A Brief Guide to Stephen King by Paul Simpson

Author:Paul Simpson
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781472110749
Publisher: Constable & Robinson

3. THE DARK TOWER

11

THE QUEST BEGINS: THE GUNSLINGER TO WIZARD AND GLASS

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

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