King's Highway pt. 43: The Wind Through the Keyhole pt. 1 of 2

Welcome back to the Dark Tower National Park and Wildlife Preserve! You're in for a special treat this time around, as we are joined by our trail guide himself, the man-behind-the-curtain at Truth-Inside-the-Lie and You-Only-Blog-Twice, Mr. Bryant Burnette. Please prepare yourself for... part one of... 

THE DOG-TRUTH-BLOG INSIDE THE OMNIBUS.

Together Again For the First Time!! And other hype!!

Overview: Although published in early 2012, this tale-within-a-tale-within-a-tale takes place between the events of Wizard and Glass and Wolves of the Calla. 

Tale Number One, "Starkblast": The beginning and end of the book describe Roland's ka-tet seeking shelter from a "starkblast," i.e. a Perfect Storm that occurs in Roland's world every so often and that bumblers like Oy can predict. Roland passes the time by telling Eddie, Susannah, and Jake (and Oy, I guess) an adventure he had shortly after the flashback-events of Wizard of Glass; within this tale, he tells...

Tale Number Two, "Skin-Man": A few months after the flashback-events described in the pink glass at the end of Wizard and Glass, Roland is sent by his father / dinh with another young gunslinger named Jamie to investigate a possibly-supernatural murder spree in the outland mining town of Debaria. A "skin-man," i.e. a shapeshifter who may not even know he is the monster, is preying on the miners and families there. With the help of a mountainous nun named Everlynne and a Richard Farnsworth-esque Sheriff named Peavy, Roland rescues the survivor of one of these attacks, a young boy named Bill, concocts a plan, lays his bait, and gets his man in typical Gunslinger fashion, i.e. with extreme-prejudice.

Before this tale wraps up, he tells young Bill Tale Number Three, "The Wind Through the Keyhole," about a boy named Tim, whose father is betrayed and killed by his wood-cutting partner, a dickhead man named Kells, a husband in the tradition of Rose Madder's Norman Daniels, or King Claudius from Hamlet. Our old friend Mr. Flagg aka the Ageless Stranger shows up as "Marten Broadcloak" aka The Covenant Man to collect the king's taxes from everyone. 

While there, he puts the idea in young Tim's mind that Tim can save his mother from their plight (which now includes blindness from one of Kells' beatings...) and avenge his murdered father by traveling to the end of the world to see old Maerlyn:

who, we eventually learn, has been imprisoned there, on command of the Crimson King.

Tim leaves to accomplish this and along the way, encounters an impish fairy, a mud dragon, and a tribe of mud-men who hail him as a gunslinger on account of the hand-cannon he carries, given to him by his elderly ex-tutor before he left. (King will always stick a writer, tutor, or teacher into his stories, even ones that take place only in the enchanted forests of Mid-World memory) These mud-men give him Daria, a talking directional device with the patented North Central Positronics guarantee stamped on it, and it leads him to "North Forest Dogan," an enormous tower with a tiger in a cage outside it. A starkblast is brewing, and Tim is certainly to be killed when it comes...

All art unless otherwise-indicated by Jae Lee, and copies of the limited edition are, amazingly, still available.  That link is https://secure.grantbooks.com/z-sk-dt-twttk.html

(From here on out, Bryan's-thoughts will be represented by the abbreviation for this blog, i.e. DSO, while Bryant's will be represented by Bryant. I thought about giving us great aliases like Doctor Phil and The Alabama Gunslinger, or Todash Malone and the Positronic Five - or even going the easy-to-confuse / visually-repetitive Bryan/ Bryant route - but... well, I didn't. One last word of trail-caution, travelers: anything unspoiled by the above will be spoiled, and spoiled Gunslinger-style, from here on out. Away we go.)

DSO : I almost hate talking about it, as the surprise of the tyger turning into Maerlyn - in the flesh! - is just fantastic. Is this his only appearance? I can only imagine how cool it must have been to see him pop up here. How was this for you, having read them all? Is there anything in here that answered a lingering question or rewarded the long patient reader? Or is this Maerlyn's only appearance?

Bryant: So as to save you any needless anticipation, I will verify that this is indeed Maerlyn's only appearance in the series.  As far as I know.  Within the overall context of the series (if not the entire Dark Tower storytelling universe), I'm not entirely persuaded that it makes any sense.  After all, this isn't young Roland we're talking about; it's young Tim, a character who -- so far as I can tell -- is of zero significance to the overall Tower mythos.  And yet, for Flagg and Maerlyn to have taken such an active role in his life --  a development that might be coincidental, although I have a hard time reading it that way -- seems awfully significant.  

My personal feeling on the matter is that Maerlyn almost HAS to serve as the opposite to the Crimson King.  In other words, the CK is working to bring down the Tower, and is very public and vocal and vigorous about it.  Meanwhile, opposing him -- but almost without anyone ever knowing it (which would explain why he never pops up in any of the other books) -- is Maerlyn, a force for the power King refers to as the White.  I am tempted to say that he and the Turtle (in It) are one and the same, and that that is the nature of the sort of thing Maerlyn does: he puts himself in the position to help bring about small -- relatively small, at least -- events that help to steer the universe as a whole away from collapse.

That's obviously pure speculation, and it's SO unsupported by evidence that it may as well be fanfic.  But I kinda like it, personally.  And again, once you start taking a truly macro view of what King is doing with the Tower series -- by which I am referring to the overall series of connected works, however big or "small" you want to define it as being -- then I think you almost have to start posing questions like that, whether or not you decide to answer them for yourself.

