The Dark Tower: Coda

Roland, the last gunslinger, as painted by Phil Hale in The Drawing of the Three

Following the earlier entries on different volumes, the below attempts to sum up some impressions and thoughts about Stephen King's The Dark Tower novels.

Needless to say, there are spoilers aplenty. If you haven't read the books and want to learn what happens in them the old-fashioned way, then you should probably stop reading pretty quickly.
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Stephen King took around 30 years to complete the seven-volume story of Roland, the last gunslinger in a world that's moved on, and his quest for the Dark Tower, a mystical building that is one of the hubs of reality for the entire multiverse.

By the time he'd finished, he'd become a husband, a father, a successful author, a brand-name franchise writer and even a grandfather. Obviously, over time his perspectives and thoughts changed. King himself observes the length of the journey in an author's note to volume four, Wizard and Glass, when he points out that a very young man, much more like the boy Roland was at the time, wrote the scene just before a door opens at a particular point. A much more mature and presumably wiser one, who is a lot more like Roland's father Stephen, wrote the scene just after the door opens.

At a million-plus words, the Dark Tower saga is justifiably knocked for being something on the puffy side. As early as the second book, though, King said the whole thing was very likely to be six or seven books long.. But I'm going to guess that the six or seven books he projected when writing The Drawing of the Three in the mid-1980s were not exactly the seven that wrapped up with The Dark Tower in 2004. I think at some point in the series, King's vision of what he was trying to do with this long work, inspired by Robert Browning's poem "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came," changed dramatically. At some point in this process, the Dark Tower saga became something entirely different than it was when he started -- and not, to be honest, for the better.

1. The Good

Before we get to that, there are a wealth of fascinating concepts at work in the series. When we first meet Roland, he's pursuing the Man in Black across a vast desert in a world that has, we're told, "moved on." Although it'll be awhile before we get a clearer picture of the causes of this moving on, we see it seems to feature a lot of abandonment, a loss of vibrancy and color and a breakdown of some kind of the natural laws we depend on. I noted that the mall where I originally purchased Drawing has lost its anchor stores and most of its retailers; to walk around in it now, nearly alone, past empty windows and storefronts, it to get a sense of something that has moved on.

Abandoned malls and shuttered factories aren't the only things that can project this air of moving on. Even though our culture seems to be speedier, brighter and flashier than ever, we can see a loss of connection among families and in our communities brought about by greater mobility and self-sufficiency. It's a fascinating idea about how a culture or even a world may come to an end -- not by fire or by ice, not from bang or from whimper, but with the simple sign "Closed," or even no sign at all, just an empty window.

The end of Roland's quest, which turns out to be the beginning of yet another cycle of endlessly repeating his search for the Tower, is another intriguing idea. My post on Book 7 compares the idea with C.S. Lewis's vision of hell in The Great Divorce. The damned receive exactly what they've dedicated their lives to winning, only to learn that without the presence of God, everything is damnation. I've read some commentary that suggests the sentence to a potentially endless repetition of the quest is unjust. Yes, Roland sacrificed relationships and even people, sometimes without much compassion or regret, in order to continue his journey to the Tower. But he was trying to reach it to stop the Crimson King from destroying it and plunging the multiverse into chaos, the argument goes, so he had to make some hard choices. Roland and Eddie make this idea more or less explicit to Jake in The Waste Lands when the boy wonders if they can't stay a little at River Crossing and help the old people there before traveling on. If they allow themselves to be distracted by the real needs these people have, they'll wind up distracted by so much they'll never reach the Tower.

Except that when we first meet Roland, he does not yet know about the danger facing all the worlds, including his own. His goal, we learn in The Gunslinger, is to reach the Dark Tower, climb to its top and question "whatever god may dwell there." There's no agenda of saving anything, and it's in service to that quest he sacrifices Susan Delgado in Wizard and Glass and Jake Chambers in Gunslinger. It's while on that quest that he kills Allie, the bartender in Tull with whom he shares a bed -- and in the original version of Gunslinger, he kills her when she's been grabbed as a human shield, not because she's been driven insane by the Man in Black and begs for the mercy of death as happens in the revised edition. Though the ka-tet that surrounds Roland later in the series humanizes him and he learns his quest was not for his own satisfaction, things don't start that way and Roland has earned his journey through the purgatory of repetition.

2. The Bad

So what about the series is bad? The smart-aleck answer is, "About four-fifths of everything that comes after The Drawing of the Three." The Kingophile Tower-head answer is, "It needed to keep going."

My own pet peeves about the later volumes of the Tower saga relate to its length, but they have more to do with its bloatedness -- even properly edited, this would still be a long work so the length is less of a problem than the sprawling mess. But that's been covered here before, so not much else needs to be said about it.

For my money, the real fatal flaw of this series comes in Wizard and Glass, which I've already said I see as its lowest point. Brief recap: The ka-tet outsmarts the murderous monorail Blaine but finds themselves in a world without a Beam to follow to the Tower. Now in the Kansas of this world, most probably the world of King's The Stand, they walk towards an odd-looking city of green glass astride Interstate 70. After a loooong flashback describing Roland's first love and first glimpse of the Tower in a magical seeing-stone, the ka-tet faces down the Man in Black in this faux-Emerald City and returns to Roland's world, where they can see the Beam again and renew their journey.

