STEPHEN KING'S NEVER ENDING STORY

by Tyler Hall

As the former Webmaster of The Dark Tower DOT net, one thing I’ve learned to do well is gauge reader response to King’s work. The Dark Tower DOT net was, and still is, the largest Stephen King community on the web. With everything that King releases, my inbox is flooded with readers’ questions, comments, and predictions about the story. Their letters poke at its secrets, tug at its seams, and try to unravel the mystery that hums at the center of every King story. I’ve learned that fans have an insatiable urge to share their thoughts with other readers. A few times each week I’ll even get emails thanking me for all the books I’ve written. For these, I usually write back and politely explain that I am not Stephen King. (I’ve collected quite a lot of these emails. I print each one and keep them in a folder in the trunk of my car. They’ll make a good book one day.) Crazy emails aside, most of the feedback I see is positive, and that shouldn’t be surprising – this is a Stephen King website after all. Most people wouldn’t be in the discussion if they weren’t fans to begin with. Still, the negative comments do appear, and, when they do, they come in waves.

The first negative swing in King’s popularity that I witnessed came in 2002 with the release of From a Buick 8. (I’m sure there were others prior to this, but I didn’t begin keeping track until 1998.) It’s not that readers didn’t like the story – most of them did. It’s that they didn’t know what to make of it. I attribute this reaction to bad timing on the part of King and his publisher. Buick 8 was released amidst a flurry of revival in the Dark Tower series. The fourth volume of the series, Wizard and Glass, had been published in 1997. That had been five years ago, and fans were anxiously awaiting their chance to step back out on the trail with Roland and his ka-tet.

In the past, King had typically separated each Tower book by five years. Fans came to expect and accept this. Good things come to those who wait – or so the saying says. However, the fifth volume was overdue. Five years had passed and there was still no sign from King that it would be on store shelves anytime soon. To make matters worse, King had stirred up his Dark Tower fan-base a year earlier when he and Peter Straub co-authored Black House. For every question about the Tower that the novel answered, it left just as many unanswered. Also, fans were still reeling from King’s brush with death in 1999. When the evening news reported that King had been struck and critically injured by a speeding van near his home, the first thing many readers thought of was “Oh no! Now we’ll never find out what happens to Roland!” It was only after that thought had already crossed their minds that they began to actually worry about King. How do I know this? I’m sorry to say that I was one of the many to think of Roland’s well being before King’s. This just goes to show the enormous hold that Roland and Mid-World have over King’s readers. The Tower series was at the front of their minds, and when King released From a Buick 8 with virtually no Tower connections in it, fans wanted more. They felt they deserved more, and the emails and message boards showed this.

Notice I’m using the word “fan” to refer to King’s readers. It’s a very appropriate word – a shortened form of “fanatic.” When an enormously popular writer like King writes a series of four books – and promises three more – fans mistakenly begin to believe that they have a bit of ownership in the story. They see themselves as stockholders in a company. They buy the books, they read the story, and they feel that King has a duty to not only finish the tale, but to finish it the way they want it done. King wrote about this very situation – albeit taken to the extreme – in Misery. If you’ve read the book, or been following along with what I’ve said, then it should be no surprise to learn that the biggest drop in King’s popularity – one that dwarfed the dip caused by Buick 8 – came when fans finished the last Dark Tower book and found that it didn’t end the way they wanted it to. What they don’t realize though, is that King never once had a say in the ending. It wasn’t up to him. The Dark Tower’s never-ending ending is their own fault. For all the complaining, moaning, and disappointment surrounding what Roland found at the top of the Tower – the fans caused it, not King.

