kate_nepveu | King's Dark Tower series: reader reluctance; reader betrayal

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King's Dark Tower series: reader reluctance; reader betrayal

I'm currently four books into Stephen King's seven book Dark Tower series, completed this September. I'd read these first four previously, but had been holding off on the most recent three, each released six months after the other. My re-read of the first four is complete, and it's prompted a couple of thoughts about reading.

So I'm oddly reluctant to pick up the first new-to-me book, The Wolves of the Calla—not that I've had the time to read since I finished the fourth at the start of this week, but the desire isn't there, either.

The reluctance may be odd, but it's explicable: bluntly, I'm scared the ending will suck. This series has been in progress for longer than I've been alive, and I've been reading it for a considerable portion of my own life. I don't remember when I read the first two novels, but I distinctly remember picking up the third, The Waste Lands from a stack of new trade paperbacks and reading the inside excerpt—that moment of astonished joy is probably what well-and-truly hooked me on the series. (I'll rot13 the revelation, even though it probably no longer counts as a spoiler: wnxr jnf onpx!)

That was January 1992. I was 14. The next volume, and the last I've read, was published in 1997. I don't like it as well—I think it's too long and slightly unsatisfying—which I think is a fairly reasonable apprisal of its merits. However, I am also aware that I am no longer 14 and no longer uncritically gulp down books: the unconditional love I have for the first three books, especially The Waste Lands, is a lot harder to come by these days. Because of that distance between my experience of the first three and now, it's hard not to feel that these later ones are, or will be, a let-down.

Beyond my changes as a reader, though, it's just nerve-wracking to contemplate the conclusion of a series that's been in progress for so very long (since 1970). It's like contemplating the last scenes of whatever series you still care about, that you half- (or more) disbelieve will actually be finished: The Door Into Starlight, Harry Potter, Wheel of Time, Song of Fire and Ice, the Continuing Time Series . . . (I really didn't think I'd ever see the Dark Tower series finished. Looking at volume seven, sitting on my bookshelf with its gorgeous Michael Whelan cover (Whelan also illustrated the first volume), gives me a faint sense of unreality.) I've been trying to avoid reviews of these most recent books, for fear of spoilers, but the few bits of information that I've picked up here and there make me nervous. Though, to be fair, I'd been nervous about the direction ever since it became clear that King had decided that all of his books, more or less, were connected to the Dark Tower universe—rarely a good idea, I think.

Work has been a bear, anyway—I scratched this out on notepaper during downtime at a CLE this morning—so perhaps when I have time to read, I'll want to. (And I've saved a re-read of my favorite King, The Eyes of the Dragon (tangentially related to the series), in case the ending does suck.)

But how about you? If you had the long, long-awaited conclusion of a sequence before you, one you'd given up hoping for—would you jump right in, or would you hold back, a little fearful of what you might find? Have you already experienced this situation, and with what?

A secondary reason for my reluctance to start the new-to-me volumes is what King's done to the first volume: he's rewritten and republished The Gunslinger, retconning it—or more than retconning, which re-explains or re-interprets existing canon, and doesn't literally re-write it. (Or am I interpreting "retcon" too narrowly? It's like what Lucas is doing with the Star Wars DVDs.) I haven't read the new edition, but rysmiel has, and the resulting comments confirm that I don't want to read it. (There's also a comprehensive list of significant changes by a fan site, which I have only skimmed because it has references to book five.)

On one hand, I can understand that tales grow in the telling, and sometimes (as Teresa Nielsen Hayden has said) "do three and a half somersaults in midair and come down wearing a different costume." And I imagine that many artists feel very strongly about being able to control the way their work is presented.

Yet as a reader, the word that keeps coming to mind is "betrayal," melodramatic as it sounds. I think it has something do with nature of fiction: once published, a fictional world and fictional characters live in the minds of the readers as well as on the page and in the mind of the author. In a way, they no longer belong solely to the author—so the author rewrites their history at his or her peril. A straight retcon is at least transparent; rewriting a book, such that the original is no longer in print, seems less . . . honest? Less desirable, at least, to remove the reader's option.

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I liked book five, though I thought it was the weakest of the series. I liked book six.

Book seven is sitting on my shelf, basking in the glory of being one of the few hardcovers I have actually dashed out to buy new, and I decided a week-and-a-half ago, after much vacillation, that I am not going to read it. I can't stand to have this series over. It's that simple. My best friend read me the last several pages over the phone, but the large portion in the middle will remain unread for now, simply so that I know that if I ever come to a time in my life when I absolutely need to read Dark Tower I haven't read, it will be sitting there.

Of course, I have no idea if this resolution will last out the year.

