My wife is emetophobic, which means she’s afraid of vomit. In order to go to the movies she needs to get a reliable “vomit-check” first to make sure she’s in the clear. There are a few trusted friends we use as sources–paradoxically, they tend to be the people who find vomiting hilarious, which means they’ll remember it if they see it–but there’s also a great website called Kids in Mind that non-judgmentally lists any questionable content (down to its most minute, like someone sneezing) so that parents can judge whether a movie’s appropriate for their kids. They’ll list vomit as part of their “violence/gore” subcategory, but of course they list everything else. So I’m sitting here as Amy goes through the listing for The Mist to see if she can see it, and while there’s apparently no vomiting in it she just keeps going “Eeeewwwww…eeeewwwwwww…eeeeeewwwwwwwww…OH MY GOD EEEEEEEEEWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!!!!!”

Needless to say, I’m pretty psyched to see this movie now.

Read: The Dark Tower–“The Last Palaver (Sheemie’s Dream)”

The thing in the world that makes me the saddest is roadkill. Roadkill makes me so, so sad. This is because when an animal is hit by a car on its way someplace else, that animal isn’t dying for a reason–not even for a bad reason, like avarice or ignorance or cruelty. That animal dies for no reason. Its death is literally pointless.

With Sheemie’s beautiful nightmare King has finally sold me on the threat to the Dark Tower, and why maybe neither Flagg/Walter’s death nor the lameness of the Crimson King and Mordred as villains ultimately won’t hurt the sense of urgency to stop the Tower’s destruction that much. Different people may have their own reasons for helping the destruction of the Beams and the Tower along–the Crimson King and Blaine and Jack Mort because they’re crazy, Mordred to spite Roland, Walter/Marten/Flagg to try and sneak in and take over at the last minute, Pimli and Finli because they’re hard workers and get satisfaction from that, the Breakers because they need to feel appreciated and can’t face the truth of the circumstances behind why they’re appreciated, the low men out of religious fundamentalism, the vampires because they like killing things and eating them, Rhea for revenge and cruelty’s sake, Balazar’s mafia and the Big Coffin Hunters because it pays well, Ben Slightman Sr. because he wants to protect his kid and maybe get something out of it himself, Andy the Robot and the Wolves because they’re programmed to, John Farson and his followers because they hate the prevailing order that props the Tower up–but what it all adds up to is nothing, no reason. The Beams are being broken, the Tower is being knocked down, reality is being destroyed, joy and beauty are being torn apart and replaced by the sad, meaningless entropy of the first few books which itself will then be replaced by nothing at all, all ultimately for no reason at all, other than that’s what happens to good things in this world.

That dream is one of the best things King’s ever written.

“It was unprecedented, absolutely amazing. The sea was red with these jellyfish and there was nothing we could do about it, absolutely nothing.”

–John Russell, managing director, Northern Salmon Co. Ltd., “Billions of jellyfish wipe out N. Irish salmon farm,” AP, CNN.com

Read: The Dark Tower–“Tracks on the Path”

This brief interlude with Roland and Jake hinges on two of the characters’ most endearing traits: Roland’s near-inability to be caught by surprise, as it turns out he’s known Mordred has been tracking them; and the sad love between Roland and Jake. The latter was the emotional heart of the series’ first and best book, and while it’s depressing that the prose here is not that volume’s equal, it’s at least comforting to see some weight given to the deepest, darkest, most complex relationship the main characters have established. As I’ve said before, if these books starred only Roland and Jake (and Oy), they’d be better.

There’s a cameo by the Wu-Tang Clan’s Ghostface Killah, who goes by the nicknames Tony Starks and Iron Man and has sampled the old IM cartoon heavily, and is basically the exact kind of smooth, rich, talented badass Iron Man should be. Someone on this movie gets it!

Bonus points to Ghostface for referring to himself in the third person as “the kid” throughout the interview.

(Via Pitchfork.)

Read: The Dark Tower–“The Shining Wire”; “The Door Into Thunderclap”; “Steek-Tete”; “The Master of Blue Heaven”

So that’s it? He’s dogged the forces of good through The Stand, Eyes of the Dragon, and six and a half volumes of The Dark Tower, and how does Randall Flagg–the villain formerly known as Walter–go out? Like a punk. Like a sucker. Popping up again only to be hoodwinked and eaten by stupid spider-baby Mordred, a character he’s at least an order of magnitude more interesting and more frightening and more established and funnier and cooler than. Boo! Hiss!

