The reason I got so upset when I found out there’s a revised version of The Gunslinger isn’t some sort of principled opposition to authors or filmmakers or whoever altering their work after the fact. For every Jabba the Hutt in Star Wars Episode IV there’s a French interlude in Apocalypse Now Redux or a Bilbo stealing the Ring rather than winning it in The Hobbit. From what I can gather–via an email from Tom the Dog and this post by Bruce Baugh, the near-simultaneous reading of which is what alerted me to the existence of the revised Gunslinger–this happens to fall a bit closer to the former category than the latter, at least in my view, because it involves going back and planting clues that weren’t there after the resolution to the mystery had been thought up and judged insufficiently supported by what had already been written. It’s tough to think of that as anything but cheating, but hey, I’m willing to extend the benefit of the doubt until I read it.
What really ticked me off is simply that this is a time-consuming project as it is, involving some fairly intense concentrated reading of a long series of long books I find I’m not super-enjoying, without having to go back and re-read an entire book. Which is clearly (clearly to me at least) what I’d have to do to glean everything that King intended to be gleaned.
Feh.
Can someone at least tell me WHEN he made these revisions? Like after which book in the series did he go back and revise the first one? I’m assuming he did this between books Four and Five, because the unrevised Gunslinger that I read bears the same trade dress as my copy of Book Four, Wizard and Glass. But I’m not gonna assume anymore. Point being that maybe after I read the last book written prior to the revisions, then I’ll stop and read the revised version of The Gunslinger before reading the remaining books. This would probably mean that I have my reading schedule set through December, which is frustrating, which is why I’m not 100% sure I’ll do it at all, but we’ll see.
I wish the comments worked just as much as you do, but alas, so please hit the email link in the left-hand sidebar and clue me in. Do try to avoid spoilers, please.
Argh.