This is all very complicated, and I dearly hope that King plans to tidy it all up a bit before he proceeds to that clearing at the end of the path.

DSO : I've been intrigued by the ongoing Arthur Eld/ Excalibur/ Maerlyn's Glass concept in general. Other worlds than these, indeed.

Bryant: Doesn't that make it seem almost mandatory for there to be some sort of spinoff series of Tim Stoutheart novels that explains exactly why, and for what purpose, these cosmic beings are so interested in such a small figure?
 

DSO: I thought the same thing. Setting us up for another Mid-World spell? Tales from Old Mid-World? I'd eat that shit for breakfast, as Shooter McGavin might say. Especially since he becomes a gunslinger later in life. (Tim, that is.)

Hell, instead of Haven, why doesn't somebody just make a Tim Stoutheart tv series?

Bryant: Oh, don't get me started on how lousy Haven is.  It astonishes me that so many King fans are giving this crap a pass.  I mean, I've seen worse, but compared to any number of shows currently active on television, this shit just don't pass muster. 

DSO: Does Tim appear again? Or is that one of those "tales for another days," a la Flagg vs. Thomas from Eyes, or the further adventures of Wyzer and Dorrance from Insomnia, etc.? I hope we get at least a dozen more Dark Tower books... not to be morbid, but once King passes, will Joe and Owen have any interest in writing a few? They have their own distinct styles, and, of course, it doesn't have to be someone in the King family to do it...

Bryant: If Joe Hill or Owen King do it someday, I'd be okay with that (although even with them, I'm not sure I think it would work).  Otherwise, I hope and pray it never ever ever ever EVER happens, because I simply don't think anyone could channel whatever King is channeling.

DSO: Yeah, it's probably not a good idea, even if Owen or Joe (or Tabitha or Naomi for that matter) wanted to do it.

Bryant : How awesome would it be if Naomi turned out to be the one to continue to King family's march toward the Tower?  It seems unlikely, though; as far as I know, she's never published anything.

It's more likely that Robin Furth would be King's proxy in this regard, and evidence indicates that that wouldn't be a very good idea.  She published a sorta-prequel to The Little Sisters of Eluria in the backs of the comics, and it ... was not very good.  Didn't match tonally, didn't match plot-wise; it just plain didn't work.

DSO: I'd love to see at least a trilogy of Tim's adventures. I'd settle for one. Maybe Marvel will go in this direction.

Bryant : I get the sense that Marvel's days on the path of the Beam are numbered, but you never know.

I'd love to see a movie version of The Wind Through the Keyhole.  Just the central tale, with no allusions to the larger story.  I think that could make a pretty solid dark-fantasy flick.

DSO: You’re right. As soon as he leaves in search of Maerlyn, things go from zero to ninety in that direction.

It would even work as a Rankin-Bass animated feature, perhaps particularly as one.

If anyone decided to make another Rankin/Bass movie, of course.

Similarly, Directive Nineteen. Damn it, what the hell!? I so wanted to learn what that was. Daria was great, particularly the burgeoning friendship she developed with Tim. One other thing re: Daria: I get a kick out of how my parents/ that generation;s approach things like GPS devices. It's perfectly understandable - they're cool as hell , for any generation - but it must really be Star-Trek-For-Real for Baby Boomers to interact with GPS devices and Siri and such. I know my Dad gets a little-boy look on his face when he talks about his TomTom. Can't blame him. I particularly liked that aspect in "Big Driver," and I enjoyed it here, as well.

Bryant: Structurally, and in terms of its implications for the macro view of the Tower series, this is a problematic novel.  But Daria is one of the many, many, many reasons why I am willing to just overlook all of that in favor of enjoying the book.  Daria is great!  I also loved the little malevolent fairy, whose name I cannot remember.  Within my experience as a reader, there is nobody who comes even close to being as good as King at creating memorable characters.  This novel is a fairly slight work, all things considered, and yet it fairly bursts with excellent new characters, at least one of whom is nothing more than a souped-up GPS unit.  Fascinating.

As for "Directive 19," I do not believe it makes any return appearances, although I could be wrong about that.  It might in Book V, actually.  Either way, the number 19 definitely appears again.
 

DSO: Andy responds with "Directive Nineteen" a few times in Calla, but I'm disappointed to hear we get no further explanation. Although, for the most part, I kind of like being dropped into the mystery along with the characters and focusing on their quest/ adventures rather than a big info-dump of the world-that-was - more tantalizing that way.

Bryant: It's frustrating, but it also makes a lot of sense.  I think there is definitely room to explore the whole sci-fi side of this story via a spinoff novel of some sort, but I'm not sure how it could be dropped into an actual Dark Tower novel or story without bringing in a character who would basically just be an info-dump device.  And hey, if that's what it takes, I'm all for it ... but something tells me that unless King can invent for himself a story to hang it all on, then it'll never happen.

And though that would kinda disappoint me, I'd be okay with it, too.  I can sorta concoct my own half-baked theories, which is the pleasure of mysterious-and-unrevealed-mythology stories like the ones King is hinting at here.  The downside is that you just know some professional hack will eventually decide to set 'em all down on paper and sell 'em to us.  I'd like to think that King's estate will persist long enough to either block that altogether, or at least ensure that it ends up being good, but hey, you never know.  Either way, I'll buy it, because I am a sucker.

DSO: Me, too. Along those lines, I'll have to buy some kind of poster with all the Beam guardians and the rhymes after this is done, or make one myself. I just love the concept so much. It reminds me a lot of Elric/ the Eternal Champion. I have yet to see that come up in Dark Tower commentary/ King interviews, so probably just one of those Jungian "coincidences."