To understand why the series ended the way it did, we need to look back at the moment when Roland’s fate was sealed. We need to step back and revisit Pere Callahan sitting among the Manni at the end of Wolves of the Calla. Here is a man worn down and tired. We first met him in a little town in Maine called Salem’s Lot where he tested his faith against the devil – and lost. It was over twenty years before we would meet him again. In that intervening period he had a lifetime’s worth of adventure, heartache, grief, and even joy. He watched his best friend wither away and die, traveled along the lost highways of America, and dedicated his life to destroying the vampires that nearly destroyed him. He tells these stories to Roland and his ka-tet, and we listen as their palaver winds its way through the night. We stand and watch as he joins the gunslingers, battles the wolves, and redeems himself. But look at him now. The battle is over, blood has been shed, and Pere Callahan sits, cross-legged, staring at a book in which he is a character. Pere Callahan, a man once known long ago as Donny, has just learned that he doesn’t exist. He is a fiction borne from another man’s imagination.

In the afterword of The Dark Tower, King describes the word I’m about to use as a “smarmy academic term.” He hates it - especially “the pretentiousness of it” (843). That word is metafiction, and I’m going to risk King’s wrath and go on using it because it works so well to describe the situation Callahan finds himself in. Webster’s Dictionary defines the term as “fiction that deals, often playfully and self-referentially, with the writing of fiction or its conventions.” Playfulness aside, it’s an apt description. Callahan’s realization is a key turning point for the story. It clues Roland in to the secret that has been eluding him for most of book five. He realizes that not only is Callahan fictional, but they all are. He understands that to succeed in his quest for the Tower, he’ll have to meet his maker – Stephen King. This meeting, between storyteller and character, occurs in the sixth volume, Song of Susannah, and entrenches the series firmly into the realm of metafiction. But it doesn’t stop there. The metafiction continues into the seventh book where Roland and Jake encounter King again. The self-referential moments of these last three books creates a sharp separation between them and the first four. When Callahan sees his name among the characters of ‘Salems Lot, it becomes clear that the last three volumes are one long finale – separate from the rest of the series. Not only were they written back to back, but the story of each picks up within hours of where the previous left off. This is a huge change from how books one through four operated. The gap between them varied from a few hours, to a few months, to a hundred years.

When King sat down to start work on the fifth book and begin his final push to finish Roland’s tale, perhaps the separation from the previous books allowed him to take the series in a different direction and incorporate the metafictional plot elements that had been brewing inside of him. As strange a twist as his appearance into the books might seem, he is hardly the first author to experiment with metafiction. The postmodernists did it and so did Cervantes (Don Quixote), Chaucer (Canterbury Tales), and even John Fowlles (The French Lieutenant’s Woman). However, I believe that King takes this style a bit further than anyone else. He not only includes himself in the fiction but also implies that without the fiction he wouldn’t exist at all.

Roland exists because King wrote a story in which Roland is a character. If King hadn’t ever written The Dark Tower series, then Roland would not exist. Like any character, their life is dependent upon the author’s pen. The trick of the Tower series is that the converse is true also. King’s life is dependent upon Roland. If King did not write Roland’s story, then King would have died in 1999 when struck by Bryan Smith’s van. Roland and Jake save King’s life and, in turn, allow King to finish writing their story. Neither author nor character could exist without the other. Who, then, is the fiction? Roland? King? Both? Neither? The line between what’s real and what’s only a story becomes dangerously blurred. The dedication to book seven complicates things even more. King writes

 

          He who speaks without an attentive ear is mute.

          Therefore, Constant Reader, this final book in the Dark Tower cycle is dedicated too you.

 

What King says is that, by itself, the act of writing is not enough to bring a story to life. In order for the tale to come alive, for its magic to persist, there must be a reader as well. This relationship between reader and writer is what fuels the story’s never-ending magic. Every time someone sits down with The Gunslinger and reads its famous opening line, Roland steps out on his quest once again. By the time they reach the seventh book and finish the series, another reader has begun the quest anew. Roland has no choice but to repeat his journey. And each time he loops, the story is altered slightly. Everyone reads and interprets King’s writing differently. Some will see Roland as a villain, while others may regard him as a flawed hero. It’s these differences in opinion that cause his quest to vary each time. However, they’ll never be large enough to completely change the ending. Because as long as there are fans anxiously awaiting the next page of his journey, Roland will always have a Dark Tower to chase.