And meanwhile, over on Patreon we are covering The Dark Tower Beginnings comic adaptation! It's a long and good discussion about some very weird and unnecessary comics. The Crimson King is just a big spider dude who sits on a wheel for some reason!
- he/him
- correlatedcontents.com/
i'm a boy from indiana and this is very emotional for me
bird
twitter.com/warrenisdead
rock
correlatedcontents.tumblr.com
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in reply to @rangedtouch's post:
I always enjoy the Dark Tower reading because in my head and my memory they were so much better than what they really are at some points.
Also, isn't the implication of The Crimson King being a Spider Thing that they are Pennywise's father/progenitor?
Pardon my typing, from a phone, but:
There is something very interesting that King ALMOST does here, but then definitely doesn't do, and it is very frustrating. Obviously I don't think it was his intent anyway, but never mind intent.
The Dark Tower is nominally about stories, right? And it is a closed loop, which he seems to already know. So you have a story that begins solely in iconic terms "The Man in Black fled and he followed" etc, and also ENDS in solely iconic terms, as the Gunslinger and the Tower as a cycle that repeats when you reread. And Wizard and Glass is the halfway mark of this.
The iconic nature of Roland's world is contrasted with the "real world" that Eddie and Jake etc are from, and the more of that world floods in, the more "real" Roland's world gets - it starts to have lore and logic, ostensibly. Now, flaw #1 is that King's "real world" contends with the way he writes stuff like race. But you can see the structural idea here: Roland's world grows more "real," and as a consequence he becomes more of a character than a concept: a guy who has a backstop etc.
As the halfway point, this is where Roland's world and story is the most "real" and you can see that, by design, in that it has local politics and civilians going about their days. IN THEORY this would culminate with a look at Susan, a real character who has a normal, uniconic existence who is subsumed by Roland's story, destroying her.
Flaw #2, then, is that King is fully uninterested in making Susan a rounded, full character with her own depth, when it would be a striking thematic point (too intellectual critic of me, I know) in addition to justifying the page count of this love story.
You can picture a trajectory moving forward where the world diverges from Roland - that it becomes more iconic but Roland's refuses to go backwards because his remaining "real" is the influence his new ka-tet has had on him. Suggesting like Roland's horn that he has been changed permanently and the cycle is untenable as he evolves.
Anyway that didn't actually play out as written, so never mind!
The Dark Tower series is full of things that are potentially structurally fascinating but is handled in the most back-asswards way. Wait until we get to book 6.
Incredibly dull piece of trivia: Cameron mentions that his copy of W&G is published by BCA. BCA is "Book Club Associates", a long-dead UK mail order book club, This may account for the dimensions of the book since Book Club editions were usually a bit different (i.e. lower quality) to the standard editions.