To make matters worse, this account of Flagg’s demise futher mucks up King’s already shaky (that’s an understatement) continuity. One of the few clarifying revisions King made to The Gunslinger was to spell out that Walter/Marten/Flagg wasn’t a servant to John Farson, Walter/Marten/Flagg is John Farson. So what does King do just a couple years after writing that? Ignore it and say Walter/Marten/Flagg and John Farson were indeed two separate people. Why? Your guess is as good as mine. Ditto the new assertion that Walter/Marten/Flagg was once a full-fledged human being and is approximately 1500 years old, rather than the indescribably ancient demon he’s tagged as in The Stand, a book superior to this series in every way including positing an interesting origin for Randall Flagg.

The thing that really rankles here is that we King readers have been following Randall Flagg for just as long as we’ve been following Roland Deschain, and through better books for that matter. To punk him out like this just plain feels like a rip-off, and once again displays a shocking lack of understanding of what is interesting about these books. Having your new big bad kill the former big bad is the oldest trick in the book writers have for making the new villain look dangerous, but that’s not what happens here. Here, you just wish there was no new big bad, because the original one was just fine, especially after King informs you that no matter who he’s nominally working for, Flagg is always looking out for number one. That’s the kind of villainy I can get behind!

So. Now the guy who teleported out of Las Vegas in time to avoid a nuclear bomb blast has been eaten alive by a psychic spider, and we’re left with–what, exactly, as an antagonist? Nothing all that frightening, to be honest. The Crimson King is by all accounts crazy, and no more an “antagonist” for Roland than late-seasons Uncle Junior was for Tony Soprano. His minions, as represented by Pimli Prentiss and Finli o’ Tego, the head honchos at the Blue Heaven telepath gulag, are basically working stiffs; I know this is King’s attempt to say “and the Nazis were just regular people too,” but I don’t care, it’s still an incredibly uncompelling set-up for the books’ big climax. I guess Mordred is kind of a villain in the classic sense, but not really–he’s a grumpy kid who hates his dad and likes to eat. I want Randall Flagg’s gleeful, giggling nihilism and swagger.

Finally, I don’t care about Ted Brautigan.

1) I saw No Country for Old Men.

2) Okay, I saw most of No Country for Old Men. Almost all of it, in fact. Except for the ending, during which I had gotten up to go to the bathroom.

3) I did not spontaneously combust upon returning from the bathroom and discovering I had missed the ending of No Country for Old Men. This is an achievement in sheer willpower.

4) I got to know this gentleman:

Future horror icon and Halloween-costume perennial. Guaranteed.

5) I read Jonathan Rosenbaum’s infamous review of No Country for Old Men. Perhaps this is just the brain damage incurred upon discovering that I’d missed the film’s ending when I got up to take a leak, but I am partly convinced this review was conjured from my unconscious mind as an embodiment of the stupidest possible way to engage with a violent genre movie. It’s not just, and it’s not even mostly, the unintentionally hilarious, outraged insistence that everything be about one’s own politics, perhaps best represented here by the straight-faced statement that a reference to a serial killer’s dog-collared victim is a “particular allusion to Abu Ghraib.” Nor is it the inevitable factual error made while ignoring all other concerns in favor of getting everything point in the direction the reviewer wants it to go, in this case lambasting a character for refusing to help a dying man when it is precisely helping that dying man that gets him into the mess he’s in in the first place. No, the review’s philosophical core is what I’ll have no truck with, and that is this:

The picture of human nature in No Country for Old Men is by contrast so bleak I wonder if it must provide for some a reassuring explanation for our defeatism and apathy in the face of atrocity.

To which I can only reply (twelve months ago):

There is nothing special about your pet target. On the contrary. All humans, from every country and time period ever, are terrible. That’s what great art is about. I can see an argument being made that embracing this belief is a way of letting oneself off the hook; I submit that one who makes that argument proves in so doing that he doesn’t understand the belief at all.

6) I saw a trailer for There Will Be Blood, which with a combination of its title, its music by Jonny Greenwood, and post-Bill the Butcher Daniel Day-Lewis may have been the most ominous trailer I’ve ever seen.