The Emerald City vs. Kansas setup is an obvious nod to the movie The Wizard of Oz. Dorothy Gale's words when she wakes up in Oz -- "I don't think we're in Kansas anymore" -- are a catch-phrase cliché and King seems to mean them to have a large impact on how the latter half of the Tower saga will run. It's in the books following Wizard that he begins to emphasize certain things, like the recurring presence of the number 19. It's also where he starts to make the sources of some of his authorly ideas more explicit, like the Doctor-Doom inspired, light-saber wielding Wolves in Wolves of the Calla or the explosive sneetches that are patterned after the golden snitch of Harry Potter's Quidditch game. Writers draw their inspirations from all kinds of places, and the fun some fans have with their books is trying to figure out what those inspirations were, as well as how their use may convey meanings the author wants to communicate. Pre-Wizard, King talks about those inspirations in interviews about the Dark Tower books. Post-Wizard, King talks about them in the books themselves -- sometimes directly, since he shows up in person in the last two.

It seems to me that the first three books of the Tower saga, as well as the long Meijis flashback in the fourth, are all stories about Roland's quest for and journey towards the Dark Tower. The last three are stories about the story about Roland's quest for and journey towards the Dark Tower. When we enter the faux-Emerald City with Roland and the ka-tet, we're still inside a narrative, in other words. When we leave it, we're now inside a kind of meta-narrative that will have our original story as a feature rather than the centerpiece. I have a friend who's a devoted Kingophile who says that after he read Wizard and Glass, he started thinking that King really had no idea where he was going with the Tower saga. I think that's partly true.

I think that from the beginning, King knew Roland's quest for the Tower began with Roland alone and would end the same way. Others who would join him might die like Eddie and Jake or they might leave like Susannah, but they wouldn't reach the Tower with him, even if King himself didn't know from the start the details of their entries, exits and travels in between. I think that early on in the series, King probably thought that the tale would end with Roland at the Tower door. I don't think he envisioned anything afterwards until maybe the middle books, when the idea of the endless quest took shape.

But at some point between The Waste Lands and Wizard and Glass, King's vision of the Tower saga changed from a narrative vision to this meta-narrative-styled one. And while he sort of knew how the narrative should finish, it took until well after Wizard and Glass before he could figure out how the meta-narrative would carry it there. On the one hand, the idea that Roland returns to an earlier stage in his quest is really the only way for the last gunslinger's story to end. I can't imagine that more than a small slice of the true-blue Tower-head fanbase would have been happy leaving Roland at the door of the Tower and not seeing what was inside it. Witness how many fans of the TV show Lost complained that the show's finale never really said what the island was or why it was important or something similar. I don't think King believed he could get away with that kind of a finish, even though I think it probably would have been a good one. And King has sometimes struggled with ending his stories as well as he's told them. Even if he hadn't, what in the world could have been inside that Tower that would have been a fitting prize for the quest that's preceded it? My imagination's pretty good and I can't even begin to answer what Roland might have found that would live up to what I think should have been there after seven books and more than 30 years worth of work.

On the other hand, Roland's return to an earlier point of his quest is a nice fit with the idea that the Tower saga has become a meta-narrative on how the imaginations of artists or writers relate to the works they create. The story has been told; the work completed, the door into this imaginary world closes. What's next? Well, for artists and writers, the only real "next" possible is another creation, another story, another world to explore via their imaginations and visions. So Roland returns to where we first meet him, setting out across the Mohaine Desert after the Man in Black. Both the story and the process by which it is told begin anew.

The meta-narrative idea shapes other parts of the story as well. Rather than the Man in Black being of a similar villainous type as The Stand's Randall Flagg, the two characters became one. In 1987's The Eyes of the Dragon, King hints that Flagg has lived in more than one world, which may be one of the earliest signs he's started to re-think the Tower saga along meta-narrative lines.

Other characters and ideas from the Tower saga doffed their other-novelish outer clothing and became overt representations of their Tower-world identities. Ralph Roberts and Lois Chasse battle the Crimson King's agents in Insomnia in order to save Patrick Danville, who will help Roland defeat the King in The Dark Tower. Breakers Dinky Earnshaw and Ted Brautigan show up in  the "Everything's Eventual" short story and "Low Men in Yellow Coats" novella, respectively. 'Salem's Lot's disgraced priest Don Callahan travels through the worlds of King's multiverse, slaying and fleeing from vampires until those same Low Men chase him into Roland's world at Calla Bryn Sturgis. Stephen King himself becomes a character in Song of Susannah and The Dark Tower as an author whose writing of the Dark Tower saga is vital to the completion of the ka-tet's Dark Tower quest.

These and other connections all serve to make an obvious statement: One guy, Stephen King made these characters up and wrote their stories. Well, duh. That's whose name is on the covers and whose picture is on the dust jackets. That's who talks about them with interviewers and persistent fans. But for some reason, it seems King chose to tell the last half of the Tower saga in a way that, as I said above, makes it a story about the story instead of a story itself. As much as I dislike the Meijis flashback in Wizard, it's just about the last sustained burst of pure narrative in the series. Even the superior Wolves of the Calla starts to show symptoms of meta-narrative-stisizing; It's where where the number 19, which was previously not at all a factor but which started to be important after King was seriously injured in a van-pedestrian accident on June 19, 1999, starts to recur. It's where Callahan shows up, where King's earlier novels appear within his own books both as novels and as descriptions of what the characters see as actual events, where his authorly in-jokes disdain any subtlety and proudly show off their own punchlines, and so on.