You mention structural problems, and I just want to spend some time on those. North Central Positronics - I'm a total nerd for this idea and get excited anytime it appears. I'm dying to learn more, though I'm not sure if I actually will.

Bryant: Ah, yes, good old NCP.  You know, it only now (at this late date) occurs to me that I have no bleedin' idea what "positronics" is.  (Are?)  

DSO: Only Dr. Soong knows for sure.

Bryant: Sometimes the word -- if we're to the point where this is considered a word (and I think we are) -- "lol" is used less than literally,  Here, I literally LOLed.

(Here is Dr. Soong, for those readers who did not have brought TNG to mind by the above.)

DSO: Similarly, though, I have no idea what the hell "Dipolar Computers" are. I keep meaning to look it up.

Bryant: I seem to recall that Book V touches on some of this a bit, and that there might be some vague hints in the final two volumes as well; but King never tackles it head-on, sadly.  I am both okay with that AND annoyed by it.

DSO: I was a bit confused by what the point of the North Forest "dogan" was/is; is this something explained more in the books to come? Or is it (like Directive Nineteen) left a mystery? Also, since NCP plays such a self-identified part in Roland's telling of The Wind Through the Keyhole story, he's obviously familiar enough with concept. He might not know what it means, but as a term he'd recognize... But I don't recall his mentioning this in The Waste Lands when this first started appearing. (I flipped through the section right after they destroy The Bear and didn't see anything) Of course, Roland was losing his mind at the time, and grappling with other stuff. But given its prominence in the Wind Thru the Keyhole tale his mom told him, just curious.

Bryant : Here is where we get into an element of TWTTK that does not work: it is entirely too vague as to whether the central tale of Tim Stoutheart represents a story that Roland is literally telling the young boy who has been menaces by the skin-man (and, consequently, to his tet-mates and to us), or if that section is merely a representation of the tale Roland is telling.  In other words, that section represents the "real" version of the story Roland is telling (which was in turn told to him by Gabrielle, his mother).  I say that not because there is any evidence of it, but because if you assume that it is instead the literal transcription of the story as told by Roland, then it makes no sense; there is too much information in it that it seems unlikely that Roland could have possessed, such as the strong hint that the Covenant Man is actually both Randall Flagg and Marten Broadcloak.  How would his mother have known this?  How would whoever told her the story have known it?

DSO: Yeah, good point! I didn't think of that, but absolutely. A few sentences (maybe even just one) would've cleared it up. I mean, in Wizard and Glass, the traveling-through-the-glass conceit holds it all together very well. I don't know why he didn't try something similar (not one of Maerlyn's Globes, per se, but something) here.

Bryant: It simply begs too many questions, so I choose to see it as an omnisicient-POV representation of the core tale as told by Gabrielle to Roland to the boy.  I'm aware that that is a convoluted mess, but it's the only way I can make it all make sense; truthfully, it doesn't work, but the tale itself is so damned good that I'm inclined to take the approach of making shit up in order to MAKE it all make sense.

The more I think about this element, the more worrisome it seems.  In looking at the text, the first "Skin-Man" section ends with Roland saying -- AS dialogue -- the first paragraph of (the "The Wind Through the Keyhole" section). So really, the text itself gives evidence that that entire section IS, in fact, meant to be taken literally as a transcription of the story Roland tells Bill.

And yet, I just don't think that can possibly be the case, due to the implications it would hold about what Roland does and doesn't know.

This might be a question worth posing on the messeage-boards at King's site.  Maybe Ms. Mod could fish an answer out of King for us.  How cool would that be?

DSO: That'd be great. I'll post it up there and see if anything develops.

Bryant: How did you like the skin-man sections of the book?

DSO: I liked this bit, but... there wasn't much to it, was there? As a book-end to the Tim Stoutheart story, it serves its purpose, but it seemed a bit like a monster-of-the-week sort of episode. I did enjoy the revelation of the demon-things under the mines and wanted to learn more about that. 

Bryant: It's definitely a vignette moreso than anything else, but it felt moderately crammed full of import to me.  For one thing, since the stuff with Cort seemingly answers the question -- which had been a persistent one in my brain for several years -- about how canonical the comics are, that felt like a big weight had been lifted.  And I think also the central conceit is cool, for all its slightness.  It's a nice glimpse at the sort of thing that a Gunslinger has to deal with on a regular basis; in that way, its very lack of importance seems ... important.

It also reinforces the notion of ka being a wheel.  After all, this is a dangerous and bloody assignment, but it's a minor one; and yet despite that, it leads Roland to some fairly vital information about his mother, which in turns leads him to some solace.  And that, arguably, restores enough of his confidence and self-worth that it will later set him on the road to the Tower.  Without this episode, or some equivalent to it, would Roland have come back to himself enough to take on a quest like that?  Maybe; maybe not.

DSO: I wanted to find out what happened to the kid in later years. He goes to live with Everylnne and the sisters of Serenity. I'd like to think he eventually made his way to Gilead - not that I want to discover he died or anything. 

Bryant: I'm with you; I'd kinda like to know what happens to Bill after this, too.

DSO: Otherwise, the only structural distraction for me was Susannah's "sugar" tic. I kept a count of how many times she called someone "sugar." Only 6 this time, with 2 "honeybee"s. Wouldn't be a bad total for the whole story, but she's only in the novel for 33 out of the 309 pages, so... kind of high.

