The key detail about the series that has always gotten me most, I think, and has stayed in my head ever since, is the fact that King quite ingeniously mixed our world with the fantasy world in the book. To this day I have no idea if this has been done elsewhere, in other books, I personally have been through a large number of fantasy books and never found it again, but I'll never be able to forget opening up the initial book in the series ,the Gunslinger, and reading how the characters , who were clearly from another universe, were sitting around listening to the Beatles song "Hey Jude".
At the time, especially because I read it just as a boy when my imaginative faculties were, one imagines, at their peak, it was incredibly baffling to me, as well as exciting, to see this sort of mix happening. I went into the book, as I do with most to this day, not having one idea what it was really about, beyond thinking it was about something with the West, so ... suddenly having that detail thrown in truly was bizarre --- and awesome!
And though I'll admit that I do not really care all that much for the last 3 books of the series (which I've thumbed through but never yet completed) I will still always have to say that this one little detail of King mixing our world and elements of it with "Mid-World" was absolutely profound, believe it or not, at the time it happened, and unbelievably important when it comes to my own writing, and especially the dreams I have of what I could write, one day. The idea of the portal to me, for instance, that leads the main characters to and from Mid World is something that we only rarely see executed in many of our stories, and for the large part, most stories tend to not try to implement something like this.
Most people who write about the Tolkien inspired elves, dragons, wizards, and so forth, for example, to my knowledge, do not seem to really ever throw those characters into other worlds, they have certainly never thrown them into our own world, and I have written before --at times even quite in depth -- about how much it bothers me that so many of us still feel so strict and rigid when it comes to our favorite charactrs or genres. Why, for instance, can't the Wild West gunslinger meet the Roman gladiator or the 60's folk singer or the Dungeons and Dragons wood elf? Why can't the modern Playboy Pamela Anderson get thrown into outer space ...to fight aliens , or jump time portals and meet up with - who?-- Pontius Pilate? Why can't Lil Kim or Jay-Z get thrown into a Dark Tower/Game of Thrones spin off?? Why can't Julius Caesar or Marc Antony or William Shakespeare listen to a Rolling Stones record?
The truth, for me, is that all these ideas seem like totally viable and even good ideas for a book and especially for a film; but, when you look at our current cultural "rules", what you're generally going to find is that mixing and matching all of these various characters & genres into one is often seen, first, as blasphemous for many people, and secondly, if it s somewhat accepted somewhere, as ridiculous and comical. Most stories that do practice this little "portal idea" tend to only function as stories that are considered infantile , et cetera. This is, in fact, the genius of the Stephen King book series here: He somehow managed to take an idea that really, on some level, shouldn't have been accepted or taken seriously, but still wound up being taken seriously and accepted on a wide level -- and not at all in a comical light. People read through the Dark Tower and see something really and truly gripping, and this is especially the case in the opening book of the series. Like I said, I'll never forget just how real and believable it was when I first found the Wild West characters humming "Hey Jude". It was incredible to me....
Now, these days I will admit that I sometimes jump back into certain parts of the last few books, like the Wolves of the Calla or The Song of Susannah, and I start to read certain random passages - especially where dialogue is involved -- and I do think that sometimes the way King tries to connect the Wild West gunslinger with the modern characters sounds goofy and even, quite frankly, awful -- and you can see why no one likes doing it -- but...I still can't take away from the fact that the idea itself, of mixing such different things, is genius, even if it does wind up not always superbly executed. In fact, when you really think about it, the cultures that King chose to mix here, from a 1970s or 1980s perspective (which is when this project of his began) seem very distant from each other, but from todays angle they actually don't seem all that far apart, since all he's really doing is essentially just mixing two American characters together with one another, who have been removed, more or less, by only a century. There is no real extreme mix happening here, like the examples I put forth before. He doesn't leave America at all, in a certain sense, believe it or not.
Yes, it's true, Roland Deschain is imbued with "magic" and the Man in Black certainly is imbued with some sort of magic as well, and so is "MidWorld"; but for the most part magic hardly plays a role in the book. Nobody is constantly casting spells. Nobody in the "Ka tet" is a wizard or a sorceror or a warlock. None of them get taught magic. It's really all quite plain in a certain sense and the parts of the book that take place in our own world basically read just like any other standard King novel (which he writes horrors, not fantasies). In fact, if we are going to throw out criticism, I have at times even felt that the Dark Tower was a sort of "cheap attempt" that King made at trying to write a fantasy, even though he can't really, in my opinion, write fantasy all that well. I do not consider this book a good fantasy book truthfully, ecept for that one detail when it comes to the portal.
It is of course marketed as such and often, if you read about it, everyone seems to throw it into the same category as Lord of the Rings. I do find this to be a bit ridiculous. Tolkien's work is very removed from this in my opinion. Not for better or worse -- just deeply removed. Tolkien's work, for instance, essentially has no sense of reality whatsoever, or, at least, no sense of any even remotely modern reality. King instead seems to have only been able to stretch his imagination so far, and most of the characters in this book, you can tell, have been drawn from his American reality, rather than purely from his imagination.
All of the characters are clearly either from western movies he would have watched as a kid or just regular every day Americans who were around in his own time period. It doesn't make it any worse, but it does make it very different from your typical fantasy book, which typically consists of nothing but heavily-- and I mean heavily -- constructed characters who are nothing like anyone in our own time, or even our recent past. I myself have often tried to write a novel dealing with pirates, and I eventually get to a point where I have to throw my hands up in the air in frustration...because I have never met an actual pirate, and so it can be difficult to pull off. It's obviously much easier for me to write characters I know -- and put little fantastical twists on them -- like King does here, than to write out and out fantasy. Tolkien, of course, did not do this at all. Everything about those LOTR books is pure fantasy. That fact of course is genius, but also rather annoying at times. Certainly I can't be the only one, for example, who wonders what Tolkien thought about the characters who he actually lived around in his own reality. Alas, he apparently found them worthless to write about, and perhaps we all would have found them worthless to read about, if he had written of them....
As always, the mystery of why a story captivates people as much as it does tends to ultimately always just remain a mystery......
LOGGING OFF ABRUPTLY
PER USUAL ---
oz
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