When we leave the faux-Emerald City and return to Roland's world, we make dual shifts. By leaving The Stand's Kansas, we leave the scene of one of King's earlier, straight-up, tell-the-story novels for what will become a journey through this meta-narrative stuff that makes the second half of the Tower saga seem like one long Little Jack Horner self-analysis. But at the same time, we also leave behind the flight-of-fancy Emerald City of a conceit that novels are their own stories and their characters command their own destinies through the writer's keyboard, and we enter the Kansas-styled prosaic reality that novelists write novels using their own imaginations, experiences, memories and ideas. The last book has a good example.

Dandelo, the psychic vampire, threatens to kill Roland and Susannah by feeding on their emotions before they're aware of their danger when they stop to stay at his cabin in the land of Empathica. The author Stephen King has the character of the author Stephen King leave Susannah a note warning them about Dandelo so she can kill him. It is, the character/author says, the only overt, deus ex machina-style salvation he will provide for his characters. Which seems kind of suicidal of him, considering that the Crimson King's plot to break the worlds would plunge his world into chaos as well and his novels are somehow vital to the success of Roland's quest. But let us not strain logic overmuch when we've already taken a ride on an insane supersonic train named Blaine. Because King the author is about to drop a much bigger deus into the story.

Roland and Susannah find that Dandelo has been keeping Patrick Danville, the boy saved in Insomnia, a prisoner in his basement. Now a young man, Patrick has the ability to make his drawings real. He will use this ability to draw and then erase the invulnerable spirit-being of the Crimson King, so that the major antagonist of the series, the one behind more evil machinations than one could shake a very discreet stick at and who nearly took over Susannah Dean's mind when she merely stepped into a sightline of his castle a book or so ago, will simply vanish, destroyed by a character who's been in less than one percent of this seven-book series and who disappears himself soon after. We're told Dandelo removed his tongue to keep him silent, and perhaps that's because Patrick's an honest enough fellow he would have said, "Stop reading here unless you want to feel really hornswoggled by this whole thing."

The move from story to story about story seems to leave King out of gas as he brings Roland nearer the tower. I suggested that Song of Susannah is most notable for having not much of note happen. You might say The Dark Tower is notable for how much happens instead of what ought to happen. Yes, Roland and the ka-tet destroy the means that the King is using to break the Beams and scatter the Breakers. Yes, they escape the Dixie Pig, buy the lot containing the mystic rose and save Stephen King's life. But as noted above, the Crimson King more or less disappears from the story and then literally disappears to end his threat. The Man in Black, Randall Flagg, dies without ever confronting his enemy Roland. Roland's half-demon son Mordred, after two books or so of buildup, manages to trip over Oy long enough to get killed.

Most of Roland, Susannah and Oy's final journey from the Breaker facility at Devar-Toi to the Tower itself is a long, cold slog through a bleak, blank wasteland, kind of like driving through downstate Illinois in the winter. Or reading books 6 and 7 of the Tower saga. After King got Roland's ka-tet together and ready to go, he seems to have lost inspiration for getting them anywhere, even though he started toying with the concept of the meta-narrative instead of just plain old story. He's like the tour guide at a theme park on the last run of the day: He's seen this stuff and been talking about it for his whole shift and he doesn't have the energy to put a spark in it one last time, even if the tourists visiting for the first time haven't seen any of it before and would like a little bit more than "Please keep your hands and feet inside the tram at all times."

Unreasonable expectations cause part of the Tower saga's problems. Many Kingophiles seized upon it as King's contribution to serious literary work, and indeed it begins with an elegaic quality that books like Christine never tried to match. One frequent poster at one Dark Tower forum has as his signature, "Thus ends the greatest story ever told, and I say thankya," imitating the speech of the people of Calla Bryn Sturgis. Obviously a guy with my job appends that "greatest story" title to another Book entirely, but I'd find it just as laughable if I sold shoes. Those are the readers' problems, though, not King's.

Writing a story about story didn't have to cripple it, but King's skills weren't by themselves up to achieving that task well. My opinion that editors have long since stopped reining him in means that he had no real external ear to say, "Why don't you try this?" or "That's kind of fuzzy, Steve. What do you want me to get from this bit right here?" or "So why didn't Patrick draw Susannah some legs?" or "Why didn't the Crimson King throw the whole box of sneetches at Roland and overwhelm his gun?"

If I were to ever run a marathon, I wouldn't win, either in my division or in one for people twice my age. But if I finished, I figure I should get some credit for that. King has earned kudos for sticking with the Tower saga over 30-plus years and actually finishing it, rather than twiddling his thumbs with prequels and atlases and leaving his major work undone on his deathbed to be finished by another author (I'm talking to you, Robert Jordan). He deserves kudos for a series with one great book, one really good book and a host of good scenes even in some of the stinkers, as well as some fascinating themes, only a few of which I sketched above.

And so we can leave it at that, I think. Maybe not three cheers, maybe not two, maybe not even one and half, but just under that, to be fair. Something like, 1.459 cheers. Why that precise? Well, if you look closely, you'll see the digits add up to...19.

Thankee-sai, hope I have spoken true.

3. The Ugly

Dave McKean's photo-collage illustrations in Wizard and Glass. Man, I hate that book.

The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower

This and the companion pieces are less reviews than they are a sort of reader's diary of my experiences encountering Stephen King's monumental fantasy/western/science fiction tale The Dark Tower. It's made up of seven books, each of which I read at different times in my life. These are some reflections on the separate volumes, and I will be assuming that the reader has already read them or does not care if what he or she reads spoils the books or their endings. That is, of course, assuming that these little exercises have readers to begin with ;-) 

Again, and I will stress this so that no one may find the experience of learning Roland's story and reading The Dark Tower lessened by knowing what comes next, THERE BE SPOILERS HERE.

