The Dark Tower Companion: A Guide to Stephen King’s Epic Fantasy (3 page)

The Dark Tower arose out of the magical primordial soup of creation in Mid-World. It is supported by six magical Beams that extend from one end of the known universe to the other, all intersecting above the Tower. Left alone, there was enough magic to hold the Tower up forever. However, the Great Old Ones, slaves to technology, mistrusted magic and replaced the Beams with artificial, scientific equivalents. After they died off—or killed one another off in a great war—there was no one left to tend to them, so they have been failing ever since.

Even so, the Beams should have lasted for many centuries. Their decline is accelerated by the work of an evil being known as the Crimson King. He hates creation and wants to destroy it, returning the world to chaos, where he will be the king in more than just name. He has minions (one of them travels under various guises, including the man in black, Walter o'Dim, Marten Broadcloak and Randall Flagg) and kidnappers who round up psychics and force them to weaken the Beams, bringing about the premature collapse of the Tower. If the Tower falls in Mid-World, all of reality will collapse. Roland's quest, then, is about more than saving one world. It is a mission to save all of creation.

Roland doesn't know all of this when he sets out as a young man. He knows only that the Tower is in trouble and that he needs to reach it to save it. Part of him isn't even sure the Tower exists, because a lot of what he thinks he knows about his world is myth and legend. However, during his quest he learns more and more details that tell him where he needs to go and what he needs to do when he gets there.

The term “
ka-tet
” describes a group of people united in a common mission. Roland sets out alone in search of the Dark Tower after his original
ka-tet
(a group that included Cuthbert Allgood, Alain Johns and Jamie DeCurry) is killed during the last great battle between the gunslingers of Gilead and their adversaries. He has no direction to guide him—directions aren't reliable anymore, even if he did.

In the beginning, he's not very likable. Solitude has turned him cold and ruthless. Saving the universe is a serious mission, and he takes it so seriously that he's willing to sacrifice anything and anyone to accomplish it. This is one reason why some readers have found
The Gunslinger
a difficult book.

Gradually, though, starting with
The Drawing of the Three
, Roland assembles a new
ka-tet
. He doesn't simply pluck people from thin air, nor do they start following him of their own volition, like children trailing after the pied piper. In Egyptian mythology, the word “
ka
” represents the life force that is imparted from the gods. In the Dark Tower series, it is a force in the universe that wants Roland's mission to succeed. In one sense,
ka
is personified by Stephen King who is, after all, Roland's creator and has the power to give him the tools he needs to accomplish his goal. Primary among Roland's requirements—especially after
ka
delivers a serious setback at the beginning of the second book in the series—is a set of people with special, though unexpected, characteristics.
Ka
puts these people in Roland's path and he plucks them out of their ordinary lives and drags them along kicking and screaming.

Eddie Dean, Odetta Holmes and Jake Chambers all come from our world, specifically from New York City. At first they seem like an unlikely group of heroes: a junkie, a legless kleptomaniac with multiple personality disorder and a preteen boy, combined with a doglike creature that can bark in words. None of them volunteers for this assignment but, though they resist at first, ultimately they adopt the mission as their own.

As the quest develops, it expands to include both Mid-World and our world, with frequent trips back and forth between the two. Similarly, King's Dark Tower saga jumps back and forth between the books in the series and other novels published between installments in the series. Characters and concepts are often introduced in nonseries books before they show up in the main series itself. Just about everything King has ever written is about the Dark Tower in one way or another.

Where did the idea for this sprawling series come from?

K
ing has discussed the primary influences that inspired him to begin a series that has been a major part of his writing career. Initially, a number of disparate things came together. One of these is fairly abstract: King acquired a ream of oddly shaped and garishly colored paper. This green paper seemed to demand something special, and parts of the opening sections of
The Gunslinger
were typed on it.

Then there was the compulsion to write a quest. As a university student in the late sixties, he couldn't help but be aware of
The Lord of the Rings
, Tolkien's epic saga. King was young and ambitious—so much so that he entertained the idea of writing the longest popular novel in history.

Two years before he graduated from the University of Maine, King studied “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” a romantic poem by Robert Browning about a knight-errant on a quest to find a mysterious Dark Tower. The poem's influence is readily apparent—not only did King name his protagonist after the poem's lead character and utilize the goal of reaching the Dark Tower, but he used other elements from the poem as well. Cuthbert's name comes from the text. Touch points appear throughout the series—from a picture of Browning on the calendar in Calvin Tower's storage room office, to the subtle use of the phrase “not-see” as a soundalike for Nazi in the story of David Quick and the water-rats Mia consumes, to the more literal appearance of a photocopy of the poem in the final book.

King was also fascinated by spaghetti Westerns such as
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
and
The Magnificent Seven
. Some of these films starred Clint Eastwood as a taciturn and violence-prone cowboy with a well-defined (though sometimes morally skewed) code of conduct. For many years, readers of the series saw Eastwood as Roland Deschain. Even Roland's companions make the comparison, and many of the artists who have depicted Roland
were inspired by Eastwood as well. While there's no chance Clint will ever play Roland in a film adaptation, the comparison will always exist.

