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Oct. 16th, 2004 02:52 pm'The Dark Tower': Pulp Metafiction
By MICHAEL AGGER
IN 1970, when he was 22, Stephen King wrote a sentence he liked: ''The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.'' It's an innocent sentence -- pulpy and suggestive -- but it grew to become a monster. As the first line in the ''Dark Tower'' series, it begins a story King intended to be the longest popular novel in history. With the publication of ''The Dark Tower VII,'' the series has topped the 4,000-page mark and, mercifully, reached its conclusion. If that fact alone does not send a shiver up your spine, you're probably not a King fan. He was almost killed in a 1999 roadside accident, and, as he has written, the reaction of a Michigan reader was typical: ''I was with this good friend of mine when we heard you got popped. Man, we just started shaking our heads and saying, 'There goes the Tower, it's tilting, it's falling, ahhh . . . he'll never finish it now.' ''
( Read Review, Spoilers in the last paragraph... )
By MICHAEL AGGER
IN 1970, when he was 22, Stephen King wrote a sentence he liked: ''The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.'' It's an innocent sentence -- pulpy and suggestive -- but it grew to become a monster. As the first line in the ''Dark Tower'' series, it begins a story King intended to be the longest popular novel in history. With the publication of ''The Dark Tower VII,'' the series has topped the 4,000-page mark and, mercifully, reached its conclusion. If that fact alone does not send a shiver up your spine, you're probably not a King fan. He was almost killed in a 1999 roadside accident, and, as he has written, the reaction of a Michigan reader was typical: ''I was with this good friend of mine when we heard you got popped. Man, we just started shaking our heads and saying, 'There goes the Tower, it's tilting, it's falling, ahhh . . . he'll never finish it now.' ''
( Read Review, Spoilers in the last paragraph... )