The new Cloverfield trailer is out. It looks like it will be a scary movie.

(Via AICN.)

This week’s Horror Roundtable is all about great horror-movie taglines. I only mention my very favorite, but for completeness’ sake, here’s my rundown:

1. Who will survive and what will be left of them? (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre)

2. To avoid fainting keep repeating, it’s only a movie…only a movie…only a movie…only a movie…only a movie…only a movie…only a movie… (The Last House on the Left)

3. When there’s no more room in Hell, the dead will walk the Earth. (Dawn of the Dead)

4. In space no one can hear you scream. (Alien)

5. We are going to eat you! (Zombie/Zombi 2)

Brilliant one and all.

–Sgt. Tyler Ziegel, USMC, from “Wounded warriors face home-front battle with VA,” Emily Probst, CNN.com

Read: The Dark Tower–“On Turtleback Lane”; “Reunion”; “The Devar-Tete”; “The Watcher”

As he nears the finish line King’s begun to directly address the reader more frequently. It reminds me of how at a certain point in The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien started throwing in the occasional “and lo!” or “and behold!”, as though he himself was getting super-excited about what was going down and wanted to share that with us.

This reader is still surprised by how much crazy sci-fi/fantasy/horror stuff King’s firing at us all of a sudden. I should point out that all of it’s written in the usual King style and as such doesn’t constitute a return to the lean-and-mean style of the original Gunslinger, as I sort of wish it would. I just can’t help but feel there was another, much better Dark Tower series in some other world that kept playing in that prose playground. This, on the other hand, just feels like “Stephen King does Star Wars,” which is fun but not so different than what you’d expect from him. I think part of the reason I keep pulling for more shoot-outs and bloodshed like Roland and Eddie’s massacre of Jake’s pursuers is that they momentarily restore that no-nonsense feel to the story.

Two quick points:

1) What happened to LaMerk Industries? Looks like they’ve been dropped from the North Central Positronics/Sombra Corporation evil-conglomerate roster.

2) King’s mentioned the notion of evil being “outside” in several of his books, and now we learn what he means by that as Mordred contemplates Roland and his gang as they gather in a circle. It basically means that evil feels no connection with anyone else, and wants to destroy those connections because it resents that.

SPURGEON: So what’s next?

COTTER: No staples. At MoCCA people would come to the table getting books for review, and people would say, “We don’t want staples.” Chris maybe printed up 1500 of this and we just sold out of #1. I hear people say that when there’s a collection they might be interested in it.

—Josh Cotter, creator of the excellent comic series Skyscrapers of the Midwest, interviewed by Tom Spurgeon

It’s pretty striking to hear distaste for the pamphlet format expressed that nakedly, apparently by the sorts of people who write about comics for the world at large.

Read: The Dark Tower–“In the Jungle, the Mighty Jungle”

Jake’s adventure in the bowels of the Dixie Pig made me think of video games again, and it occurred to me that their multi-environment “go here, do this, beat that” structure isn’t quite as unique as I thought. They’ve actually got a lot in common with children’s fantasy stories, which in my experience involve a kid who gets thrust into a series of situations with no real logical ties to one another, and has to “solve” his or her way out of them through actions that also frequently wouldn’t logically achieve that result. Think of The Neverending Story, for example: Atreyu and his horse ride through a swamp that makes you suicidally depressed to get acquire information from a centuries-old giant turtle who’s allergic to youth, then after the horse bites it the kid gets rescued by an albino luck dragon. Or The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe–open a closet, meet Mr. Tumnus. Or Alice in Wonderland with “Eat Me/Drink Me” and the rabbit hole. Not all that different from Mario jumping on evil mushrooms to save a princess, is it? Nor is it all that different from a private-school kid beheading half-man, half-animal cannibals with dinner plates, then switching bodies with his pet in order to dodge a giant cartoon triceratops conjured from his imagination by mind-reading movie projectors. Fun stuff.

Read: The Dark Tower–“Dan-Tete”

I’m starting to feel like King saved up all the weirdness and horror stuff for the final 1.25 volumes. After all that it’s starting to feel like an odd gear-shift, but I’ll take it. Watching a newborn baby with a boner mutate into a giant cannibalistic spider with a baby face growing out of its back like a tumor and then eat its own mother? I’ll take it indeed!

