All Hail the King
Yes, another fanboy gushing about Stephen King. Do something.
My parents pretty much forbade me from reading Stephen King when I was young. I was a sensitive kid, so I don't think it was because of the evil material, so much as they were afraid it would give me nightmares. And they probably weren't wrong. But I would see the kids in junior high carrying around copies of “Cujo,” “Salems Lot,” and “The Stand,” and wonder what it was all about. It seemed like a BIG DEAL to be able to read those books. And I feared I was destined to never be part of The Big Deal.
BUT. There was a loophole that my parents never considered.
My folks were both primary school teachers. As such, they believed that teachers should get the last word when it came to all things education. If a teacher said I should read a book they disagreed with, they deferred to the teacher. (I know, weird, right? Parents are supposed to fuss and fume and get all butt-hurt that teachers are grooming their kids to love Satan and fentanyl and cough syrup, and have all books that reek of controversy yanked from the shelves of the school library, so our precious minds might never be tarnished by such filth. My parents were good eggs.)
That loophole got exercised when I arrived in my Freshman English class at the tender age of fourteen. Why they were holding out on Stephen King at that age, I'm not sure, I'd already been watching people get wholesale slaughtered in splatter movies, so how King was going to ruin my sleep sort of escapes me. But back then, he had a global reputation as the devil's scribe, and it was known that to let your children read him was to court disaster, so I guess they were just being overprotective.
Anyway, I get to this English class, and the teacher notifies us that we're going to be doing four mandatory book reports that year. We could choose any author on the list she passed out, but it had to come from that list.
Well, guess who was on that list?
My mom was struck dumb by this syllabus. I could see her wanting to argue it. But the teacher was the teacher, so she got the last word. I would finally be allowed to read a Stephen King book, and for school, no less!
HOWEVER.
I was told in no uncertain terms to abide by the rules, and my mom assumed that the teacher would want us to choose four different authors for those four different book reports.
She assumed… incorrectly.
My teacher was quite the King fan, so I was allowed to read all of his books my heart desired. And indeed, my heart desired quite a bit. Suffice to say I read far more than the required four that year. Which, in the grand scheme of things, I think my parents ended up being happier with. As they said of my comic book reading, I wish you didn't read so damn many of them, but as long as you're reading something...
I'm not sure how I landed on "Firestarter" as my first King book, but by coincidence, it was practically a novelistic version of the comic books I so loved, about a little girl with pyrokinesis. So my entrance into the world of King was practically seamless. And from the first words, I was hooked.
I'm sure I don't need to tell anybody why King's writing is awesome. There's a billion reasons, and us Gen Xers know them all. But the thing that maybe grabbed me and held me the firmest, was that, he wrote like people talked. Not just dialogue. Most great works I'd read to that point, there was a sort of separation between author and character, and the author's voice tended to be more formal. There was the occasional first person narrative to break that up, or your Mark Twains and the like, but most writers tended to use that classical style, of an author smarter or more formal than their characters.
King seemed to be telling the story in his own voice. He wasn't formal, and he certainly wasn't detached. It was like your best friend telling you this story, "man, didja see how that dude's head exploded, holy SHIT that was fucking amazing!" And got damn, he was funny. He cursed like a sailor on shore leave, he would describe things in the nastiest details he could think of, and his dialogue sparkled. It sounded like people I knew. And most people I knew were filthy.
I blew through most of his books in fairly short order. By my senior year, I was almost caught up. There were a couple of notable holes (hello, “Tommyknockers!”), but I assumed I knew most of what King had to offer.
I assumed… incorrectly.
My senior year, I was chosen to attend the prestigious Boys State Arizona, held at ASU, the local university. High school boys from acrost the state would be housed in the dorms, and taught the inner workings of politics on a state and federal level in a week-long immersive experience.
I don't remember a got-damned thing about what I learned about politics. I think I was a State Representative. Maybe.