You've been alerted.

After an almost 30-year journey that started in the pages of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Roland Deschain's quest for the Dark Tower would close in 2004. Just a few months after Song of Susannah was released, the seventh and at the time final novel of the series was published on Sept. 21, author Stephen King's birthday.

The Dark Tower begins pretty much where the placeholder book Susannah left off. Jake and Callahan are preparing to assault The Dixie Pig, a restaurant that the vampires, Low Men and other servants of the Crimson King use as their base in New York City. They're trying to rescue Susannah Dean, who's been possessed by the demon Mia and driven to the New York reality in order to give birth to her demon-child, sired by Roland himself. The Crimson King has plans for this child, called Mordred.

Deep within the Dixie Pig are tunnels that cross into some of the other realities that have some bearing on Roland's quest for the Tower. Susannah has been brought through them and is now fully separate from the Mia, whose now-physical body gives birth to Mordred. The demon-child's first act is to morph into a spider form and eat his mother. Susannah tries to kill him, but he escapes. She kills the other agents of the Crimson King who've been holding her, though.

Only Jake survived the attack on the Dixie Pig, as Callahan sacrificed himself so that the boy could reach Susannah. He and Susannah are reunited, and Roland, Eddie and Oy the billy-bumbler catch up to them there after leaving 1977 Maine. They've purchased the lot containing the mystic rose that represents the Tower in that hub-world, making it safe from the Crimson King's agents that wanted to buy the lot and destroy the rose. Whole again, the ka-tet sets out through the ancient ruins of the high-tech city of Fedic to reach Devar-Toi, where psychics employed by the Crimson King are breaking the Beams that hold the worlds together and anchor the Tower. Brain material from the stolen children of Calla Bryn Sturgis was used to augment the psychics' abilities but even without that help, the group is close to breaking the last two Beams.

The psychic Breakers are held captive by the Crimson King's agents and would stop their work if they could; the story of one's escape attempt is the focal point of the novella "Low Men in Yellow Coats" from Hearts in Atlantis. With his aid, the ka-tet frees the Breakers from their captors and stops the breaking of the Beams, ending the Tower's immediate danger. But Eddie is mortally wounded during the battle and dies several hours later. Roland and Jake leave Susannah to mourn her husband and jump to the hub-world holding the mystic rose, but in 1999. They're going to try to save Stephen King, the author whose Dark Tower novel series is vitally important to the success of their quest for the Tower. A news item showed King dying after being hit by a van, but if he dies they believe the quest will fail. Jake pushes King enough out of the way so that he is merely injured but is fatally wounded himself. King, of course, was seriously injured in a real-life accident like the one he describes in the book. The ka-tet is down to Roland, Susannah and Oy, and Roland returns alone to the other two after gathering information from allies they had made in the rose-world that most resembles ours.

The trio now begins the final leg of their journey to the Tower, traveling across a cold wasteland for many weeks. Along the way they learn that the Crimson King, believing Roland will now kill him, has killed himself so that he can survive as an invulnerable spirit-being. The psychic vampire Dandelo tries to lure them into a trap, but the author King drops a literal note from the author into the book in time for Susannah to recognize the danger and save them. They discover the vampire has been holding a young man named Patrick Danville prisoner and when they release him, they find that he has the power to draw things that become real. When he heals a potentially fatal sore on Susannah's mouth by erasing it from the drawing he made of her, they learn he can un-make things as well.

Susannah and Roland decide that she should leave and Patrick draws a door for her to another world. In this world, Eddie and Jake are both still alive and are in fact brothers. Susannah meets them as she enters their world and although the story leaves them there, we're led to believe they all live happily ever after.

Mordred has been tracking Roland since they left Devar-Toi and finally makes his move after Susannah leaves. But Oy's ferocious defense delays the demon-child, now mostly grown and still capable of changing into a spider, and Roland is able to kill him. Oy is also fatally wounded in this battle. Roland and Patrick find their way to the Tower blocked by the Crimson King, an invulnerable spirit armed with what seems like an endless supply of the explosive sneetches used by the Wolves of the Calla. Although Roland's gun prevents any sneetches from reaching the pair, he knows that he can't keep that up forever, and besides, the Tower's call is so strong he must fight the urge to simply walk towards it and allow the King to kill him. Patrick draws a picture of the Crimson King and erases it, destroying him. Roland at last comes to the Tower after setting Patrick back on a path towards populated areas. There, he shouts the names of his companions and others as he had promised to do and he enters the Tower.

In an afterword, King suggests that the reader stop there, with everyone at the end of their respective quests. But for those who don't want to, he offers the end of Roland's story. Which, as it turns out, is also the beginning -- after climbing several levels of the Tower and encountering reminders of different stages of his life, he reaches the top and sees a door like the others below, only this one has his name on it. Opening it, he finds himself drawn back into the desert where we first met him. He realizes he has reached the Tower many times before, but his memories of his quest vanish and he is once again pursuing the fleeing man in black.

There are several ways The Dark Tower is an end for the Dark Tower series, and some of them work better than others. On the one hand, the idea that Roland is somehow sentenced to an eternal quest seems fitting. And, interestingly enough, not too far off many Christian ideas of evil and hell. C.S. Lewis, in The Great Divorce, offers a Hell that each person in it creates for themselves by trying to make their own paradise, only without God. Roland, having made his quest for the Tower the center of his life, is given that quest, repeated endlessly until he might one time learn that there are more important things. There's some hint that he's slowly progressing each time, gaining understanding until he might reach that point, so this would be more of a Purgatory than Hell, but the parallel is interesting.

