyone, including his lover, in order to escape. Tracking his quarry, Walter, he arrives at a Way Station where he meets a young boy, Jake Chambers, who was pushed in front of a car and died in our world, waking in Roland’s. They follow the man in black towards the mountains, and along the way Roland learns that he will have to sacrifice Jake to reach his goal.

In the mountains, they follow an old rail line through a tunnel, but are attacked by slow mutants. Jake becomes
convinced that he is going to die, and he’s right: Roland chooses to talk with his opponent rather than save Jake, who falls to his death, after telling Roland to, ‘Go, then. There are other worlds than these.’ Their palaver in a Golgotha on the far side of the mountain shows Roland his future, bound up with a Prisoner, the Lady of Shadows and the Pusher. The man says he is a pawn of Roland’s true enemy, and tries to persuade Roland to give up his quest. Roland falls asleep and wakes ten years later on the edge of the Western Sea, next to a skeleton, thinking about his future.

Stephen King began writing the ‘Dark Tower’ series in 1970, while a student at the University of Maine, living at the Springer Cabins by the Stillwater River. It was inspired by Robert Browning’s poem ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came’, which he had been given as an assignment two years earlier. The whole poem is reprinted at the end of the seventh book, and can also be found in most of the books and on the websites dedicated to the series. King wanted to write a ‘long romantic novel embodying the feel, if not the exact sense, of the Browning poem’, which could easily end up as the longest popular novel in history. He decided that everyone has their own personal Dark Tower in their heart that they want to find, which might be destructive and cause their end but they need to attain it. By the time he had completed work on the second volume, King knew what it was that Roland was seeking – even if he wasn’t going to tell anyone else yet.

Other influences included J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic saga,
The Lord of the Rings
, although King didn’t want to write in the same sort of fantasy world that Tolkien had created, even if he was intrigued by writing in a world where ‘feelings of mysticism and wonder are taken for granted’. Arthurian legend and the Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western film
The Good, The Bad and the Ugly
, with Clint Eastwood’s
‘man with no name’ the archetype for Roland Deschain, also played key parts.

The five stories that were compiled to form the original version of
The Gunslinger
were published in
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (F&SF)
between October 1978 and November 1981, and the book was first printed by Donald M. Grant in 1982. ‘The Gunslinger’ and ‘The Way Station’ were completed a long time before King returned to Roland’s world: the third story, ‘The Oracle and the Mountains’ was written while he was working on
’Salem’s Lot
; ‘The Slow Mutants’ followed completion of
The Shining
. The final story, ‘The Gunslinger and the Dark Man’ was only finished after the earlier stories had already been published in
F&SF
.

According to an interview he gave to Ain’t It Cool News in 2007, it was an accident that the stories ever got published, since King believed that he had lost the original versions of the first two stories. However, after finding them in a box in the cellar of his house in Bridgton, he showed them to his agent, who was able to sell them to
F&SF
.

When King came to work on the final three books of the series, he realized that there were numerous parts of
The Gunslinger
that didn’t tally with later developments – including those which he had yet to write. He also accepted that many of his Constant Readers weren’t following the series, in part because they found the first volume to be inaccessible. Even once the saga was complete, King admitted that the ‘Dark Tower’ was ‘like an acquired taste. It’s like anchovy pizza or something a little bit different’.

He therefore reworked the manuscript, adding over 9,000 words, and making various changes, such as the nature of both Roland’s lover and the man in black’s deaths, Roland and Jake’s ages, and assorted references to things from our world. The revised book, published in 2003, bears the subtitle ‘Resumption’ which makes little sense on first reading, although, as with many references within the story (such as
to the number nineteen), it is much clearer once the reader has experienced the entire seven books of the saga.

Since the book was originally published by a small press with a correspondingly low print run, copies of
The Gunslinger
were hard to find – there was no publicity about the series, but King included it (under the title ‘The Dark Tower’) in the list of books he had written in the front of
Pet Sematary
in 1983, leading to King being ‘flooded with letters from fans’. The demand was so great that despite two further printings by Grant, a trade edition was finally released in 1988.

King still had mixed feelings about it being so publicly available: in an interview in the
Castle Rock Newsletter
in March 1989, he was concerned that it was so unlike his other work, and that it wasn’t complete: ‘When the book ends, there’s all this stuff to be resolved, including: What is this all about? What is this tower? Why does this guy need to get there?’ At that point he estimated the series would run to eight volumes and 10,000 pages; he wasn’t far wrong.

The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three

(Donald M. Grant, May 1987)

Only a few hours have passed since Roland woke by the Western Sea, but he is in trouble: he is attacked by a ‘lob-strosity’, a huge lobster-like sea-dwelling creature. It takes two of the fingers from his right hand and the big toe of his right foot; the wounds quickly become infected, and Roland desperately needs help.

