Revisiting Stephen King's Fantastique Literature

I was down with a terrible headache and toothache today. Couldn't even go for my Evidence lecture in the afternoon. Was bed-ridden and struggling with the pains in my head. The only thing I had for company was Stephen King's and Peter Straub's "The Talisman" novel. I drifted in and out of sleep. Could only read in small amounts in between my waking and sleeping. But I enjoyed what I read very much. King and Straub crafted a deft fantasy horror adventure mixing Twain, Tolkien, Narnia, blues music, hallucinatory drugs and Lewis Carroll. I remember seeing the cover to the paperback in 1984 (I was only 8 years old at the time) in a bookshop next to a swimming pool and thought that it must be the scariest novel ever written. Little did I know that King is more of a fantasist than a horror novelist. More accurately, King's novel is a celebration of the fantastique in literature.

Speaking of Stephen King, I remember writing a review of the first volume of his "The Dark Tower" novels some years back. I wrote the review in the computer lab at the international school that I was teaching in. My students were busy doing research for their class project and so they left me alone to my own devices. I'm reposting the review below:

For some unfathomable reasons, I decided to pick up Stephen King’s “The Dark Tower” series of novels. Now, I’d never been a fan of King’s writings. Always found him a tad verbose and wordy. Maybe that’s why I was never able to finish any of King’s books in the past. Anyway, I picked up the first volume of “The Dark Tower” – “The Gunslinger” over the weekend and finished it late last night. Firstly, the book actually reads like a prolonged prelude to the real story that, I was told, began only with the second book, “The Drawing Of The Three“. As a prelude, it worked fine but as a standalone novel, it is probably the most exasperating quick-read ever. Stephen King’s verbosity is at its very worst here, with words falling over each other all the time. When brevity is called, he gives us so many adverbs that you get the feeling that the price of adverbs are going up the next day! When you are screaming for clearer descriptions of scene, he gives us very economical descriptions that the reader is often left scratching his head and wondering what just happened! The version that I read is an edited one. Apparently King rewrote a lot of it - removing thousands of adverbs and adding 900+ more words to flesh out the background of Roland Deschain, the Gunslinger.

For the life of me, the whole book is a muddled mess. Don’t be expecting a coherent story here. Most of the action happens in flashbacks. King doesn’t “tell” a story so much as he does blasting imageries into your head hoping that those imageries will form some coherent “experience”. So we get Roland shooting down everyone in the town named Tull – including his one-time lover, Allie. Then we get Roland with Brown, followed by Roland with Jake (a dead boy from modern New York City). We also get some flashbacks showing Roland’s “coming-of-age” under the tutelage (battering, more accurately) of Cort and finally Roland’s meeting with the mysterious man in black that he was pursuing throughout. The book ends with the man in black (revealed to be Marten and Walter O’Dim, the man who had an affair with Roland’s mum) reading some Tarot cards and talking about quantum mechanics (don’t ask) with Roland.

I cannot fault the man for his ambition to write the American “The Lord of the Rings“. Some of his ideas are competent enough – the Dark Tower as the nexus of all realities holding the multiverse together (something that comic fans like me are familiar with after numerous readings of “Infinite Crisis”, etc.) The problem is with King’s writing style. Having said that, die-hard fans will probably laugh at my inability to comprehend King’s verbose prose (with his artificial Wild-West dialogues, etc.) My problem is that there’s nothing in the novel for you to “hang” anything on. Nothing that really hooks into your heart and tears out a piece of it. The characters are either too vague (deliberately mysterious, I should add) or too underdeveloped for you to care about – e.g. does anyone care for the deaths of all the inhabitants of Tull? It felt like watching someone play a shoot-em-up arcade game! Furthermore, King seems more interested in setting up parallelism/contrasts than developing real relationships between the characters. The man in black and Cort are simply filling in the role of “teacher/guide” archetypes in the novel – or in Roland’s quest. Roland’s love for the boy Jake that he’s destined to sacrifice comes off as flimsy and artificial. That’s because King was using all of his powers to set up a parallel with the Abraham-Isaac on Mount Moriah scene that when all is said and done, nobody really cares about whether Roland sacrifices Jake or not! Similarly, the whole backstory with Roland’s mother’s infidelity is so forced that nobody cares for it at all. There is no indication that Roland’s parents were ever passionately in love or anything. The backstory was so matter-of-fact that you don’t even know why Roland felt anything at all!

To be fair, I probably should reserve my judgment for the book only after I’m done with the entire series. But for the life of me, I’m really not sure that I want to continue with the 2nd book after this one. I was told that the Peter David graphic novels that tell the origin story of Roland are very, very good. I have no doubt about that actually. Peter David can do no wrong (especially when teamed up with an artist like Jae Lee). Maybe if Peter David had written the seven novels instead of King (but using King’s ideas), the thing would’ve worked. What we have from King is like a songwriter who just came up with the most beautiful song ever but he somehow made the mistake of singing it himself rather than get a competent singer to deliver it.