Bryant: Here's my viewpoint on that: King's tendency to give characters verbal tics like that is one his absolute worst characteristics, and it's a shame nobody has ever -- seemingly -- talked him out of it.  All that "beep-beep, Richie" and the inane things that come out of Trashcan Man's mouth and all the "SSDD" in Dreamcatcher so forth ... it just doesn't work for me, nine times out of ten.  Susannah has some of those characteristics, and so does Eddie, although they don't bother me all that much, because ... well, to be honest, I don't know why.  And to be fair, the only time it's ever really taken me out of a story to any meaningful degree is in Lisey's Story, which has an abominable amount of it.

DSO: It doesn't really bother me, really, either, any more than Wireman's in Duma Key with his endless "muchachos;" it's just King's style, I guess. I wonder, though, how no one at Scribner has pointed this out, if only to shield him from more unflattering accusations than "his style." Whether it's Susannah or Sara Tidwell from Bag of Bones, you'd figure someone would've said "Hey, uh..." Or maybe they do, and SK is insistent. That would be funny. Maybe he's just got a thing for The Archies:

Bryant: I suspect that this is a side-effect of King "seeing" his characters so clearly as he writes them; in his brain, that's just what they talk like, so he is merely transcribing them accurately.

NEXT!

Pt. 2, Wherein we Discuss Quotes, the Art, Starkblasts, and More.

King's Highway pt. 42: From a Buick 8

I had no idea this novel existed when I started this project five months ago. During the years I wasn't reading any King, I'd click on a link or two or read the odd newspaper story, but it wasn't until 2012 that I took a close look at his post-Tommyknockers bibliography.

The hardcover comes with this poster, as well.

I first heard about it in On Writing, when it was then only a first draft. King summarizes it as follows:

"A mysterious man in a black coat - likely not a human being at all but some creature inexpertly disguised to look like one - abandons his vehicle in front of a small gas station in rural Pennsylvania. The vehicle looks like an old Buick Special from the late 1950s."

In the final draft, it's a '54. But, like our mystery-man in the black coat, it is not exactly a car but... something else, inelegantly masquerading as one.

"(It) falls into the hands of some State Police officers working out of a fictional barracks in western PA. 20 years or so later, these cops tell the story of the Buick to the grief-stricken son of a State Policeman who has been killed in the line of duty." (pg. 229)

That's the bare bones of the plot. I was very intrigued by this description. The first thing I thought of was That would make a great sequel to Duel. 

I mean, someone had to come along and clean up that mess, right? And who's to say the driver of the truck wasn't a Can-Toi?

He goes on to relay how it was between drafts at that point (1999) and the dot-your-Is/cross-your-Ts part of it - i.e. traveling to Pennsylvania for some ride-along time with actual Western PA state troopers - was delayed by his car accident and recovery. He made it, though, and he thanks them for their patience and instruction as he hopped after them on one crutch, learning everything he needed to learn in order to make it all believable.

(I enjoyed this section of On Writing a lot. Well, the whole thing's amazing, but it was fascinating to peek behind the curtains at SK's process. Write the whole thing first, let it "cool" for a few weeks so you can edit it with fresh eyes, and then do your research and make sure you haven't put Pittsburgh in Ohio or got the real-life details too mixed-up. After all, "It is a story about monsters and secrets, not about police procedure in western PA." I tend to get too bogged down in research-details when I write; it can really delay and derail things.)

This is a pretty typical view from the thruway in western PA.

But once you get off the turnpike or away from the cities, it varies wildly...

from this

to this. Just wanted to give you folks who haven't been there an idea of the setting, which like many of King's settings, is fictional but next-door to real places. I've always loved the look of western PA.

While I have you here, he mentions how he set this story "down the road" from K.C. Constatine's series of "increasingly philosophical" detective novels centering around chief of police Mario Balzic.

Great, more stuff to read, thanks, SK! This author sounds like a real character, and I loves me a good ongoing series... But! One thing at a time.

Back to "America's schlockmeister," this time from the author's afterword to the book itself. "(From a Buick 8 is a) meditation on the essentially indecipherable quality of life's events, and how impossible it is to find coherent meaning in them."

Unsurprisingly, the author nails it; that is exactly what the novel is about. I think one's enjoyment of this will depend on how comfortable one is with that perspective. The Buick and the troopers are just the delivery mechanism. As Kev notes in his review, "In the early 2000s, Stephen King began experimenting with uncertain endings in more depth and with more frequency than ever before. While books like Pet Sematary, 'Salem's Lot, The Waste Lands, and Christine featured cliffhanger finales, these were mostly done for effect rather than ambiguity. Starting with From a Buick 8 and continuing through The Dark Tower, The Colorado Kid, and Cell, King is fascinated by the way books generally offer a sense of completion, in ways that real life rarely does. With From a Buick 8 on, King seems far more interested in the nature of mystery than closure, and how questions without answers affect his characters."

Art by Berni Wrightson

Post-modern, in other words, for us lit-nerds. Anyway, does it work? I'd say so. About halfway through this, our narrator - well, our main narrator; the book is split between several narrators, each with his/her own particular way of speaking, which makes for a fun read, tho I can see how it might irk some people - begins to get frustrated with Ned (the grief-stricken son, mentioned above) for wanting the story delivered in bullet-point form, marching logically to its conclusion. But there is no conclusion. It's the journey, not the destination; it's the mystery, not the solution. Kind of an anti-Agatha-Christie attitude... I think I'd be unsatisfied if this was his approach to every story, (I don't think King is cut out to be David Lynch; hell, David Lynch might not even be cut out to be David Lynch) but as a meditation on "life's unknowables," it works here.

