If I had to blame this crazy project of reading all SK works in chronological order on something (apart from the anthology of his first three novels that got it going), I think that I would choose to blame The Dark Tower. Probably I am not the first or only person to fall prey to this folly since so many of his works are mirrored in this series; there is a dangerous temptation to find everything that SK ever wrote somehow coming full circle in his magnum opus (which is so totally wrong, as I will explain). However, the journey that I took to get there is a bit unusual, so I wanted to share that before I start posting on these books. In fact, to best understand this journey, you need to know more about my relationship with SK over the years and how it has changed.
When I was a kid, some SK novels interested me and some didn't. I have no idea what the distinction was. So I can't tell you why I wanted to read Pet Semetary but had zero interest in Cujo. Undoubtedly, this was fueled in part by what was available at my local library (in the grown-ups section) and what was not. At the same time, I can explicitly remember being uninterested in some of them, such as Christine, which was available on the shelf but one that I never read. I can't remember the first novel that I ever read by him or what possessed to start reading these novels in the first place. Probably they seemed like Something Important that could be found also in movies and other cultural references, so I wanted to know what they were about.
If I had to guess, I would date my SK years from 1990-1995. The last 'new' book that I read by him was Needful Things (1991), which I owned in hard copy. I know that I read 'The Mist' in the summer of 1994--in fact, I can date a number of his books very precisely because I remember where and when I read them, or more exactly, where and when I became afraid from reading them. Perhaps it is for this reason that they stay more firmly fixed in my memory than most of the books that I have read in my life. I would say the same of John Bellairs, whose Gothic horror stories were like SK for kids, and whose novels also terrified me.
In other words, I was not an avid, constant reader (sorry SK), but one who disappeared for quite a while. I remember rediscovering some when I lived in Vienna (2003-2004) because the choice of English-language books was slim--that time, Pet Semetary didn't scare me as badly, and I realized that I just might be able to reread these stories that scared me so memorably when I was younger. Some I remembered fondly, like Misery (which I realized was actually about the writing process) and The Eyes of the Dragon (I ran out and bought a copy in the summer of 2005 just because I wanted to read it again). But these incidents were few and far between, and I can't say that I ever really planned to rekindle my relationship with SK.
You have to fast-forward to 2007 and a very long bus trip for my first encounter with The Dark Tower series. I was underemployed and looking for things to do, which may have been why I bought The Gunslinger to help pass the time for my travels. It would have been an ideal time to crank through seven books (after getting off the bus, of course, and back to my underemployed life at the end of the line). My reaction was that I did not care for it. Not at all. In fact, I found it boring and had absolutely no desire to continue reading the series. But I owned my personal copy of the book and did move it with me when I started my new job in the fall of 2007. It sat on the shelf, along with my copies of Misery and The Eyes of the Dragon as the only SK novels that I owned.
I'm not sure what possessed me to pick the book up again in the winter of 2011. I had just rearranged all of the books that I owned in preparation to put them in real bookshelves, so maybe it just caught my eye. But I decided to take it with me for some light reading while dog-sitting for friends. This time it did take, for some reason, although I couldn't say what changed from my first reading of it. I wanted to continue reading the series this time around and see what happened to Roland next.
The timing could not have been more ideal, because the next day I realized that I was coming down with the flu. As my final act before succumbing to illness, I rushed to my local library and picked up the next three books in The Dark Tower series. This was probably one of the best moves that I have ever made, literature-wise. The books helped get me through the illness without being too bored, while I had an ideal opportunity to read. And read I did. In fact, after finishing those four, I wanted to know how it ended (although I was recovered from flu). So that was my January 2010: reading all of The Dark Tower in the course of one month.
(You've probably realized that I read fast).
And then, I wanted to rediscover SK. Because I could hear echoes in The Dark Tower of his previous works, echoes that sometimes I barely remembered. But it was amazing to me how vivid those recollections could be. I remembered the prayer to the Turtle in IT. I was sure that the haunted house was a theme that had appeared in previous SK books. I wanted to find these common threads and tie them together...even though I rationally know that there is no such 'master-thread' in his works.
Part of what fascinated me about The Dark Tower was its unapologetic post-modernity. SK invents a world that seems to fit into conventional tropes; I think that we spend much of the first book thinking that we know what is happening ('It's a post-apocalyptic disaster zone! I'll bet nuclear weapons are to blame!'), and then things get weird. Very weird. Not explainable by conventional narratives weird. And I think that this post-modern approach to the epic is part of what makes these twists so fascinating. Characters walk through the worlds of other novels and meet their characters; time ceases to move in a linear fashion; and even death loses its permanence. This is the world that I wanted to explore more, and I think that there are hints of this post-modernity throughout King's oeuvre. Maybe not all the time. Maybe Cujo really was just a rabid dog. But his way of mitigating this post-modern universe by using a popular style (and writing an epic on the scale of C. S. Lewis or Tolkien) is a uniquely King creation. And this was what I found when I explored The Dark Tower again. It was fascinating and intoxicating, in a literary way, and perhaps that is why I felt I needed to complete the series in a month.
(That is kind of crazy when I think about it since I am no longer underemployed. It was almost 4000 pages. Yeesh.)
I think that The Dark Tower led to my reappraisal of King and wanting to reread his works. While I would still consider the anthology of his works sitting on a friend's shelf as the impetus, part of me is convinced that this is far more to do with finding fragmented shards of The Dark Tower in King's other works and trying to piece them together. Yet I know that this is impossible because you can't uncover a master narrative in a post-modern work, at least not in the conventional way. Maybe I am being a literary Roland here, seeking to fulfill my quest which is ultimately unfulfillable. At any rate, I am looking forward to revisiting the world of The Dark Tower to see if I can make any more sense of this complex, compelling universe.
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