Another 31 Days, Another 31 Screams: Day 9 (The Gunslinger)

Bang.

There's a huge pull of gravity with this one for me. I frankly can't believe I've finally made it to this point. Writing about the Tower. Shit. In many ways, this is the completion of the whole arc of 2003 for me. It started on a couch in April, in my home. It ended in September, 600 kilometres away, in a dorm room at Doyle House in Memorial University. There's a haunting here, and it's a personal one. I'm visiting my own ghosts. To review the arc of 2003, briefly: Sailor Moon made me want to be a writer. The Dead Zone finally got me interested in the works of Stephen King. The fusion of those two happened just a short distance away from that dorm room, at a Shopper's Drug Mart in Churchhill Square. That's where I saw a paperback copy of The Gunslinger. That's where I plunged headlong into the world of the Dark Tower. That's where I became a writer... and my god, is there some mirroring going on here. The version I had (and indeed, the version I re-read) was the Revised and Expanded Edition of The Gunslinger. I didn't even know what the original was, but this new version began with an essay by King. "On Being Nineteen, And A Few Other Things.". The short of it all is that King came up with the seeds of this massive epic, this seven-part series of books, when he was 19. I was 18 when I read this for the first time, and I'm much older now. Not nearly as old as King was when he wrote that essay, but I get it. His inspiration was simple enough; he'd read and loved Tolkien, but held off on making his own work of epic fantasy until he had a better setting. He found it by watching The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly. Lord Of The Rings, but a dark western set in an endless expanse of a mystery world. I think this is an aspect of King that helped me get into his stuff. For all I'd expected his books to be full of blood-drenched horrors and fanged nightmares ready to eat me... my first two forays into his canon were a tragedy about a man with psychic powers, and a weird post-apocalyptic western. Whatever was going on, I fell in love with this book right then and there.


To summarize The Dark Tower in a post like this would be impossible. You'd need a massive project, kind of like the Sailor Moon one, to even scratch the surface of what King did with these. We're going to try to ignore all of that. The Gunslinger is a very special book to me, and I'm doing my absolute best to cast myself back to being 18 in that dorm room and devouring it, letting it all sink in. Like The Dead Zone, it's a series of disjointed and self-contained vignettes as the gunslinger travels across the desert, recanting hardships or encountering new and mysterious folks. This makes sense because each of the parts were put out in magazines as separate short stories. It's an anecdotal form of storytelling, but one that makes things interesting and incomplete. We don't know a lot, and we drift back and forth between perspective. Time is wonky here in the desert, because the world has moved on. What the hell does that mean? Entropy? Something like that. I think what most drew me to this was the prophetic sense of it. Its vagueness hints and teases at things and mysteries to come, and this is only emboldened by King actively going back and changing things to both mesh with the later books, and foreshadow them. The mystery of the number 19, for one, is added into the proceedings. The fact that he only revised this book, and the 19 thing only comes in the final three, means that the number's important at first before it fades away, only to come back up again. Similar are the prophecies given by the succubus at the mid-point of the book. "Three is the number of your fate" is a phrase that gave me chills in 2003, and it lit a fire inside of me. I wanted more. Needed more. I dove headlong into the Dark Tower series, then and there, and a year later in that dorm room I brought home the last two books. I finished the saga.


This post ended up being more of a biography of myself than any review. The Gunslinger is a very good book and you should check it out. Hell, the whole Dark Tower series is a bit of a master stroke for King. I had my tinkerings and my own ideas, of course. I got to work on this whole writing thing myself. My early fiction was clunky. Hell, I think my current fiction is kind of clunky... but I just adore expressing the ideas and making up wild shit. Making an epic that spans generations. Telling a story. You all reading this will know me more for the nonfiction blogging, of course, but that comes about from hacking away at fiction words. I've drawn the beam that led me to where I am. Magical girls. Psychic powers. Gunslingers following across endless desert. There's only one thing left to do. I need to go back to the Tower. Not to the whole series, as that's a project I don't feel qualified for, even now. Look at how I've avoided talking about the book, for instance. No. I need to go deeper.


I need to watch the movie.