This theme is expressed most clearly in two motifs that appear throughout the book like counterpoint in a Brandenburg concerto. One is "Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought him back:" the Troop D mantra, stated in various ways by all of the characters at some point. The other: "I didn't know about reasons, only about chains - how they form themselves, link by link, out of nothing; how they knit themselves into the world. Sometimes you can grab a chain and use it to pull yourself out of a dark place. Mostly, though, I think you get wrapped up in them. Just caught, if you're lucky. F**king strangled, if you're not." (pg. 13) Chains are Sandy's (our main narrator) main metaphor for life/ time.

The only part that might work against this (I'm not sure how I feel about it, after only one read) is the dissection scene. But I guess I have to give you a bit more background to discuss that. The Buick, once it's stored in the shed behind the barracks, gives off "lightquakes" from time to time, always preceded by a hum and a drop in temperature. Sometimes, but not always, these lightquakes result in either something from our world disappearing (as is the case with one unfortunate trooper) or something from some other world appearing...

as is the case with this weird-ass wanger-chested thing, as imagined by Tanem at ConceptArt.

Among the other things that appear is a bat-like creature, which Curtis (the grief-stricken son's father, in flashback) dissects. Both the dissection and the lead-up to it take up a bit more space in the narrative than may be necessary. But, it's wonderfully gross, so that's a plus.

As we've come to expect from Sai King, there are some lyrical flashes of description/ turns of phrase worth noting:

"It's funny how when you look back at disasters or love affairs, things seem to line up like planets on an astrologer's chart." (pg. 13)

"It was the early afternoon on the sort of day that's common enough in the Short Hills Amish country during midsummer; overcast and hot, the heat magnified by a syrupy humidity that hazed the horizon and made our part of the world, which usually looks big and generous to me, appear small and faded instead, like an old snapshot that's lost most of its color. From the west came the sound of unfocused thunder." (pp. 18-19)

"This young fellow, twenty-two years and untold thousands of beers later, would come along and kill the feather of a boy who was not then born, crushing him against the side of a Freuhof box, turning him like a spindle, unrolling him like a noisemaker, spinning him almost skinless into the weeds, and leaving his bloody clothes inside-out on the highway, like a magic trick. But all that was in the yet-to-be. We are in the past now, in the magical land of Then." (pg. 25)

"We smiled at each other, the way men do over love or history." (pg. 67)

"Curt handed out Polaroids... the best had that odd, declamatory quality which is the sole property of Polaroid photographs. I see a world where there's only cause and effect, they seem to say. A world where every object is an avatar and no gods move behind the scenes." (pp. 96-97)

"When desire drives, any fool can be a professor." (pg. 128)

And I quite liked this bit from the end:

You don't know where you came from or where you're going, do you?" I asked him. "But you live with it just the same. Don't rail against it too much. Don't spend more than an hour a day shaking your fists at the sky and cursing God."
"But-"
"There are Buicks everywhere," I said.

Someone on the SK Forum took that to mean there are all these portals to other dimensions, everywhere, which, while certainly true in the King-verse, is too-literal a read of that line, for me. I don't think King meant there are specifically a whole bunch of magical Buicks everywhere (though that's an amusing thought.) Much more likely that what-the-Buick-represents vis-a-vis man-and-eternity/unknowable-mysteries is everywhere for the pondering.

"If there could be some sort of test at the end of this... some way in which Ned could demonstrate new maturity and understanding, things might have been a whole lot simpler. But that's not the way things work nowadays. At least not by and large. These days it's a lot more about how you feel than what you do. And I think that's wrong." (pg. 143)

Yeah, but what about The Dark Tower, you ask?

Maybe I'm not done looking at old cars... I mean, seriously, these things look pretty bad-ass. I want to watch American Graffiti now.

- Sandy's last name is Dearborn. Probably just a fun coincidence, but Dearborn is the alias Roland assumed during his time in Mejis (in Wizard and Glass).

- The original driver of the car (who disappears, leaving the car in Troop D's hands) certainly seemed to me like a "Low Man," aka one of the Can-Toi. I don't know if its subsequently revealed what the hell he was doing in Western PA or where he went, though. (Didn't look it up.) I also don't know if any of the creatures the Buick coughs up are mentioned for their absence, elsewhere, not that that really matters. (But I wouldn't put it past him, if they are.)

- At the end, Sandy peers into the other-dimension on "the other side of the car" and sees a landscape that reminded me of The Drawing of the Three, though I think it's meant to be something else. (The Todash Darkness, i.e. the land of "The Mist," most likely.)

Anything else? If so, I missed it. I didn't look into these too closely. I'm so close to the end that I figure, why spoil anything.

One last thing. This bit: 

"Sandy's opinion was that when the Feds did show the occasional flash of intelligence, it tended to be self-serving and sometimes downright malicious. Mostly they were slaves to the grind, worshipers at the altar of Routine Procedure." (pg. 98) 

should be printed on currency right next to Annuit Coeptus and Novus Ordo Seclorum.

As a certain Vulcan scientist of my acquaintance might put it, "I would accept that as an axiom." (As my wife might put it: "...NERDS.")

NEXT!

OUR TRAIL GUIDE BRYANT BURNETTE JOINS US FOR A DISCUSSION OF THE WIND THROUGH THE KEYHOLE. MARK IT, DUDE!