Susannah, of all people, gets the first big bloodbath against the Crimson King’s monstrous minions, massacring the motley maternity-ward crew. (Alliteration!) I was glad to see Flagg-manqué Sayer go down. I feel like King should have come up with a better reason for Susannah not to have killed Mordred the spider-baby than “she missed a few times,” but still, a pretty good showing. Even the uncredited cameo by C-3PO, aka Nigel the Robot, was a hoot.

Hey, here’s something that just occurred to me: After the age of magic ended, North Central Positronics built mechanical means of preserving magical phenomena such as the Beams, right? Like, at Shardik’s den, they built the big metal generator thingy, not to mention Shardik himself. But if North Central Positronics is a front for the Crimson King, and the Crimson King’s goal is to break all the Beams, why would they have preserved them in the first place?

Read: The Dark Tower–“Callahan and the Vampires”; “Lifted on the Wave”; “Eddie Makes a Call”

Three elements combined to put me in a good mood in starting to read this, the final volume in the series. (The journey’s almost over.)

1) The last quarter of Song of Susannah was really good.

2) The inside front jacket copy starts thusly:

All good things must come to an end, Constant Reader, and not even Stephen King can make a story that goes on forever.

Despite appearances to the contrary, it only feels that way!

The tale of Roland Deschain’s relentless quest for the Dark Tower has, the author fears, sorely tried the patience of those who have followed it from its earliest chapters.

You don’t say! All kidding aside, this level of self-awareness is refreshing, as well as funny.

3) In addition to a passage from Robert Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” (obviously) and Bad Company’s “Bad Company” (knowing King’s taste in music, also obviously), the epigraph page also contains this:

What have I become?

My sweetest friend

Everyone I know

Goes away in the end

You could have it all

My empire of dirt

I will let you down

I will make you hurt

–Trent Reznor

I did not see that coming! NIN quotes always put me in a good mood.

Now I’m three chapters deep, and so far, so good. I’ll admit that I wanted to see Callahan go down in a bit more of a blaze of glory. His demise was fun and dramatic, but it might have been nice to see him take the whole room full of Grandfather Type One vampires (and by the way, how fucked-up and awesome are they?) with him. As far as the wonky todash concept goes, the “todash tidal wave” that Roland and Eddie get swept up by ain’t half-bad. And I even kind of dig the idea that this random John Cullum guy (note the initials) will suddenly step up and save the day, like the Arliss Howard character in Natural Born Killers. Would I spend so much time in the conclusion of my epic Western sci-fi/fantasy quest series arranging land deals and organizing corporations? That’s a big negatory, but, y’know, it’s not super-distracting at the moment.

More monster shoot-outs, more unimaginable battles, more winding of horns and storming of towers, kthx. But so far so good.

Please go check out Monster Brains’ unbelievably awesome gallery of Ogoh-Ogoh monster statues from Bali.

Read: Song of Susannah–“13th Stanza: ‘Hile, Mia, Hile, Mother'”; “Coda: Pages from a Writer’s Journal”; Wordslinger’s Note

HAhahahahahahahaha!

What a great ending! I laughed out loud. But I would, wouldn’t I? It involved something I’d wanted to do for 3/4 of this book, i.e. killing Stephen King. Ha! So I guess I was definitely right about this being at a remove from the real world, even in “the real world.” Great!

Before we get that far we finally do something fun, or even just not boring and annoying, with Susannah and Mia–their deliriously bugshit trip through the Dixie Pig and into the maternity ward from hell. King really outdid himself in this passage, one of the very, very few in the entire series that’s actually scary, and easily the craziest thing in it this side of Shardik the giant cyborg bear. Vampires, red mutant rat-people with distended teeth and human-face masks, cannibals that sound almost exactly like Grandpa from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre eating roast human babies on a spit, bird-people in Duke T-shirts, and evil gynecologists who act like all this is perfectly normal. That’s what I’m talkin’ ’bout! God only knows why it took this long to get there, but I’m not going to look a gift horse in the mouth.