King probably does better at characterizing Roland in The Dark Tower than at any other point in the series. I'll confess I read the ending of the book when it was released, several years before I read the actual book itself. So, knowing what was coming for Roland offered a real aura of pathos as one by one his ka-tet is taken from him by death or by leaving.

But as an ending to the overall story, The Dark Tower carries a lot of flaws. For one, remember the Man in Black? The guy we started out chasing, the guy who we later learned had an affair with Roland's mother and tricked the gunslinger into killing her? The guy who we eventually learn is none other than Randall Flagg, a bad dude from several of King's novels, most notably The Stand? The guy who killed Roland's childhood friend Cuthbert Allgood? He gets dispatched pretty early in this book, almost offstage and certainly without any real confrontation with Roland, when he is mind-controlled and eaten by Mordred. Morded himself, after three books and a ret-conned conception's worth of buildup, lurks in the background for most of the story, makes one scream-and-leap stab at his pops and fails epically. The Crimson King is the last obstacle between Roland and the Tower, but he disappears when Patrick Danville draws him on a pad and erases him. Susannah gets sent to another world for a reunion with an Eddie and Jake like the one she knew when Patrick draws a door to that world. But why, when Patrick's magical drawings can create doorways that never existed and cure medical illnesses, does the author King not have him DRAW SUSANNAH SOME FRICKIN' LEGS?

The Dark Tower, like a lot of the last half of The Dark Tower series, suffers from lazy storytelling that undercuts its good qualities. Some of it's just some undisciplined yarning that needs to be reined in. Some of it's some plot holes that a little bit of thinking through could help cover up. And some of it's a possible change in approach that King took during the creation of the series that will be the subject of the next post.

PS -- The Dark Tower saga may not end with book 7.  King said in several interviews in 2009 that he's been considering the idea of another novel, or series of connected novellas, set in Roland's Mid-World, although Roland himself may or may not be the focus of the book. Tentatively titled The Wind Through the Keyhole, it has a possible publication date of 2011 or 2012 and is either A) set in the time between Wizard and Glass and Wolves of the Calla or B) involve a younger Roland while his friend Cuthbert Allgood is still alive.

The Dark Tower VI: The Song of Susannah

This and the companion pieces are less reviews than they are a sort of reader's diary of my experiences encountering Stephen King's monumental fantasy/western/science fiction tale The Dark Tower. It's made up of seven books, each of which I read at different times in my life. These are some reflections on the separate volumes, and I will be assuming that the reader has already read them or does not care if what he or she reads spoils the books or their endings. That is, of course, assuming that these little exercises have readers to begin with ;-) 

Again, and I will stress this so that no one may find the experience of learning Roland's story and reading The Dark Tower lessened by knowing what comes next, THERE BE SPOILERS HERE.

You've been alerted.

When last we saw our group of traveling heroes, they had saved the children of the town of Calla Bryn Sturgis from abduction by raiders called Wolves. We had also seen a decided rebound of the Dark Tower series, as Wolves of the Calla was easily its strongest entry since The Drawing of the Three, way back at volume two.

We dared to hope that this monumental meta-work that spanned most of Stephen King's imagination was back on track after the lackluster The Waste Lands and the awful Wizard and Glass. But just as the heroic quartet find their joy short-lived when they learn Susannah Dean has given herself over to the former demon Mia so the supernatural being can bear a child, the reader finds his or her hopes equally brief. Song is King back giving in to every undisciplined authorial impulse and chaseable rabbit he can find.

Although Susannah has taken the world-traveling mystic talisman Black Thirteen through the doorway with her into a world like ours, Roland, Eddie and Jake, joined by Father Don Callahan (originally of 'Salem's Lot, Maine and 'Salem's Lot, King's second book) use the combined magic of the Manni to open it again and make an attempt to rescue her.

Eddie and Roland will track Susannah to New York City in 1999. Jake and Callahan will travel to Maine in 1977 to secure the purchase of a vacant NYC corner lot from a man named Calvin Tower. Tower's lot holds a single magical rose that links to the Dark Tower itself in some important way, and if the group can purchase it before agents of the Crimson King do, they still have some chance at stopping his plan to break the worlds. But the magic goes awry, and each pair goes to the other team's destination: Jake and Callahan will have to face the Crimson King's lieutenant, the Man in Black and rescue Susannah, while Roland and Eddie have to track Tower.

We also pick up Susannah's story, seeing her struggle with Mia and with her own multiple personalities as she waits word from the King's minions.

And as mentioned before, we see the author King revert to his more recent habits of slathering his story over meandering pages better measured in acreage than word count. After 40,000-plus words, for example, Susannah/Mia has...answered a phone call. Sure, she showed up in our world, but we already knew that's where she was headed so I'm not spotting King that one. The rest of the time Susannah fights Mia and takes control, then Mia fights Susannah and her old alter Detta Walker and takes control, and then Susannah/Detta fight Mia and then they journey to a faux-Mordor (the land of the Crimson King, to be precise) for their expository palaver that explains everything that's happening to her via retconning several earlier incidents and blah blah blah.

The upshot is that the coming baby is also Roland's child because the demon with which Susannah had to couple when Jake was brought back into the group in The Waste Lands was the same demon with which Roland coupled in The Gunslinger. Mia was an incorporeal being desperate to bear a child. Walter, the Man in Black, promised her she could if she gave up her bodiless state and became mortal. As the birth of her baby or "chap" approaches, she begins to exert more and more control over Susannah's body and comes closer to separating herself physically from Susannah.