King's Highway pt. 39: Bag of Bones

OOPS. I checked my trail guide and realized I skipped Desperation and The Regulators. Damn, I'll have to circle back to those after-the-fact. If I may abuse my Dark Tower National Park and Wildlife Reserve conceit, these trails were temporarily closed for maintenance/ due to bear attacks. I also want to get the two hardcovers with the connected-covers, and neither of my local shops have those. So, two for the proverbial rainy day, sometime before the end of the Highway. "Everything's Eventual" will be covered next time, though.

Okay, let's start with the book itself.

"Compared to the dullest human being actually walking about on the face of the earth and casting his shadow there, the most brilliantly drawn character in a novel is but a bag of bones."- attributed to Thomas Hardy.

I think this is a well-written, well-plotted, well-paced, richly characterized work, but when Maddie mentions (on pg. 467) that she suspects her daughter might have psychic insight, I surrendered to the nagging feeling that I'd been served another casserole of stock-King ingredients. I don't mean to make too much of it. One, I enjoyed it (and, to continue the metaphor, well, he's feeding me and all, so I'd feel a bit like a dinner guest criticizing the menu when no one asked me to sit down in the first place); two, it's not something unique to King - all writers tend to mine similar material, over time; and three, King is certainly aware of this tendency on his part and plays around with it. 

So, not that it really bothered me, but does any of this sound familiar? A grieving writer (Mike Noonan) returns to rural Maine (his cabin at Dark Score Lake, called Sara Laughs), forms a psychic bond with a child, receives supernatural assistance via dreams, bangs his head against the taciturn natives, and then uncovers the source of the supernatural trauma (the rape and murder of the namesake of his cabin, a woman from the town's past). A whopper of a storm pounds the town as things are wrapping up, and then all lingering questions are mopped up to a peripheral buddy-character in the last ten to twenty pages. 

Regardless, this is quite an enjoyable book. It's interesting to speculate what people would make of this one were it the only book King ever published. My guess is it would be hailed as a masterpiece from quarters that normally don't praise King's work. I'm not sure where it fits in to my own personal rankings (but I look forward to that; that comes after the Highway is fully traversed, so, ye lovers-of-lists, make a note on your calendar)

 Couple of notes: 

- There may be a bit too much about Mike's erections; I mean, seriously. If that's your thing, you're in for a treat. (The only thing missing was him comically knocking things off the table with it as he tried to get around Sara Laughs. In fact, that may even have happened once or twice.) I have a joke that would be perfect here, but damn it, our trail guide Bryant Burnette beat me to it... but I'll link to that later.

- Some of King's difficulty in portraying well-rounded non-white characters comes into play here. Unless you think every black person ends each and every sentence with "Sugar."

- Much was made of the pre-publication history of this novel. (As discussed here, among other places.) The short version is, King parted ways with Viking after 17 years and 44 titles, over money; Bag of Bones was his first book with Simon & Schuster, with whom he still publishes. Viking, it is said, balked at his asking price for Bag of Bones, something he laments in On Writing, which is too bad. In general, I think King is often too nice of a guy for his own good. I think people hear things like, "He wanted $17 million and 50% of the profits" and think Oh, here we go; greedy-ass writers/ prima donnas... without taking into account how many people get rich off the labor of artists who in no way contributed anything to the process. Like John Lennon said about the Beatles early career, "We held on to as much of it as we could, but we made a lot of millionaires along the way," i.e. guys in suits with MBAs who get chunks of the publishing/ syndication. Numerous examples abound. (Can you believe long-retired/ only-barely-connected producers still get residuals on All in the Family reruns? It seems criminal.) Anyway, on this score, my sympathies lie 100% with the artist. Particularly when said artist is a writer, without whom... (Along these lines, I quite enjoyed the glimpses behind-the-publishing-world-scenes in the first hundred pages.)

- As for the Dark Tower connection, i.e. how we ended up on this trail at this point in time:

- From the Dark Tower wiki: 'Bag of Bones features a house named Sara Laughs. This house is the Twinner of Cara Laughs, the house on Turtleback Lane that was the center of the walk-in activity. By extension, Mike Noonan is also the Twinner of Stephen King, both being writers who own a summer house name Sara/Cara Laughs.' And lest you ask, I'm not sure what some of that means, either. While reading, I assumed the connections were to The Outsider (the malevolent being that seized upon Sara Tidwell's rage to piggyback its own evildoings) and to...

- The Green Lady (i.e. that tree, there). I thought this might relate to The Green Man from Insomnia, who helped our protagonists in that story, as it helps our protagonist in this one. (Green Man? Crimson King? Power of the White? The Man in Black? Cuckoo for Color Motifs!)

- King mentions in the afterword, "Hope this gave you one sleepless night." Did anyone anywhere get scared sleepless from this? I'm not knocking its "scare" elements, just seemed an odd novel on which to hang that particular sentiment. It's more literary fiction than horror, for me. Perhaps I'm too jaded when it comes to horror. The last work of horror to upset my sleep was The Shining back in junior high, and I'll save all attendant-anecdotes for when I get to that one.

- As per usual, Kev has a fantastic review out there. Just wanted to quote this part: "Perhaps more than in any other novel, Bag of Bones is rife with symbolic names. Mike Noonan's maid is Brenda Me-serve and his handyman is Bill-Dean ("building"). Mattie's evil father-in-law is Max Devore - an echo of devour - and two of his emissaries are George Footman and Rogette Whitmore (King is adamant about pronouncing her name with a hard g, making her a rogue in the feminine). Rather than merely being a playful detail, both the extent and obviousness of symbolic names are actually clues. Names are of vital importance to the deeper mysteries of Bag of Bones." I didn't catch any of that; well-played, Sai King.

