The Blogslinger: Blogging The Dark Tower, October 2007–Day 23

Read: Wizard and Glass–the rest of “Come, Reap”; “All God’s Chillun Got Shoes”; Afterword

Raced through the rest of the book yesterday and already the details are fading into the recesses of memory. I sure did enjoy it, though. When it finally came, the gunslingers’ massacre of Jonas, Latigo, their men and the traitorous townies was every bit as bloody, relentless, shrewd, and cathartic as I’d hoped. The fun thing about Roland and his pals–and to his credit King only hits this on the nose very rarely, preferring to leave it to the reader to realize–is that they’re pretty fucking horrifying. Between the three of them they killed upwards of 200 people, right? And none of them are older than high-school sophomores, if that. In another world they could be Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.

Well, that’s probably an exaggeration. With the exception of Roland, who’s repeatedly characterized as tinged with madness, there’s no evidence that these kids would have ever gone bad, or at least “gone bad on their own” if you’re not feeling charitable toward their gunslinger training. It was that training and the accumulated weight of “a hundred generations of gunslinger blood” that brought out the killers in them. It occurs to me that one of the under-reported themes in King’s work is the mettle of children–their ability to be pretty hardcore if called upon. In the Dark Tower alone you’ve seen this so far in Roland, Alain, Cuthbert, Susan, Sheemie, and Jake. Hand in hand with this is his belief that children can be cruel, a theme that echoes everywhere from the group of Little Coffin Hunters who kill and mutilate the stray dogs of Hambry to “The Children of the Corn” (a story referenced in Wizard and Glass–thematically in the blood-madness of the townsfolk on Reaping Day and explicitly in the afterword). I guess if you acknowledge the latter trait, which anyone who’s been a kid probably would, you have to give some credit to the former.

Post-flashback the book took some wild twists and turns. I’m surprised at how little I was jarred by the sudden reliance on The Wizard of Oz–it’s such a random direction to go in after hundreds of pages of a junior-varsity Fistful of Dollars on supernatural steroids, and yet it worked. Perhaps because it centered on Flagg, whose demented, pop-culture-riffing sense of humor would lend itself quite naturally to trying to scare his enemies with the Wicked Witch and the flying monkeys and the twister and the Great and Terrible Oz and all that. Or maybe it’s just that the series itself lurches so dramatically from one style to another between books, and sometimes within books, that one more crazy jump is barely noticeable. Start on an evil supercomputer monorail, wander through The Stand in an alternate universe, flash back to the Wild Wild West for three quarters of the book, return to the present in the Emerald City, then have one last flashback-slash-Hamlet-riff before calling it a day? Sure, why not?

The Flagg situation, of course, is now more confusing than ever. So he’s not just Walter–he’s also Marten? I guess he’s also a balls-out fantastic shapeshifter or master of disguise, because Roland had contact with all three incarnations of this character and never made the connection. Still hasn’t, in fact, at least as far as King lets us know–he never says “Flagg, Marten, Walter–they’re all one and the same” or anything like that. (I wouldn’t be surprised to be informed of this in the Argument for the next book, though.) All my questions about yesterday’s “Flagg = Walter” revelation go double for “Flagg = Marten.”

Finally, we’ve got another Afterword, and with it we get another batch of information yet to be revealed by the story itself. Father Callahan from ‘Salem’s Lot is apparently going to show up? Or did he already show up and I just didn’t recognize him? And the main character from Insomnia, which I haven’t read, is also going to put in an appearance? Or was King saying that Dark Tower elements showed up in Insomnia rather than the other way around?

Maybe I’ll get some answers to these meta-questions in the revised edition of The Gunslinger, which I’ll be tackling next. As best I can tell–and I’ve gotten conflicting information from literally everyone who’s coached me on this–Book One received its revisions (the only book of the series to get anything other than a new introduction) between the releases of Book Four and Book Five, in preparation for that final stretch. My guess is that it’ll be a lot more Flaggish, and have some more of the now-familiar details about the political situation in In-World and Mid-World thrown in. And there will probably be a bunch of groundwork laid for the final three novels in ways I won’t pick up on yet, other than by noticing that they’re different from the original version. At any rate I’m looking forward to returning to the purest articulation of the Gunslinger and his world and seeing if it feels any different knowing what I now know.