I vividly remember a few of the guys I met there. Not their names, those are sadly lost to me forever. But I still remember them. There was the longhair dude who played the guitar endlessly, and taught us "Cat’s in the Cradle" and "American Pie," which we sang over and over. And over.
And there was the guy that introduced me to The Dark Tower.
It was an afternoon break, we were hanging in somebody's dorm room, while Guitar Guy played "American Pie" for the third time that afternoon. And this other guy, Mr. Blonde I'll call him, cuz that's all I remember about him physically, he says to us, he says, "Hey, you guys ever read ‘the Dark Tower?’"
No, says we, what's that?
"Oh, man," he says, "It's a Stephen King book, it's fuckin' awesome. So, there's actually two books, right, the first one, it's called 'The Gunslinger,' and it's about this guy, and it's like the Old West, except it's maybe in the future, right, like ‘Mad Max?’ Like, the whole world's blown up, and this guy, the Gunslinger, he goes from town to town, he's chasing this guy called the Man in Black, and if he catches him, you don't know what the fuck he's gonna do to him, and he goes to this town, and the Man in Black has cursed the whole town, and like, they come after him like 'Night of the Living Dead' or something, and he blows the whole town away, man, it's fuckin' bitchin'! And then, in the second book, like, he's spent the whole first book like blowing people away two-handed right, with his guns, but then, right in the beginning of the second book, he gets the fingers on one of his hands hacked off, so he can't shoot with that hand anymore! So like, you got the baddest-ass gunslinger in the whole world, and he can't shoot with his good hand! Like, what does he do now?! It's fucking awesome, man."
I was wide-eyed, riveted, probably with my mouth open the whole time. These sounded like the best books ever.
And, to my surprise, they kinda were.
Stephen King's "The Dark Tower" is my favorite book series. It is not necessarily the best series ever written, but it is most certainly my favorite. Part of that is the nostalgia it brings out in me, reading it at the exact right age for it to have maximum impact. But it's a genuinely great, epic story. That description that Mr. Blonde gave in that dorm room all those years ago? That was like the best sales pitch for a book ever, and I was delighted to discover that there was lots more to it. Fantasy, adventure, the Old West, a future dystopia, the modern day, time travel, monsters, demons, sex, death, rebirth, the multiverse, nasty villains, and worse heroes.
It was my introduction to the anti-hero, Roland Deschain.
(I would learn years later that it was actually my introduction to Clint Eastwood's “Man With No Name” from Sergio Leone's movies, as that's who Stephen King had been inspired by. But that's more than okay, I also have been likewise inspired by those movies once I latched onto them, as you can probably tell from my stories.)
Roland is a gunslinger, which is sorta like a knight, in a world that, as the characters say again and again, has moved on. There are hints that the Roland's world may be the future of our own, an apocalyptic wasteland living in the bones of our demolished society. Roland is on a quest to reach the Dark Tower, the lynchpin of all space, time and reality. The Tower is in trouble, we're told, but we don't know how, and we don't know what happens if the Tower falls. Roland is determined to save the Tower, by any means necessary, and he leaves a lot of bodies in his wake, both friend and foe. In fact, Roland has a bad habit of getting everyone he ever meets killed. And he's decided he doesn't really care. All he cares about is reaching the Tower, and getting inside to see what's there. It's his obsession, and there's a lot of clues along the way that maybe him reaching the Tower isn't the best idea. He's a hollow man when we meet him, and one of the biggest questions is, is it worth saving the Tower, when it causes so much suffering along the way?
Needless to say, I was shocked that there was a book, nay, a series Stephen King wrote, that I had never heard of. He'd been more coy about the Dark Tower in those days, as it was one of those things like Richard Bachman, a thing he was trying to cultivate separate from his reputation as "The Master of Horror." But he was so popular in those days, the readers discovered every tiny thing he'd ever done, and so this fantasy series that had started as a limited print run from a small press became part of the whole Stephen King... thing. At that point, there were two books in the series, "The Gunslinger" and "The Drawing of the Three." I was able to track both of them down and devour them, and I loved them. All the stuff I loved about King was in these books, with more added on top, a whole mythology he was building, a world of magic and mania. In the postscript to the second book, he spoke of at least two more books to come in the series, with possibly more.
