Read: The Gunslinger (revised)–Introduction; Foreword
The new Introduction to this revised version of Book One is harmless enough. I’m glad he decided to finish the series and sorry it took a near-fatal car accident to make it happen. I’m glad he was once young dumb and full of the desire to mash up The Lord of the Rings and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
The Foreword is where things get fishy. Here King explains why he’s revising The Gunslinger, and now it sounds worse to me than just a cheat–it sounds like a bad idea. He’s not revising this like he did The Stand, to add in material that was cut for logistical reasons. As I already knew, he’s revising it to bring it in line with the later volumes. In cases like the one he cites, where the name “Farson” is changed from referring to a town to referring to a guy, I’m fine with that. Like I’ve said before, even Tolkien had to rewrite the Ring chapters from The Hobbit. But if he’s adding 35 pages of story, he’s doing a lot more than that–he’s shoe-horning things in that weren’t there at all before, in erroneous form or otherwise. It’s already apparent that there’s now going to be a bunch of numerological stuff regarding the number 19, which irritates me because by this point he’d written and released four books, more than half the series, without so much as a peep about it. I’ve had certain information revealed to me regarding changes King makes in this revision to the way Roland’s quest progresses, which also seems like a pretty major overhaul. And surely (ha, I say this like I haven’t already flipped to the end to see what’s going on) there will be significant alterations to the man in black’s words and actions, to make his triune nature as Flagg/Walter/Marten more apparent when it wasn’t even conceived of as such when the book was first written. Put it all together and it feels like a cheat; at the very least it totally shifts the ground beneath long-time readers’ feet as they try to get a handle on what’s going on in the series.
But worst of all, he’s not just revising for information; he’s revising for style! He can explain it however he wants, but apparently he’s made the book’s prose sound more like something he’d write today. I’m sure even bigger King fans than myself would agree that’s not necessarily a good thing, especially when that original style, so different from anything else King had ever written, was what made the first version of The Gunslinger such a stand-out.
Sigh. Time to take my medicine, I guess.