Mia also tells us that the trouble in Roland's world, its "moving on" that's wrecked so much, is part of the loss of magic in the world. People turned away from magic and faith and belief, relying instead on pure reason and technology to give the world its meaning. The problem was that such things break down, and when they are gone there will be neither the ancient magic nor technology to order things leaving everything in the chaos sought by the Crimson King.

We'll deal with Eddie and Roland in a minute, but first we pick up Jake and Callahan. Along with Oy the billy-bumbler, they've appeared in 1999 New York City and they have to take on the role of rescuing Susannah even though Eddie and Roland would have been the better fighters to do so. They have a brief encounter with a street preacher -- one of those slightly or more-than-slightly off religious folks who populate King's novels on the fringes -- who also met Susannah/Mia and learn where she has been. They retrieve the Black Thirteen glass and store it in a locker at the World Trade Center, where it will presumably be destroyed in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Then they ready themselves to attack a restaurant called The Dixie Pig, a front for the forces the Crimson King is using for his work in the world and where they know Susannah is being held. That's it for them in this book.

Eddie and Roland show up in Maine in 1977, only to find themselves under attack as soon as they arrive. Mia, it seems, revealed their plans to Walter who moved against them using mobsters he had also been working with to push Calvin Tower to sell his vacant lot containing the mystic rose we've mentioned before. In a furious gun-battle, Roland and Eddie wipe out most of the mobsters, some of whom Eddie knows because during his time in the world, in the 1980s, he will run drugs for this same outfit. Eddie's wounded and some bystanders are killed, but a man named John Cullum helps them escape. He also tells them of strange happenings in the area, of people who seem to appear from nowhere, dressed strangely and speaking unknown languages, before disappearing just as quickly. These "walk-ins" seem to be concentrated around a town nearby and have increased in frequency since an author named Stephen King moved into a house there. The pair have seen a book King wrote called 'Salem's Lot which features the exact story Father Callahan told them about his own past, so they resolve to visit King after they've seen Calvin Tower.

Tower is eventually convinced to sell them the vacant lot containing the mystic rose, although he is a weak man and demurs even when Eddie reminds him of the dangers posed to him by the mobsters who were pushing him to sell the lot to their employers, where it would fall under the control of Walter and the Crimson King. We spend a couple thousand words dancing through Eddie getting angry at Tower and Tower being petulant. Then the gunslingers visit Stephen King and learn that not only did he write about Father Callahan, whom they know as a real person, but he also wrote a story about Roland's quest for the Dark Tower itself. He's only finished the volume we know as The Gunslinger by this time in his life, so he doesn't know Eddie. But he does know Roland, and that knowledge allows him to believe their story and to tell them how he feels that some force is pushing against his completing it. Eddie and Roland believe that force to be the Crimson King, using a bad childhood memory of the author's to scare him out of writing the full Dark Tower story. Roland hypnotizes King so that he will finish the story as he is able.

That's pretty much it for the action -- Song vies with Wizard and Glass for the least amount of forward movement in the overall story. We start with Susannah/Mia about to bear a child that somehow combines Roland's essence with demonic forces and we end the same way. We start with the gunslingers needing to purchase Calvin Tower's empty lot containing the mystic, tower-connected rose and they do. Wizard bears the burden of thousands of words of clunky rambling backstory that is in itself longer than the whole Song of Susannah, but Song counters with one of the most egregious authorial pretensions available to the modern best-selling writer: The placement of himself or herself in the story in a pivotal role. Obviously, no story happens without the writer, but King chooses to make certain we get that by incorporating that reality into the Dark Tower saga. That takes an ego almost as big as one of these books, which is saying something.

It's also a clue as to one of the things that drags so much on the later Dark Tower novels and much of King's own output since he published It back in 1986. He quite simply can't get out of the way. In the bloated best-sellers that he's been churning out since then, his lack of storytelling discipline and his publisher's unwillingness to edit him into smaller and less profitable chunks clots the narrative arteries and prevents clear streaming of the story's arc. In Song, he goes a step further and shows up as a crucial factor in the quest for the Tower.

He's also part of the cliffhanger -- a coda excerpts the journals of the Song version of King that shows him publishing the first four volumes of the Tower saga before being killed when hit by a van in 1999 -- the same day in which the real-life King was seriously injured in exactly that kind of accident. But we know from Roland and Eddie that King must finish the story in order to help the quest succeed, so what will happen now that he's dead? Moreover, we understand that the alternate world where the gunslingers meet King is a sort of hub to the multiverse accessible through the Dark Tower -- one in which time flows only one way and can't be reversed. They can't undo King's death as they have changed other incidents during the story.

Even though Song of Susannah is the shortest Dark Tower book since the second one, it desperately needs compression. Book V, Wolves of the Calla, is mostly a self-contained story that wouldn't be well-served with Song's events tacked onto it. And the series' final book, The Dark Tower, was published at almost 290,000 words, which means it surely didn't need any more and which leaves us thinking that maybe Song did indeed have to be a stand-alone.

But that assumes that The Dark Tower -- both the saga as a whole and the upcoming book 7 -- don't need a stout pruning, and I'm betting that's an assumption that won't stand.