It ended up being eight books. And it took awhile getting there.
I was a Senior in high school when I discovered the Dark Tower. I think I was a Junior in college when the third book finally hit paperback and was available to me. I'd been living in Los Angeles for a few years when the fourth one came down the pike. At the rate he was putting them out, I was afraid he'd die before he finished (and he famously almost did). It might be what fans of "A Song of Ice and Fire" feel like, waiting for George R. R. Martin to finish those books.
But fortunately for us all, he finished the original seven books in a three-book burst in 2003 and 2004. (Which, I just noticed, is now almost twenty years gone by. Oy.) He added another book to the series, a delightful surprise one-off, in 2012. And he sometimes mumbles about one last book, which I really hope he gets around to, but I'm assuming he won't, because the man just seems to have too many ideas to get to in one lifetime.
I've read and re-read and re-re-read and listened to the Dark Tower books many times. My favorite in the series is the fourth one, smack in the middle, "Wizard and Glass." I gather it's a favorite of many people, the way it's talked about, so I'm hardly alone. That book is an extended flashback to Roland's teenage years, his first big adventure on his own, and his first heartbreak. There had been brief flashbacks in earlier books, sort of what the show "Lost" ended up doing much later on, contrasting the Roland of the past, a more hopeful and naive boy, with the Roland of the present, a dark brooding son of a bitch. If I'm being honest with myself and you, it may actually be my favorite book of all time. Again, probably not the best book I've ever read, but my favorite, and hopefully that difference seems clear. Like, "To Kill a Mockingbird" was my favorite before King came along, and I'd easily say it's a better book. But "Wizard and Glass" is my favorite. It's the one when somebody asks me my desert island books, I always feel compelled to include.
And why, when all is said and done, do I love King so much? I mean, let's face it, some of his books are these perfect little jewels, great stories, great characters, great endings. But others are these giant bricks with hundreds of pages too many, and some with endings that just don't hit the mark. And yet, there's something in every single one of them that I love and/or admire, and I think it boils down to his voice. That wide-eyed mania he seems to write with, “wasn’t that cool?!” And I can’t help but be swept along with it.
And he's really, really good at capturing people's voices. Some of his main characters end up sounding eerily similar to one another (being that they're all writers), but when you've written more than a bazillion pages of stories, I would assume that's an occupational hazard.
But more than his characters, there's one giant thing King excels at, that very few other authors capture as well. It's the reason, I think, that most of his best books feature at least one character under the age of ten. And that one major thing is: he remembers what it was like to be a kid, and how, even in the best of homes, with the sweetest of parents, how absolutely fucking terrifying the world can be. He's one of the few authors who understands that many kids live life in a low-grade buzz of anxiety at all times. And if those kids are in abusive homes, or being bullied, or haunted by a night creature, Jesus, there's almost nothing scarier. The monsters are bad news, but sometimes, fighting them is better than going home and facing alcoholic parents.
I have plenty more I could (and maybe will) say about King, but I think I’ve gushed enough for one day. If you’ve never cracked a Stephen King book before, and you’re looking to, man, I envy you your choices. If you want a recommendation, I’d say you could actually start at the beginning with “Carrie.” It’s a slim book, a fast read, and it has all the stuff that makes King’s engine rev. I’d also recommend sticking with the first few books he wrote before you go deep-diving. Some of his latter-day books are magnificent, but the earlier books just, I don’t know, go. They’ve got a crazy energy to them, and his editors were still making him keep his page count lower.
And, y’know, cocaine’s a helluva drug.
But really, you can’t go wrong, and he’s got fifty-plus books to choose from, so go buck wild man. It’s fuckin’ bitchin’.
(NOTE: If you enjoyed my short story “Four Walls,” and would like to hear it read by Craig Sechler, click below to listen to a special bonus podcast!)
© 2024
Firestarter was me first one as well.