He treks along the beach and encounters a door, labelled ‘The Prisoner’. Going through he finds himself in 1987 inside a man in our world: Eddie Dean, who is running drugs for crime lord Enrico Balazar. Roland and Eddie hide the drugs through the doorway back on the beach, and Eddie is then interrogated by Customs. Balazar kidnaps Eddie’s brother Henry to make Eddie hand the drugs over, but after he learns that Henry has died of an overdose,
Eddie, with Roland’s help, kills Balazar. Eddie agrees to join Roland, even if he is a bit nervous of him.

A second doorway, marked ‘The Lady of Shadows’, leads to 1964 and the crippled Odetta Holmes, a black woman heavily involved in the civil rights movement. She lost the use of her legs after being pushed in front of a subway train, and is unaware that she harbours a second personality, the violent and nasty Detta Walker. For much of the time that Detta/Odetta is in Roland’s world, Detta is in control, and tries to use Eddie as bait to force Roland to take her home.

A final doorway (‘The Pusher’) connects Roland with Jack Mort, a sadistic sociopath who was responsible for Jake’s death in Manhattan, Odetta’s crippling and dropping a brick on her when she was a child, which caused Detta to emerge. Arriving in 1977, Roland prevents Jack from killing Jake, then forces him to get medicine and ammunition. He then makes Jack jump in front of the subway train that should have crippled Odetta, ensuring that Detta can see Jack’s death through the doorway. This leads to Detta/Odetta fusing to become a third personality, Susannah, who frees Eddie – who in turn starts to fall in love with her. Both of them recognize that Roland will do whatever he needs to in order to achieve his quest.

King returned to writing about the Dark Tower a dozen years after completing work on the original five short stories, although apparently the original version of the second volume (then known as ‘Roland Draws Three’) was lost. He worked out a complicated outline detailing what would happen in the remaining books of the series – certain hints are given about the next two volumes in the afterword at the end of
The Drawing of the Three
– but then set the story aside, to return to when he was ready. ‘It’s the one project I’ve ever had that seems to wait for me,’ he commented in 1989, shortly before the trade version of the second volume was released.

What would become a hallmark of the ‘Dark Tower’ series, which spread into some of King’s other work, was most noticeable in
The Drawing of the Three
. Because the book – like the original version of its predecessor – wasn’t professionally copy edited, there were various inconsistencies both in terms of the continuity with the first story, and internally. Characters would change names, and there were errors of geography, such as the wrong subway train coming into the Christopher Street station, or placing Co-Op City in the wrong New York borough. These were seen to be mistakes on the part of the author at the time, but they later came to be recognized as clues to the multiple levels of reality that were at play in the ‘Dark Tower’ worlds – King would deliberately insert these sorts of ‘errors’ into later books, and responded to one criticism of
The Colorado Kid
’s ‘inaccurate’ use of a Starbucks by reminding Constant Readers how such things played out.

The Drawing of the Three
sees Roland bring his ka-tet together – a group of people connected by a like-minded purpose, or ‘those bound by destiny’ to use King’s own explanation in his foreword to the revised edition of
The Gunslinger
– which marks a change in the single-mindedness of the gunslinger. The subtitle added to the twenty-first-century editions was ‘Renewal’.

There are some interesting links to other King/Bachman tales: Balazar is involved with the Mafia thug Ginelli, about whom we learned considerably more in
Thinner
, and it is in this volume that we learn something of the fate of Dennis and Prince Thomas from
The Eyes of the Dragon
.

For King, this was the book that ‘hooked’ him on to the story of the Dark Tower: ‘I loved the way that that took off from the very beginning,’ he told Ain’t It Cool News. He also found a willing audience for it close to home: of all the stories he had written up to then, this was his children’s favourite book, he explained to fan interviewer Janet Beaulieu in November 1988, and they were pestering
him to write more. ‘That’s the best incentive I know. Tell somebody a story who really wants to hear it.’ Now that he had an idea of Roland’s world (‘I see the gunslinger’s world as sort of a post-radiation world where everybody’s history has gotten clobbered and about the only thing anybody remembers anymore is the chorus to “Hey, Jude,” ’ he told Beaulieu), he was ready to explain how it had got that way.

The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands

(Donald M. Grant, August 1991)

Five weeks have passed since Roland and his two friends left the Western Sea and started heading east. Roland begins training Eddie and Susannah (who has taken Eddie’s surname) as gunslingers, and after an encounter with a seventy-foot-tall cyborg bear named Shardik, who Roland realizes is a Guardian, they find one of the six mystical Beams which hold the world together. They follow the Path of the Beam towards the Tower.