Monday, January 24, 2005

Hey Dad, let's take a picture!



Here's how my morning with Jane, the lovely child who has been begging for muffins all weekend went:

Me: Morning, Bear. I made you muffins!

Jane: But last night mommy said I could have a pancake.

Me: You've been asking for muffins all weekend. I got up early to make them.

Jane: Mommy said I could have a pancake.

Me: Okay, pancakes it is.

Monday, January 10, 2005

My Road To The Tower

When I was 13 we took a weekend trip from our home in Evansville,IN to Martin, TN, to visit with some of the people that we had known when we lived there. We stayed at the home of my childhood best friend, Jamie Gillon. Now, Jamie and I spent the entire weekend playing Castlevania II: Simon's Quest and we had a hell of a time. Jamie and I had a pretty tight bond for a couple of kids who hadn't really seen each other for any length of time in the last seven years. I thought Jamie was cool as hell, and for all I know, he still is. One of the things I noticed in Jamie's bedroom was a bookshelf filled with Stephen King novels. Not just one or two, but at least a dozen. I asked him about them as I had never read any Stephen King, and I'm always on the lookout for good stuff. He assured me that King was truly the good stuff, and I was determined from there to start reading him.

Shortly after we returned to Evansville I had my mother purchase a Stephen King novel for me. That novel was The Gunslinger.

And I was hooked. I devoured the book in short order, and desperately wanted more. My mother and I made another trip to the book store and we discovered that the second book in the Dark Tower series, The Drawing of the Three, was available but only in the more expensive trade paperback form. I will never forget my mom taking one look at me and buying it, even though she clearly didn't like the idea of dropping more than $13 on a single book. She knew there was no resisting me - I had an addiction and I would hound her for my fix until she gave in.

I read The Drawing, not believing that it was possible for the second book to be so much better than the first. But it was. I was hungry for more of this world of Roland and his new crew. But there would be no more for four years.

I was a senior in high school when The Waste Lands came out and I, of course, got it as quickly as possible and read it in short order. It was also very good. It was different though, in style and in tone. You realize later that the difference comes because book three is really the beginning of the end of the quest. Roland has finally made it out of In-World and into Mid-World and the true story is beginning. At the time I just realized that it was different from the other two, in ways I wasn't completely sure I enjoyed. Also, the book had no ending. It was a complete cliffhanger. No one likes a cliffhanger, especially one that isn't resolved for another four years.

I read plenty of other King books, stuff that wasn't part of the Tower series, and I mostly enjoyed them. He's written some pretty incredible stuff, but none of it was the same as the Tower books. They were better than all his other writing.

And then Wizard and Glass came out. I felt completely let down after reading it. I couldn't believe that something that had started so incredibly well, with The Gunslinger being this incredible mystery and The Drawing being a phenomenal place setting of the story, that this series could take such a turn for the worse. Wizard and Glass was your classic frame story, with Roland and his current crew occupying only the first 100 and last 100 pages of the novel. In between were 400 pages that told the tale of Roland's first and only love, how he lost her, and how that loss was the real beginning of his life's quest for the Dark Tower. It was 400 pages of dry, boring, methodically paced Cowboy Romance crap. And re-reading it, I still think it is.

I was afraid that King had really lost it. The tale that had started so incredibly was bogged down and for all I knew would never really recover. There was a glimmer of hope in those final 100 pages, but not much of one.

And that was it for the Tower for quite some time.

Then in June of 1999, King was nearly killed in an auto accident. It scared him into finishing the Tower books before the opportunity was taken away from him. He wrote the final three novels and made public his plans to publish them all in a twelve month period. He also re-wrote the first novel. He had begun writing the work that would become The Gunslinger more than 30 years ago, in June of 1970. He had placed things in that simply didn't fit with the rest of the series and started threads of subplot that were never taken up. He removed those threads and tightened up the story then republished the novel.

I didn't know what to think. Wizard and Glass had been so bad that I simply didn't have the desire to jump back in. So when the fifth novel, Wolves of the Calla, was released in November of 2003, I didn't buy it. I barely even looked at it. I was afraid that it wouldn't be any good. I managed to hold off until spring of 2004, when I happened to see it in the public library. On a whim I picked it up and took it home.

And it was good. True, it started a little slow, and very strange, but it quickly got on track and ramped up the interest level all the way to the very last page. I recall tearing through those final pages desperate to see how it ended. And true, it didn't have much of an ending, but it wasn't really a cliffhanger in the way that The Waste Lands had been. It was a complete chapter in the tale, and it re-ignited my passion for the series.

Book 6, The Song of Susannah, was published in the spring of 2004 and Book 7, The Dark Tower, was published on September 21st, King's 57th birthday. I didn't read book six immediately after it was published. I decided that if I was going to finally get to read the end of the series, that I would do it in style, re-reading the first five novels and then heading immediately into books 6 and 7.

So, I started with the new revised edition of The Gunslinger. It's very different from the original, and I wasn't sure that I liked it. Knowing what I know now, I can certainly appreciate it more than I did after first reading it, but there is still a large part of me that prefers the original. In either edition The Gunslinger is the shortest of the novels by far, at less than 250 pages. I finished it in about a day. The Drawing of the Three quickly followed, as did The Waste Lands. By the time two weeks was up, I had read all three from cover to cover. Then came Wizard and Glass.

Even knowing how good Wolves of the Calla was and that I already possessed the final two novels of the series, unread, I still had a hard time making my way through the book. Because so much of it doesn't actually move the story along. Sure, it was backstory and it was somewhat interesting and it laid the foundation for things to come, but imagine if Tolkien had decided in the middle of The Lord of the Rings to spend 400 pages on an incident in Rohan that had happened to King Theoden many years earlier and had no immediate bearing on the current tale of the One Ring at all. This was just like that - mildly engaging, but not enough to get me through the book with any speed. I spent nearly five weeks on the re-reading of Wizard and Glass, and I don't know that I will ever read it again.

Eventually though, it was done. And I got to the final three books - the tale of Roland and his company passing from Mid-World to End-World, and from there to the Tower. I started reading Wolves of the Calla on Wednesday, December 1st, 2004. I finished the final book, The Dark Tower at 1:30 AM on Thursday, December 9th.

After 15 years of waiting to see what happened to Roland when he got to the Dark Tower, and lusting of the knowledge of what the Tower is, and what is inside I can say without reservation that the answers to those questions are incredible.

The Dark Tower series is, even with its flaws, simply the best work of fiction that I have ever read.

The final three books in the series are so outstanding that it completely makes up for the flaws of the fourth book, the middle child.

I could not believe that after fifteen years of hype and expectation that Stephen King managed to pull it off. The ending was unexpected, surprising, wholly appropriate and better than I had any hope of believing possible. This, for me, is on the same level as it would have been for most people if George Lucas had managed to deliver Star Wars prequels that actually turned out to be better than the original trilogy.

I can't believe that it's over. I can't believe that I know what lies at the top of the tower, and I can't believe how amazingly fitting the ending of the story was.

I strongly encourage you to make the time in your life to read the series. Because no matter what the critics think, it's these novels that will be remembered as classics by generations to come, and these novels that will be taught in universities as being truly great works.