So, I’m looking forward to watching Jake, Callahan, and Oy come in guns blazing against a restaurant full of monsters. I’m wondering what the loose end is regarding that John Cullum dude Roland and Eddie met in Maine and why his mention of his mysterious friend in Vermont gave Eddie the willies. (It’s entirely possible that plot thread gets picked up in an totally different King novel, or is a plot thread continued from one, but whatever.) King’s reference to seeing Armageddon in the “Coda” section has me hoping for a full-on monster apocalypse a la the rant the Ghostbusters went on in the mayor’s office. And of course there’s all the cool stuff we already have seen prophesied about what’ll happen when Roland comes to the Dark Tower–winding his horn, singing his fallen comrades’ names, doing some unimaginable battle. Let’s get it on!

“Mentally Ill in Serbia are Abused, Report Says,” Dan Bilefsky, New York Times. Photo by Mental Disability Rights International.

(Via Blue Texan.)

Read: “10th Stanza: Susannah-Mio, Divided Girl of Mine”; “11th Stanza: The Writer”; “12th Stanza: Jake and Callahan”

Hey.

Hey!

Not bad!

Not bad at all!

The Susannah stuff was fine–I like the idea of Flagg serving as Mia’s Archangel Gabriel, I like the use of science to produce magical results. That’s nice and perverse.

And despite all my worries and fears, despite chapter after chapter of dreck leading up to it, the appearance of Stephen King as a character in his own book was…pretty great! A few things won me over:

1) King comes across as charmingly out of his element. Just the fact that anyone comes across charming was a treat after spending time with the likes of Calvin Tower and Detta Walker for the last few books. But character-King seemed genuinely at a loss as to what the hell was going on–no “it’s ka” for him until they put him under hypnosis, pretty much.

2) This is related to the first point, but whatever godlike attributes character-King may have in terms of his role in creating Roland, his friends, and their worlds, he’s not in control of them, meaning he himself is not godlike. That is a huge relief for me. Why? It’s hard to articulate, but if we got the sense that nothing we’ve read about would exist if character-King hadn’t dreamed it up it would invalidate the whole affair. Instead, we’re told that the larger forces of good, evil, and fate at work in Roland and company’s adventures would still be at work whether or not King put pen to paper at all. King’s more their vessel–an important one, I guess the third-most important after the Dark Tower and the Rose, but still just a vessel. This means that (within the context of The Dark Tower series) his fictions are not, strictly speaking, fictional. Phew. He’s a part of them more than they’re a part of him.

3) King further cuts down the too-cute-by-half nature of his metafictional conceit in the following chapter, when Father Callahan muses that while certain things might only exist in this “real world” they’re currently inhabiting, evil corporation North Central Positronics would exist in all worlds, just because the Crimson CEO King is a dick like that. Now, while there’s no real way for us to verify whether Roland, Eddie, Callahan, Jake, Oy, and Susannah have ever traipsed around this big blue planet of ours, you and I can look around and see that there’s no such thing as North Central Positronics. That means that even the book’s “real” world with its “real” Stephen King writing “real” novels like ‘Salem’s Lot and Carrie is NOT, in fact, to be considered real–in other words, the fourth wall is never truly broken.

The story keeps on rockin’ with the “Jake and Callahan” chapter, too. Their mental duel with Black Thirteen was a hoot and gave you a sense of how risky it is to mess with that thing, their Butch-and-Sundance attitude to their impending doom in the Dixie Pig is the kind of fatalistic heroism that makes Roland such a fun character to read about, and even the pretty breathtakingly brash decision to loop 9/11 into the storyline has the “that’s so crazy it just might work” brio of great conspiracy fiction.

Look, is it the direction I would have taken things in? No. I don’t think I’d ever have brought the gang back to America ever, let alone with the frequency King has, let alone to visit the author of the books. It just seems to me that Roland’s world is rich enough to want to explore on its own, not least because it isn’t King’s America, which we’ve seen plenty of in virtually every one of his other books. But if you are gonna go there, these last two chapters are about as good as you could hope for. For the first time in ages I’m having a good time reading these books and can’t wait to turn the page. Hooray!

Listen, folks–y’all who told me to keep going? I don’t really hate you. I’m not really going to hunt you down. I don’t know if this constitutes a spoiler for the next entry, but I’m actually pretty happy with you right now. Just wanted to clear all that up.