A note on book seven, by the way: it has, and King has been perfectly up-front about this, two endings-- the one he wrote, and the one the publisher wanted him to put on, which is separated from the rest of the book by a vitriolic little essay about why it shouldn't be there. Everyone I know who has stopped after the first ending has been delighted and happy and satisfied. Everyone I know who has read the second has furiously wished they hadn't. If you're the kind of person who reads things whether you decide to or not, I'd recommend cutting the second ending out and throwing it away before you can read it, because King never wanted it to see print and really would rather everyone ignore its existence.

As far as the revised edition of book one goes, I haven't been able to bring myself to read it, and have been buying up copies of the original in used bookstores to give to people I want to introduce to the series. Betrayed sounds exactly right to me.

I might not be able to fully articulate or justify this feeling of betrayal, but I feel it keenly all the same. As readers, writers, critics, what do you think? Am I overreacting, discounting the author's interest? Is this just not a question most readers have occasion to confront? If you were Stephen King, would you have done it?

This is an interesting question, and I haven't read the King Dark Tower series (I have an unfortunate allergy to Westerns, and it was called The Gunslinger. And yes, if it weren't for

andpuff and the manager at the store, I would have missed Firefly, which would have served my narrow little reading tastes right).

My first published novel will be reprinted in September of next year. I'm almost terrified of it, to be honest -- I haven't reread the book in years, and I'm certain there are things I wouldn't do now, and there are things I would do entirely differently now. I don't hate the story -- but I was younger and knew less, and because I wrote it, what I see first and foremost are the errors, the things that show cracks in the craftsmanship of the whole.

But... having said that? There are people who still write me to say they loved that book. Whatever flaws I perceive in it, or will, they don't see. They see the heart of it, the thing that drove me to write it -- but not the flaws that I'll see. I've had people tell me they were upset by the end of the fourth novel because they knew there wouldn't be any more of them, and they almost didn't want to finish it because of that.

And mine didn't have those long gaps between volumes.

Digression, digression, and too much Me. If I were to have to write in that universe, if I were to somehow return to it, and I were given the chance to change things, I think I would almost have to, to keep going. Because it wouldn't be a finished thing, to me, anymore; it wouldn't have that certain sense of completion. I would have re-opened the world, and the story, and while doing that? I think the story would have different layers and different meanings or subtext than it once had. Granted, King always intended to write more. But a lot of years passed between the first and the last, and I'm sure that has to be part of it.

Retcon, to my understanding, can also involve wholesale shifts into an alternate reality (or it felt that way in comics, which is where I first heard the term used widely). But your use is more in keeping with how it's generally done.

Oops. And to add: if I ever had thoughts of wholesale revision, if I ever had even the glimmering of a thought about it, this whole post would stop me dead in my tracks. Which is probably not a bad thing <g>.

Revision: If it's to fix stylistic flaws or whatever, fine. Some people might object, but only people that you could dismiss with a wave of the hand and an airy "Pshaw!" But if it's to put in plot points that you didn't think of back then, CHEATER CHEATER CHEATER.

Long-running series reaching a conclusion: The only thing that comes to mind is Brust's Khaavren novels; I still half-expect another one to come out some day...

The first two things I had that feeling about were Silver on the Tree and The Courts of Chaos... most recently I had it with the new Kirsteins.

There's this weird thing with pacing, with a series, because as a reader there are these huge gaps between volumes in which you re-read. And, for me, into that re-reading comes thinking about what happens next, and sometimes that becomes thinking what ought to be the shape of what happens next -- and that's bad, because if the author has thought of something else, then it will at least initially disappoint me. (This is, incidentally, why I don't go to fragments of novel readings at conventions. If I've heard chapter one, my brain will fill in the shape around it, and then when I get the real book, it won't fit that.)

The worst case of this ever was Sylvia Engdahl's Beyond the Tomorrow Mountains. In this case, it wasn't Engdahl's fault that I had a twenty-five year gap between reading the first book and the sequels -- the first one was published in Britain and the others weren't, I couldn't even ILL them. But because Heritage of the Star/This Star Shall Abide was Puffin, it had an author bio with names of other books, and the name of Beyond the Tomorrow Mountains was there, and, even better, (worse) I knew what that meant, because it's a line from something in the book. I re-read the first book a million times between the ages of eight and thirty-five, and my Beyond the Tomorrow Mountains was about the wonderful culmination and success of the project... no book could have lived up to that, and the real BtTM was a very strange experience.

Oh yeah, the revision thing?

I have feelings both ways, both that I own other people's books as a reader and my own as a writer. I think it just shows how important it is to get it right first time.

Chapter 32 of The King's Peace remains in italics in my plan file, meaning that I never actually got it right, but sometimes you have to let it go anyway. It's beyond getting right. I still don't know how to fix it, but if I did, I don't know that it would be fair to do so. Hmm. If I could fix it for the German edition, I would. But I don't know how I'd feel about fixing it for a putative new English version. I think -- I think there's been enough time, and I've changed enough and moved on enough that I'm not sure I'm the person who wrote it, and I'm not sure my messing with it would not in fact be a betrayal of that person and of it, rather than a shoring up. So it'll just have to stay as it is. OTOH, I made a few minor consistency tweaks to the mmpb to make nomenclature fit with Prize... but I was still writing that then.

