The Road to The Dark Tower (4 page)

In the Overlook Connection winter 1990 catalog, King contributed his New Year’s resolution, which said, “I resolve to get down to business and write the third novel in THE DARK TOWER series,
The Waste Lands.
It will be the only fantasy novel of 1990 (I hope) to feature a talking train.”
Before starting to write, King reread the first two installments, taking notes and marking pages with highlighters and Post-it notes.
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He finished the final draft and revisions early in 1991.

[F]inding the doors to Roland’s world has never been easy for me, and it seems to take more and more whittling to make each successive key fit each successive lock. Nevertheless, if readers request a fourth volume, it will be provided, for I still am able to find Roland’s world when I set my wits to it, and it still holds me in thrall . . . more, in many ways, than any of the other worlds I have wandered in my imagination. And, like those mysterious slo-trans engines, this story seems to be picking up its own accelerating pace and rhythm. [DT3, afterword]

With the demise of the
Castle Rock Newsletter
in 1989, King fans no longer had an inside source of information concerning upcoming publications. The first indication that King had returned to Mid-World came in the December 1990 issue of F&SF. Billed as the Stephen King Issue, it contained a new short story (“The Moving Finger”), an author appreciation by the magazine’s book review editor, Algis Budrys, a bibliography organized by King’s assistant, Marsha DeFilippo, and “The Bear,” an excerpt from
The Waste Lands.

It also featured an ad from Donald M. Grant stating that the book would be published in early 1991. King was less optimistic. In his introduction to “The Bear,” he says
The Waste Lands
may appear in 1991 or 1992.

The limited editions from Grant came out in August 1991, with the trade paperback from Plume coming close on its heels the following January. Because of this narrow window of exclusivity, the Grant trade hardcover didn’t sell out.
⁴²

In the afterword to
The Waste Lands,
King apologized for ending the book with a cliff-hanger and said the fourth volume would appear in the “not-too-distant future.” Years passed with no sign that he had returned to the series. However, the
Dark Tower
began to insinuate itself more and more into his nonseries books. While on a promotional tour in 1994, King responded to the inevitable question “When is the next
Dark Tower
book coming out?” by calling
Insomnia
the next
Dark Tower
book. It was the
first of three books published in consecutive years with conspicuous ties to the series.

In mid-1994, King said for the first time that once he got his next novel out of the way, he would write the remaining four books back-to-back to finish the series.
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In a fanzine essay, Stephen Spignesi, author of the
Stephen King Encyclopedia
and
The Lost Works of Stephen King,
suggested that this strategy might encourage readers who hadn’t yet tried the
Dark Tower
series to start because there would be no other new King material for a couple of years.
⁴⁴

Rose Madder
appeared in 1995 with references to elements from
The Waste Lands,
but King’s plan to tackle the rest of the series that year didn’t materialize.

He had a highly publicized and successful six-month run with the serialized publication of
The Green Mile
in 1996. All six installments appeared simultaneously on the
New York Times
best-seller list in September. In the first book’s introduction, he compared the serial release to his ongoing work with the
Dark Tower
and discussed some of the fan reaction the series had inspired:

I liked the high-wire aspect of [the serial publication process], too: fall down on the job, fail to carry through, and all at once about a million readers are howling for your blood. No one knows this any better than me, unless it’s my secretary, Juliann Eugley; we get dozens of angry letters each week, demanding the next book in the Dark Tower cycle (patience, followers of Roland; another year or so and your wait will end, I promise). One of these contained a Polaroid of a teddy-bear in chains, with a message cut out of newspaper headlines and magazine covers: RELEASE THE NEXT
DARK TOWER
BOOK AT ONCE OR THE BEAR DIES, it said. I put it up in my office to remind myself both of my responsibility and of how wonderful it is to have people actually care—a little—about the creatures of one’s imagination.
⁴⁵

The author’s alter ego writes, “I still get a ton of letters about the cliff-hanger ending. They fall into three major categories: People who are pissed off, people who want to know when the next book is coming out,
and pissed-off people who want to know when the next book is coming out.” [DT6]

In April 1996, King told participants in an AOL chat that he was going to try to write
Wizard and Glass
during the coming summer. “I know a lot of what happens. Mostly now it’s a matter of gathering my courage and starting.” To prepare, he returned to the first three books, armed once again with a highlighter and sticky notes. He started writing in motel rooms while driving from Colorado to Maine after finishing work on
The Shining
miniseries. Ads announcing the book’s upcoming publication appeared in the back of the final four
Green Mile
installments.

Courage he must have found in abundance. In October, during a conference at the University of Maine in Orono,
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King read an excerpt, announcing that the first draft was more than 1,400 pages long and dealt mostly with Roland’s childhood.
⁴⁷

King’s twin books
Desperation
and
The Regulators
were released simultaneously in September 1996. Initially, they were bundled together with a battery-powered night-light. However, once supplies of the night-light were depleted, King suggested to his publisher that they could replace them with a small booklet containing the first two chapters of
Wizard and Glass.
Fans squealed with delight and shrieked in consternation. The next
Dark Tower
book was on its way, but to get this freebie they had to buy two hardcover books many already owned.

By now, the Internet had numerous places where fans could express their opinions. One of the most active was a USENET newsgroup called
alt.books.stephen-king
, which was occasionally monitored by King’s publisher, Viking. Through them, he learned of reaction to his gift. His publisher posted the following message to the newsgroup on King’s behalf.

