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.

Man Trying to Escape Police Eaten by Gator

Read: Song of Susannah–“9th Stanza: Eddie Bites His Tongue”

I’m tired of King’s faux-humility when having characters talk about him. “Maybe he’ll amount to something. What if he becomes famous or critically acclaimed–the chances are remote, but still.” Horseshit. Dude, you are the most popular author in the history of the world. Dine out on that instead of making your characters skeptics about your prospects and crowing to yourself “I showed them!”

Also, are we supposed to share Eddie’s astonishment that the plot of Wolves of the Calla is the plot of The Magnificent Seven and the name of the town is the name of the director? If not, are we supposed to be entertained by watching him realize this? If the answer to either of those questions is yes…I just hate you people who wanted me to read this more and more, basically.

I mean, really, fucking up in The Drawing of the Three by saying Co-Op City is in Brooklyn and then making that part of the stories’ continuity?

I did wish Eddie killed Calvin Tower, because then a) there’d be one less of these annoying assholes to read about, and b) maybe then they’d lose their quest for the Dark Tower and the bad guys would win pluck the goddamn rose and knock down the goddamn Tower and wipe everything out. I am totally rooting against everyone in this book now. Even Roland. He could have put bullets into all these other douchebags four books ago.

Read: Song of Susannah–“8th Stanza: A Game of Toss”

Even though I read it today, I had to flip through this chapter before starting to write this post just to remember what was in it. As best I can tell it exists to point out that Roger Clemens is a good pitcher, that people in New England like the Red Sox a lot, that Eddie dislikes that Calvin Tower character, and that King thinks that ‘Salem’s Lot is “a corker” of a book and that he himself is a pretty nice guy. Mostly it makes me wish that I could use Black Thirteen to go back in time and stop the goddamn fucking Red Sox from ever winning a World Series ever, just to ruin King’s day.

Seriously, what the hell, people. This is not entertaining. You people who encouraged me to stick with this? I’m coming for you.

Bloody Disgusting’s “huge” interview with Clive Barker is up. It’s actually not so huge, as it turns out, but it’s interesting as you’d expect it to be thanks to quotes like this:

I cried at the end of The Exorcist when she touches the cross that is hanging around the neck of the priest and dimly remembers what she was saved from. That got me. Yes, you’re not going to weep in the middle of a Freddy Krueger picture and I’m not writing Hellraiser for tears. I’d rather people wet their seats with urine. That’s the nature of horror stories. I’d like us to be doing more than just telling horror stories. Why can’t we tell the Doctor Zhivago of games? Why can’t we do the Lawrence of Arabia of games? I use the David Lean model only because he was telling these massive narratives, which had extraordinary emotional fuel, and the battle scenes still remain definitive benchmarks. Without the aid of CGI he still made battles scenes more exciting than George Lucas could or indeed Peter Jackson could by multiplying infinitely the number of Orcs. So what I’m saying is let’s look for the models within cinema that are plausible, that we can reasonably aspire to. I only tend to cry in a movie during a moment of triumph. I see no reason why a game shouldn’t do that.

Matt Maxwell does my “list your favorite horror movies” thing, but uses quotes instead of images.

Read: Song of Susannah–“6th Stanza: The Castle Allure”; “7th Stanza: The Ambush”

If you know me well, you could have probably guessed that I’d get excited when they started mentioning Discordia. Basically that’s just another word for the primordial soup in the King-verse, though, and not a crazy goddess, so oh well. A lot of other “oh well” answers are forthcoming in this chunk, mainly in chapter 6. Mia is white, she might be a demon, there’s like six big-deal demons who are each both male and female, the one who had sex with Roland in the willow jungle and the one who had sex with Detta when Jake crossed are the same demon, that demon took Roland’s sperm and impregnated Detta/Susannah/Mia with it so that’s whose baby Susannah is carrying, his name is Mordred just like in the Arthurian legends and he’s gonna kill his dad, blah blah blah. It’s a boring cosmology.

Meanwhile, the evil genius overlord of the vampires and the low men and shit, Richard P. Sayre, devises a foolproof plan to kill Roland and Eddie by sending in the same mafia goons who the pair wiped out in an alternate reality earlier in their adventures together. How could that possibly fail?

A final self-indulgent twist sees our heroes get rescued by some just-folks flannel-wearing “ayuh”-saying guy in Maine. So in a series that, need I remind you, began as Conan starring the Man with No Name and at one point included a giant cyborg bear, we now spend a paragraph or three marveling at how people from Maine pronounce words like “boathouse.” (Bwut-huss, if you were wondering, which you weren’t.) Turns out that’s how the people in the Calla pronounced it too! Isn’t that amazing? No, you’re right, it’s not.

Even though the thought of voluntarily subjecting myself to more Stephen King at the moment isn’t a particularly appealing one, I heard good things from a friend who saw an advance screening of The Mist, which the trailers had kind of turned me off of. (Just seemed too ersatz Spielberg; I prefer the real thing.) MTV’s got a whole bunch of clips from the movie up. I really hope it’s good. (Via Bloody Disgusting.)

Norman Mailer looked like Ed Asner with more hair.