 - There are a hell of a lot sponge-worthy passages/ turns-of-phrase in this one:

'Grief is like a drunken houseguest, always coming back for one more goodbye hug.' (pg. 94)

'Things conceived by minds and made by hands can never quite be the same, even when they try their best to be identical, because we're never the same from day to day or even moment to moment.' (pg. 109)

'My first editor used to say that eighty-five percent of what goes on in a novelist's head is none of his business, a sentiment I've never believed should be restricted to writers. When trouble comes and steps have to be taken, I find it's generally better to just stand aside and let the boys in the basement do their work. That's blue-collar labor down there, non-union guys with lots of muscles and tattoos. Instinct is their specialty, and they refer problems upstairs for actual cogitation only as a last resort.' (pg. 245)

'Perhaps sometimes ghosts were alive - minds and desires divorced from their bodies, unlocked impulses floating unseen. Ghosts from the id, spooks from low places.' (pg. 317) (Low Men in Yellow Coats?)

'This is how we go on: one day at a time, one meal at a time, one pain at a time, one breath at a time... We turn from all we know, all we fear. We study catalogs, watch football games, choose Sprint over AT-and-T. We count the birds in the sky and will not turn from the window when we hear the footsteps behind us as something comes up the hall; we say yes, I agree that clouds often look like other things - fish and unicorns and men on horseback - but they are really only clouds. Even when the lightning flashes inside them we say they are only clouds and turn our attention to the next meal, the next pain, the next breath, the next page. This is how we go on.' (pg. 361)

(on writing) 'It never really felt like work to me, although I called it that; it felt like some weird kind of mental trampoline I bounced on. Those were springs that took away all the weight of the world for awhile.' (pg. 384)

'The muggy, smutchy look of mid-July was gone; the sky was that deep sapphire shade which is the sole property of October.' (pg. 492. 'Smutchy' is perfect, sort of like when he nails the sound a Polaroid makes as it spits out its image as 'squidgey' in The Sun Dog.)

'I could see through him, but I could also see into him: the rotting remains of his tongue in his mouth, his eyes in their sockets, his brain simmering like a spoiled egg in its case of skill. Then he was gone, and there was nothing but one of those swirling dust-helixes.' (pp. 647-648)

'One eye popped; a dripping yellow splinter ran up her nose like a dagger; the scant skin of her forehead split, snapping away from the bone like two suddenly released windowshades. Then the lake pulled her away. I saw her face a moment longer, upturned into the torrential rain, wet and as pale as the light from a flourescent bar. Then she rolled over, her black vinyl raincoat swirling around her like a shroud.' (pp. 707-708)

Whew!

Okay, so there is a film adaptation of this one...

and I have tried to watch it four separate times. I never make it to the end. Luckily, a very entertaining overview and book-to-film comparison already exists at our aforementioned trail guide's site, and I highly recommend any of you who have seen it check it out post-haste. (See if you can find the joke I wanted to use, above - not that it's all that, ahem, hard.) I will say, of what I have seen, it is a very fair takedown of the changes from page to screen. io9 also has a good one. And lest I focus only on the negative, here is one positive review, though I should mention I disagree with just about everything in that one, particularly "He is faithful to the flow of the story, the characters behavior and the tone of the book itself." I couldn't disagree more, on that score. Here are some pics.

Jason Priestley, Matt Frewer, and Pierce Brosnan. I felt bad about my 'Donna Martin Graduates' crack from my Children of the Corn blog, but I also didn't want to erase it, as just typing those words makes me chuckle. So, you get two pics, Mr. Priestley; carry on.

William Schallert (Max Devore) and Anika Noni Rose (Sara Tidwell)

One final note: do answering machines exist anywhere except for in movies, these days? I wonder when that will change. It's a convenient plot device, to be sure, one that has proven quite resistant to the advent of cellphones/ voicemail in the real(er) world. Anyway, it was nice of everyone who left Mike Noonan a message in the movie to leave long-enough pauses for Mike to make comments aloud as he listened to them.

NEXT:

EVERYTHING'S EVENTUAL
and THE LITTLE SISTERS OF ELURIA

King's Highway pt. 38: Rose Madder

The title of this one put the theme from the old Roadrunner cartoon in mind every time I picked it up:

Rose Madder (meep meep!) It's fun to beat your wife!

Rose Madder (meep meep!) But it might cost you your life!

And so on. Sorry if that gets stuck in your head. (Welcome to my world, and if you come up with any fun variations, please share.)

NOTE: Don't beat your wife, or anyone, please. Thank you.

The plot: Rose Daniels née McClendon escapes the torture of an abusive marriage and with the help of a battered woman's shelter, begins life anew in a city far away. Her husband, Norman Daniels (a villain that I can only describe as Henry Bowers (from It) on steroids and armed with (from the description on the back cover) "a cop's training, a cop's technology, and a cop's bloodhound instincts") gives chase, determined to teach her a lesson she'll never forget. (In the parlance of the novel: 'talk to her Up Close.')

In the pawn shop where she hocks her diamond (fake, of course) engagement ring, she meets Bill, a new (and non-abusive) love interest, and she is mesmerized by a painting identified only by a single name on the back: Rose Madder. From the New York Times review: "After hanging it on the wall of her room, she notices that it (begins) to change in peculiar ways. Soon she finds herself able to enter the world it depicts.... She gets caught in an eerie play of mythic forces that reflect and eventually resolve the conflict between her and her husband."