The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla

This and the companion pieces are less reviews than they are a sort of reader's diary of my experiences encountering Stephen King's monumental fantasy/western/science fiction tale The Dark Tower. It's made up of seven books, each of which I read at different times in my life. These are some reflections on the separate volumes, and I will be assuming that the reader has already read them or does not care if what he or she reads spoils the books or their endings. That is, of course, assuming that these little exercises have readers to begin with ;-) 

Again, and I will stress this so that no one may find the experience of learning Roland's story and reading The Dark Tower lessened by knowing what comes next, THERE BE SPOILERS HERE.

You've been alerted.

It would take Stephen King six years to return to Roland, Eddie, Susannah and Jake after they escaped plague-ridden Topeka and Randall Flagg's Emerald City trap. It took me an even dozen.

The sprawling mess of Wizard and Glass simply made me less and less concerned with what King was doing in The Dark Tower. The rest of his work had begun to disappoint as well. His publisher seemed to operate almost like a vanity press, doing a simultaneous release of a Desperation by Stephen King and The Regulators by Richard Bachman, King's long-exposed pen name.  The "unexpurgated" version of The Stand, a re-release of that early King novel including several thousand words cut from the first edition, demonstrated that editors do have value and that more is not always more. Bag of Bones was a wandering trip to -- and through -- nowhere.

Despite occasional bright spots like The Colorado Kid and The Green Mile, I'd lost enough interest to not even care how the whole saga of the Dark Tower ended. I greeted Wolves of the Calla with a shrug and a pass.

It's probably good that I did, because Wolves is good enough I might have given King another chance and inflicted Hearts In Atlantis, Dreamcatcher, From a Buick 8 or Black House on myself.

The quartet of gunslingers and Oy the billy-bumbler continue following the Beam towards the Dark Tower. They travel through some settled country and eventually they encounter people, in the form of a delegation from the town Calla Bryn Sturgis. The folk of this town face a horrible affliction. Once every generation, a group of raiders called Wolves attack the town and carry away one of every pair of twin children. The stolen children return sometime later, with diminished mental capacity and destined to grow into giants who will die very young. Andy, a wandering robot left over from a more technological era, has warned them that the Wolves are coming and will be at Calla Bryn Sturgis in about a month. Their terrible weapons make it impossible to fight them and they always find the children, no matter how well hidden they may be.

Although hundreds of years seem to have passed since Roland's day, the people of the Calla remember gunslingers and approach the group, alerted to their presence in a dream. Roland agrees to listen to their problem and see if he can help, even if it takes time away from his quest for the Tower. Providing such aid is part and parcel of being a gunslinger; he can do nothing else and remain true to himself.

In Calla, Eddie, Jake and Susannah find another traveler from their own world, Father Frank Callahan. Fr. Callahan was last seen in 'Salem's Lot, King's 1975 vampire novel. His shaky faith led him to fall victim to the vampire Barlow and he was forced to drink Barlow's blood, rendering him unclean. Callahan spent years in an alcoholic stupor before drying out and working at a homeless shelter in Manhattan, where he found himself able to see certain kinds of vampires. He began killing them, but this brought him to the attention of other vampires as well as a group of hunters called the Low Men. Callahan stays on the run from the Low Men for many years, sometimes switching between parallel worlds, before being trapped by them and the vampires. Rather than be infected by AIDS-carrying vampires, Callahan kills himself and finds that he has crossed over into Roland's world near Calla Bryn Sturgis. There he resumes his duties as a priest.

Callahan also crossed over with a seeing stone called the Black Thirteen, similar to the Maerlyn's Grapefruit stone Roland found in Wizard and Glass but even more evil. Its presence allows the gunslingers a chance to return to the other world and protect a mystic rose growing in a vacant New York City lot. That rose has some connection to the Tower and if it is destroyed, the consequences could be dire.

Over the course of the month, the quartet grows close to the townspeople. Jake especially, given the chance to be with children like himself, enjoys the time. But as the Wolves' attack grows closer, opposition to Roland's plan intensifies, and Jake learns his friend's father is a traitor working with whomever controls the Wolves themselves. Andy the robot is found to be their ally as well, so the gunslingers must plan ways to defeat him and the treachery they have uncovered.

In a final battle, the gunslingers and some women of Calla Bryn Sturgis, adept at throwing sharp metal discs that look like plates, defeat and utterly destroy the wolves. But Jake's friend dies, killed by the wolves' advanced weapons.

And following the battle, Susannah becomes completely possessed by an alternate personality named Mia. When she coupled with the demon in The Waste Lands, she became pregnant with its child and the supernatural being growing within her causes her to revert to her multiple personality disorder. Mia has been taking Susannah part of the time at night, as first Roland, then Jake and then Eddie and Susannah herself learn. After the battle, Mia slips away and uses the Black Thirteen to open a door to her world. She takes it with her, trapping the others in Roland's world so they cannot follow. Wolves closes with Eddie insisting the remaining gunslingers find a way to get to her and rescue her. Father Callahan will join them.

Wolves puts Roland in the most classic Western setting of the series. King said he drew from The Seven Samurai and Magnificent Seven movies, as well as Sergio Leone's "Man With No Name" westerns. King's gift for storytelling really details the people of the Calla and shows them clinging to the hope Roland represents.

There are some false touches. The Wolves are robots, dressed like Marvel Comics' Doctor Doom. They wield Star Wars-style lightsabers and explosive versions of Harry Potter's sneetches. On the surface these inclusions seem like King being silly, but they may have to do with a possible "narrative behind the narrative" that we'll get to in another post. Quality-wise, Wolves almost reaches the level of The Drawing of the Three. The use of Fr. Callahan reflects the self-indulgence that weighs down most of King's work since the late 1980s, but even though most of his backstory is an extra, it's not a story-killer.