King was intrigued by the possibility of blending the epic fantasy novel with the Western. He underscored the influence of these films in
Wolves of the Calla
, the fifth book in the series. The novel is a variation on the story of
The Magnificent Seven
(itself a remake of the Japanese film
Seven Samurai
), and the name of the town that seeks the gunslinger's help—Calla Bryn Sturgis—alludes to John Sturges, who directed
The Magnificent Seven
. Eddie Dean, who saw many of these spaghetti Westerns when he was a teenager, eventually realizes the similarity between their adventure and the film—an important discovery about the nature of their reality.

The Dark Tower series follows Joseph Campbell's hero's journey in some aspects and diverges from it in others. At its heart, though, it is a quest wherein one man has a monumental goal that causes him to embark on a great journey.
The Lord of the Rings
, though it spawned many imitators, is an unusual quest story. In most, the hero and his followers set out to find something. In
The Lord of the Rings
, Frodo and Sam are tasked with destroying something they already possess. The quest element comes in their need to get to the only location in Middle Earth where the ring can be destroyed.

The archetype for the quest is the story of King Arthur's knights, who are dispatched to locate the Holy Grail. Arthur senses that his empire is falling apart and comes up with a mission to unify his followers under a common goal. Similarly, Roland Deschain's Mid-World is falling apart, for some of the same reasons. The gunslingers of Gilead, analogs to King Arthur's knights, have become so obsessed with the problem of the Dark Tower that they neglect to take care of the immediate issues facing their empire. Those they are meant to govern are growing disenchanted because they are paying taxes without receiving anything in return. Rebels are organizing against them. It's understandable that the gunslingers might dismiss anything that isn't as important as the end of reality, but the rebellion destroys their ability to do anything about the problem of the Dark Tower.

Getting back to King Arthur—the inspiration here is, again, obvious. The first leader to unify the various Baronies and kingdoms of All-World was Arthur Eld. He had a sword called Excalibur. His chief adviser was a magician named Maerlyn. One of his ill-begotten descendants is named Mordred. Though the reign of Arthur Eld takes place long before even the earliest stories in the Dark Tower mythos, his presence is felt throughout. Roland of Gilead is also Roland of the Eld. Most gunslingers are directly descended
from Arthur. Roland's gun barrels are made from the metal of Excalibur's blade.

Finally, one of the most intriguing inspirations for the Dark Tower series is Stephen King himself. One of Michael Whelan's early illustrations of Roland, used for the cover of the Plume trade paperback of
The Gunslinger
in 1988, was based on a profile shot of the author. Over the years, the series began to extend tentacles into many of King's other works. Were the Territories that Jack Sawyer visited in
The Talisman
a part of Mid-World? Ultimately, we discover that they were. Did Mrs. Todd's shortcut take her through a thinny? Perhaps. Though some of these crossovers are subtle, the influence of the Dark Tower became more pervasive. King's 1994 novel
Insomnia
is for all intents and purposes a Dark Tower novel, although Roland appears only in a brief cameo. In the 1990s, he used his nonseries books as “proving grounds” in which he introduced concepts and characters that would become crucial to the series. Low men, the Crimson King, Breakers, Ted Brautigan, Dinky Earnshaw—all of these appeared first in nonseries books and stories.

And then the books themselves became part of the series, as did their author. When King was nearly killed in a car-pedestrian accident in 1999, he realized that there was a possibility that if the creator were killed—or died of natural causes, even—the series would remain incomplete. Roland's quest would never succeed. So he wrote that into the story. The Crimson King is aware that Stephen King is the creative force driving Roland and his friends from the Western Sea to Lud to the Callas and onward. If he can stop Stephen King, he can stop Roland. Stephen King scholars pore over his works looking for clues that will help Roland. Other characters discover that they are characters from a Stephen King novel—a cause of great existential angst.

So King became his own inspiration and influence, along with all of the other factors mentioned above. No wonder the series is often considered to be his magnum opus. It consists not only of the seven—now eight—books, but everything he has ever written, because he is a character in the story.

T
he novella “The Little Sisters of Eluria,” first published in Robert Silverberg's anthology
Legends
in 1998, relates an incident that takes place after the battle of Jericho Hill and before Roland Deschain ends up in the Mohaine Desert on the trail of the man in black. As such, it is the earliest appearance of Roland outside of the stories of his youth in
Wizard and Glass
and
The Wind Through the Keyhole
.

The idea behind
Legends
was that it would feature self-contained stories set in each author's respective fictional universe. People unfamiliar with a particular ongoing epic fantasy could sample it and perhaps be inspired to tackle the series. As a stand-alone, “The Little Sisters of Eluria” could be read before, during or after the Dark Tower books. However,
The Gunslinger
is a difficult book. This novella is a more accessible introduction to Roland, since it shows him during a transitional phase. He's alone, but he doesn't shun companionship. His skills are still developing, and he's prone to making potentially lethal mistakes, but he is growing to understand that
ka
may want him to succeed at his quest.