Rose Madder by chaniilame from Deviant-Art. 

The bits leading up to her physical immersion in the painting are well-handled. First she hears crickets, then she opens the back of the painting and grass and dead bugs fall out, then she hears the storm from within, sees the glow of the moon, etc. I quite enjoyed the build-up.

King separates this story into several sections: Sinister Kisses (the prologue), One Drop of Blood, The Kindness of Strangers, Providence, The Manta Ray, Crickets, The Temple of the Bull, Picnickers, Viva Ze Bool, I Repay, Rosie Real, and the epilogue, The Fox Woman. I'm not always enamored with King's chapter/section titles, but I love these.

Got this from here - great picture.

So, beginning with Gerald's Game and Dolores Claiborne, King began a five book spree exploring the psychology of sexual and domestic abuse. It's tempting to guess at his motivation here, but I think he was simply coming into a different phase of his art, one where he was more earnestly exploring horror genre tropes. Perhaps some of the feminist criticism of his female characters (such as Adrienne Barbeau in Creepshow) got him thinking? I don't know; ask him, not me.

I don't, for the record, consider his earlier work misogynist. True, there are a lot of raging-bitch-queens and ingenues, but he's employing certain genre tropes (more on that below). I'd argue King's work displays quite a strong (and consistent) feminist sensibility. But, for whatever reason, he decided to explore these concepts more directly in the early-to-late 1990s. (To the chagrin of some fans.)

(That link mentions "Before Gerald’s Game, every book King wrote was certain to be a best seller. After Gerald’s Game, his books struggled to make the best seller list." That strikes me as way off... I did some looking myself; according to Ms. Mod, the caretaker/ King-confidante at the Stephen King forum, "No one has such a list that I'm aware of. I even checked with his business agent at one time, but they don't keep a running list. It would be a daunting task to keep track of, considering how many sources would have to be reporting that information, if you added in all the foreign translation sales, etc.")

The horror genre certainly has its fair share of misogynistic tropes, as true (if not truer) today as it was back then. What started as an effective way of eliciting the strongest emotional response in an audience (thus ensuring bigger box office/ book sales) i.e. "show a woman or a baby being terrorized, and the audience is more emotionally involved" turned, by the 70s, into a cottage industry of violence-against-women. Horror became synonymous with nubile co-eds menaced by faceless male killers, until saved (usually) by men. As with anything, success begot repetition and intensification. This is a one-size-fits-all description, you understand; many books and documentaries go into much greater detail and I encourage you to seek them out.

Not that it started with Hollywood, of course; it can be traced all the way back to the Greeks, Judeo-Vedic myths, you name it. Something on which I believe King to be explicitly commenting, here.

Theseus kills the Minotaur
Athenian black-figure vase, ca. 550 BC

Now speaking of the Dark Tower, let's check in with our road map and see where we're at:

"I may as well tell you: I'm not a fan of this novel.  However, it does feature some mild connections to The Dark Tower (specifically, to Book III), and some concepts that feature into the series.  Also, Stephen King includes it on his official list of books related to the main series.... Who am I to dispute Stephen King?"

Indeed. I mean, I don't like it is fine; King shouldn't mix fantasy with gritty realism is not. Not because I say so, but again, because it's what King does. And while I liked it better than our Trail guide did, it's not one of my favorites. There are some moments where he could've been a bit more subtle (particularly the line wrapping up Norman's character arc), but I rolled with it. I'd like to see what someone like Jane Campion would do with it. (Although I find her work to be pretty erratic, she might make a kick-ass film out of it.)

Anyway: the Dark Tower connections are pretty thin:

1) Rose Madder (i.e. the vengeful fury within the painting) says "Men are beasts... some can be gentled and then trained. Some cannot. When we come upon one who cannot be gentled and trained - a rogue - should we feel that we have been cursed or cheated? Should we sit by the side of the road... bewailing our fate? Should we rage against ka? No, for ka is the wheel the moves the world, and ther man or woman who rages against it will be crushed under its rim."

2) Dorcas (Rose Madder's aide) mentions having seen heads on spike in the city of Lud. (She does not mention having done the Velcro Fly.)

That's it, unless I missed something. Perhaps the story doesn't need these Dark Tower connections, but I'm a fan of the way King ties his work together, so, I dug it. Does it harm anything? Not in the slightest. If one is unfamiliar with Lud/ ka, it just deepens the sense of mystery and other-worldness of the world within the painting; no harm, no foul.

As with any King novel, there are some lovely turns of phrase:

Once you got started killing people it never seemed to stop; the first one spread like ripples in the pond.

and lyricism:

What had she expected from that face? Now that she was looking at it in the waning moonlight, she couldn't exactly say. Medusa, perhaps.  Gorgon. The woman before her was not that. Once... her face had been one of extraordinary beauty, perhaps a face to rival Helen of Troy's. Now her features were haggard and beginning to blur. One of those dark patches had overspread her left cheek and brushed across her brow like the underwing of a starling. The hot eye glittering out of that shadow seemed both furious and melancholy... Underneath that beauty was madness... but not just madness. It's a kind of a rabies (Rosie thought) - she's being eaten up with it, all her shapes and magics and glamours trembling at the outer edge of her control soon, soon it's all going to crumble...

Finally, King has said of the tree-symbolism of the epilogue: "Rosie discovers that rage doesn't go away just because a person no longer needs it... by planting the tree from the poison seed she is making an effort to externalize her anger and neutralize it. Think of it as symbolic of therapy, or confession."

Spoken like one who knows.