King-o-philes and Tower-heads love it, of course, but since their main complaint is that this immensely long series (somewhere north of 1.3 million words) isn't longer, their judgment can be questioned.

We learn more about Roland than we did in the whole Meijis episode from Wizard, and we begin to see the work done by whoever is behind some of the initial villains Roland and the others encounter, like Flagg. Some of the shadowy plans concerned with the Tower's destruction begin to take shape. Eddie's leadership abilities come to the fore, as Roland realizes he would continue the quest if Roland himself was killed. Jake also begins to develop over the course of the story, rather than being the simple Sidekick the Boy Wonder/Hostage he was in Gunslinger and The Waste Lands.

Wolves of the Calla can give a reader, especially a former Tower-head like myself, a reason to hold out hope for the rest of the series. The pessimistic reader (raises hand) might be pretty sure none of the subsequent volumes will match the heights of Drawing of the Three, but considering the buzzkill of Wizard and Glass, any hope at all is kind of a miracle.

Long Live the Legion!

A trip to the comic shop last month brought a pleasant surprise. On the shelves I found the return of the superpowered team of the future, the Legion of Super-Heroes. During the long droughts between issues of some other titles, like Kurt Busiek's Astro City, I was still a regular visitor in order to be sure I picked up the latest chapter in the story of the 30th (later 31st) Century's greatest heroes.

The Legion began in the pages of Adventure Comics in the late 1950s. They were a group of teens who, inspired by the example of Superboy, the greatest teen hero of the 20th century, gathered to help the citizens of the far-flung United Planets and fight its enemies. Superboy himself was made an honorary member and frequently traveled through time to fight alongside those who follow in his footsteps.

During the 1960s and 70s, the Legion shifted to eventually be the headline feature of its own book. Aging with the slowness of comic book time, the teens of the Legion gradually became young adults. In the 1980s, some paired up and began families. Then, after a brief hiatus, they came back as a more grizzled, smaller set of heroes no longer-as-beloved by the United Planets government. Writer Keith Giffen was faced with a number of obstacles: The Legion's inspiration, Superboy, had been retroactively erased from history in order to match with the official history of Superman. Over the course of three or four of the first issues of the new series, Giffen re-created the Legion's history so that the Legionnaire Mon-El became the time-displaced hero Valor, the new inspiration of the hero team. Later, he added a group called the "SW6 Batch" of teenage Legionnaires alongside their 30-something counterparts.

Despite some very interesting storylines and some great artwork from Chris Sprouse and Karl Story, as well as Stuart Immonen and Ron Boyd, the learning curve for new readers remained very steep, and the paired Legion of Super-Heroes/Legionnaires titles were wound down during DC Comics Zero Hour event. A new series told the team's story from the beginning. It continued in the two titles for a few years. Interest never got high enough to maintain two books, even with stunts like sending half the team back to the 20th century for awhile. I lost some interest when the writers decided to split the team again by sending half of them to unimaginably distant space to end the paired books. I skipped the subsequent Legion Lost/Legion Worlds books, as well as the re-started Legion series. One of the selling points of the Legion books for me had been great, interesting artwork, and newcomer Oliver Coipel's pencils were way too often just plain ugly.

Yet another rebooted series began in 2004, which paired comics über-writer Mark Waid with the excellent art of Barry Kitson. In a nod to the old Legion's partnership with Superboy, the recently restored Supergirl was sent forward to join the team midway through this version. Waid and Kitson created a largely bland and restrictive society in which the teens of the Legion banded together to help change their world as much as save it. Their example inspired hundreds of thousands of young people across the United Planets to become their fans, or Legionnaires. After a few years, Waid and Kitson moved on, turning the title over first to writer Tony Bedard and then to 1960s Legion writer Jim Shooter. Shooter had been a wunderkind of sorts, writing Legion of Super-Heroes stories before he was even in high school when it was in Adventure Comics. Unfortunately, his return to a series he first wrote when he was 14 seemed to bring about the kind of writing a 14-year-old would do, and the 2000's were not the 1960's. The mix of baby-boomer juvenilia, Gen-Y sniggering and Frances Manapul's distorted-yet-crude cheesecake art quickly doomed the already not-so-robustly-selling title to another cancellation.

And now we're back -- literally, in one sense. This version of the Legion appeared in a Justice League/Justice Society arc in 2007, in the Action Comics arc "Superman and the Legion of Super-Heroes" and then as a backup feature in Adventure in 2009 before returning to its own book just last month. According to DC Comics editors, this is the original Legion that started in Adventure, without the story contortions forced on the continuity by the 1986 Infinite Crisis series. So it's got a Superboy connection, even if it's not exactly the same one we'd seen before, as well as some other tweaks that make it kind of interesting.

Paul Levitz, a Legion writer off and on between 1974 and 1989, writes the Legion's new tales, and Turkish artist Yildiray Çinar makes them visible. As an unabashed Legion fanboy since I was nine (Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes #200, "The Legionnaire Bride of Starfinger," to be precise. No, I don't still own a copy. You think I'm some kind of geek?), I have high hopes that the title will do well. Çinar's work with Jay Faerber on Noble Causes shows he can handle a large cast and he has made a good-looking first issue, even though the "L"-decorated flight ring shown on the cover is apparently being worn upside-down. I'm glad there's a Legion series around, even though its up-and-down history has got to irritate publishers no end. Because no matter how many times bad writing, bad art or ill-advised creative team changes kill it, it seems like someone wants it back to try again. I'll be crossing my fingers for luck for volume six.