Gentle Readers:

It’s reached my attention that there’s been a fair degree of pissing and moaning about the
Wizard and Glass
booklet which comes with a dual purchase of
Desperation
and
The Regulators.
I swear to God, some of you guys could die and go to heaven and then complain that you had booked a double occupancy room, and where the hell is the sauna, anyway? The major complaints seem
to be coming from people who have already bought both books. Those of you who bought the double-pack got the light, right? A freebie. So whatcha cryin’ about?

The booklet was my idea, not the publisher’s—a little extra for people who wanted to buy both books after supplies of the famous “Keep You Up All Night” light ran out. If you expect to get the booklet IN ADDITION to the light, all I can say is sorry, Cholly, but there may not be enough booklets to go around. If you bought the two books separately, because there weren’t any gift packs left (they sold faster than expected, which is how this booklet deal came up in the first place), go back to where you bought them, tell the dealer what happened, show him/her your proof of (separate) purchase, and they’ll take care of you. If they get wise witcha, tell ’em Steve King said that was the deal.

If you’re just jacked because you want to read the first two chapters of
Wizard and Glass,
wait until the whole thing comes out. Or put it on your T.S. List and give it to the chaplain. In any case, those of you who are yelling and stamping your feet, please stop. If you’re old enough to read, you’re old enough to behave.

STEVE KING
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King’s frustration with reader demands rings out loud and clear—so much so that many people refused to believe it was genuine.
⁴⁹
The hue and cry was all for nothing as it turned out—Penguin posted the excerpt on their Web site two months later.

In the introduction to the preview—which he calls “a signal of good faith” for readers who have waited five years since the previous installment—King quotes Susannah from
The Waste Lands.
“It is hard to begin,” she thinks while preparing to challenge Blaine the Mono in a game of riddles. Returning to the
Dark Tower
series has often been hard for King. “And sometimes
scary,
too.”
⁵⁰

Wizard and Glass
proved to be the longest book of the series—so long that the 780-page signed/limited edition from Donald M. Grant was split into two volumes. The first copies shipped on August 9, 1997. Betts Bookstore, an independent seller in Bangor specializing in King editions, sent a truck to the publisher’s warehouse to speed up their delivery
process. A trucking company lost or damaged about a third of the dust jackets for the deluxe signed edition, delaying its release until the end of September.

For the first time, Grant made a significant number of the forty-thousand-copy limited trade edition available to nationwide chain bookstores.
Wizard and Glass
became the first book from a specialty (that is, small-press) publisher to appear—albeit briefly—on the
New York Times
hardcover bestseller list.
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The trade paperback from Plume appeared in November with a first printing of 1.5 million copies.

The dedication begins: “This book is dedicated to Julie Eugley and Marsha DeFilippo. They answer the mail, and most of the mail for the last couple of years has been about Roland of Gilead—the gunslinger.” Shortly after the book was released, King reiterated his plan to continue working “until the cycle is done and then, that way, I can walk away from it.”

It’s always been my intention to finish. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about Roland and Eddie and Detta and all the other people, even Oy, the little animal. I’ve been living with these guys longer than the readers have, ever since college, actually, and that’s a long time ago for me.
⁵²

He intended to start work on the fifth installment in 1998 so that he could finish while he “still drew breath” and “before I can hide my own Easter eggs,” King’s expression for senility.

Wizard and Glass
was the last
Dark Tower
book readers would see in the twentieth century, but it wasn’t Roland’s final appearance. Robert Silverberg proposed an anthology of novellas by famous fantasy writers, where the stories were to be set in the author’s best-known fictional universe. They were to be stand-alone tales so people unfamiliar with the associated works could enjoy the collection. King accepted Silverberg’s invitation to write about Roland “in a moment of weakness.”
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Though novellas allow a writer to be more expansive than short stories do, he had trouble keeping “The Little Sisters of Eluria” to a manageable length. “These days, everything about Roland and his friends wants to be not just long but sort of epic,” he wrote in the story’s introduction when it was reprinted in
Everything’s Eventual.

Another novella released in F&SF in early 1997, “Everything’s
Eventual,” would ultimately turn out to be a
Dark Tower
story, though no one realized it at the time. The venue should have been a clue. Almost every story King has published in that magazine has been related to the

Dark Tower.

His plans to complete the
Dark Tower
series were thwarted by reality. In 1997, he left Viking, his publisher since 1979, for Scribner. A three-book contract left little room in his schedule for the
Dark Tower,
though the series’ influence would continue to be felt in books like
Bag of Bones
and
Hearts in Atlantis.

King continued to get letters asking for more
Dark Tower,
including one from an elderly woman with cancer begging him to tell her the ending before she died. Another letter came from a fan on death row who promised to take the secret to the grave. As much as King may have wanted to respond to either letter, he couldn’t. He didn’t know yet where the story would take him. “To know, I have to write.”
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In 1997, one reviewer,
⁵⁵
marveling at the scope of the series and the length of time it took to reach the midpoint, implored readers to pray for the author’s continued good health. His advice was eerily prescient. King’s accident in 1999 almost spelled the end of the
Dark Tower.
During his
From a Buick 8
book tour, one fan told King that news of the accident made him think, “There goes the Tower, it’s tilting, it’s falling, ahhh, shit, he’ll
never
finish it now.”
⁵⁶