I just discovered that in fact I believe that up to the paperback, it's fixable, the paperback is the immutable copy, because that's the one normal readers buy. Go figure.

Re: Dark Tower, I am kind of in the same position; have not read books 5-7. I'm not quite faced with the same problem you have, because I haven't had TIME to read them. When they come out in TPB versions which match the other ones, I will make an effort, though. I have been hooked on this series since the first sentence ("The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed."), which IIRC I also read sometime around age 14, and there's no way I cannot find out how it ends. FWIW, people with good taste have given books 5&6 good reviews.

Re: revision old works & reader betrayal, I on the one hand know what you're talking about, because I have felt that way. Actually George Lucas & Star Wars is a perfect comparison. On the one hand, I can understand a creator being dissatisfied with an early work, and wanting to "fix" it, but OTOH, works take on an existence independent of their creator, in the minds of the readers/viewers/etc, and it's not fair of an author/director/etc to just up and say that the original work isn't valid any more. Best, I think, would be for old version and new version to be available. Like, fine, revise The Gunslinger if you must, but don't try to make it as if the original never existed.

Re: possibility of suckage, it is always disappointing when a series goes from good to bad, but I try to avoid letting bad sequels retroactively ruin their predecessors for me. Sometimes this requires one to be proactive, and to trust the opinions of friends--I will never watch the third Matrix movie, for example.

whatever series you still care about, that you half- (or more) disbelieve will actually be finished: The Door Into Starlight, Harry Potter, Wheel of Time, Song of Fire and Ice, the Continuing Time Series . . .

Gee, you'd never guess which of these is at the top of my wish-list -- unless you read my user-name. I keep checking "Out of Ambit" for a tick mark next to The Door Into Starlight on her "What I've Worked on Today" list, but I haven't seen one in over a year. *sigh* I keep telling myself that it is because she is less than compulsive about updating the list, rather than that it has been languishing in a drawer un-looked-at all this time. And, interestingly enough, I was (almost) fourteen when I started on this series; perhaps there is something about that age that causes us to grab on tightly to things we will love for a lifetime.

Though, to be fair, I'd been nervous about the direction ever since it became clear that King had decided that all of his books, more or less, were connected to the Dark Tower universe -- rarely a good idea, I think.

I'm in agreement with you on this point. Despite the fact that To Sail Beyond the Sunset is one of my favorite Heinleins, it had felt to me for several books that he was really straining to get all of them to tie-together with his "Future History," when sometimes it might have been better to let them stand alone. In fact, given that The Number of the Beast was about there being " 6^6^6 " universes (or "ficti-verses"), one would think that there was more than enough room for each to have its own. Although for the most part it's fun to recognize characters from other beloved books, there were times when I thought, "Jeez, Bob, give it a rest."

If you had the long, long-awaited conclusion of a sequence before you, one you'd given up hoping for -- would you jump right in, or would you hold back, a little fearful of what you might find? Have you already experienced this situation, and with what?

For me the trouble wasn't that the "ending" sucked, it was with what came after. I'm definitely of the "jump right in" sort, and one series for which I waited a somewhat-long time was David Brin's "Uplift" series. Although I felt the newer trilogy wasn't quite as good as the original three books were, I was pretty happy with the ending, as an ending. Unfortunately, I then picked up Robert Silverberg's anthology Far Horizons, in which Brin's short story "Temptation" (set just after/concurrent with the ending of the series), came along to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. I'm still a little peeved by that one. After a thousand-plus pages of "our under-dog heroes, despite enormous odds, continue to struggle along on the side of truth and justice," tacking on fifty-pages of "here's why your petty little struggle is pointless" just felt like a slap in the face.

Another on the pig-pile of "read 1-4 but not more (yet)". I received #5 as a gift, and still haven't gotten around to it; but then, I hated #4, and since adulthood have found the first three increasingly flimsy and excessive. I think I just became immune to the Grandiose King Magic (tm).

As for revision -- not retconning; retconning literally means inserting new information to re-interpret old information in a way not originally intended --, in the original edition of The Hobbit, Gollum lets Bilbo go. It's only when the ring gained significance in Tolkien's mind that he went back and revised that chapter to make Gollum nastier and obstructionist. (I thinkk Bilbo's lying about the ring is also in the later editions, but not in the first.) Notably, the only edition you can find outside of rare book shops is the revised edition.

So, although I'm not always a fan of retro-tinkering, sometimes it can work and even be necessary to future endeavor. Sometimes, however (take note George Lucas), it's just egomania at work.

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