The Dark Tower Companion: A Guide to Stephen King’s Epic Fantasy (21 page)

A:   I monitored them really closely at the beginning. I wanted to make sure everything was on track and going the right way. I know Robin [Furth] does a really great job. After they went off on their own, I didn't want to junk up my head with their story lines. That's Robin's take on all this, and she's fine with it and she can do whatever she wants because I'm more or less done. I've got this one book coming out,
The Wind Through the Keyhole
, and there might be more after that, but if there are, they won't be influenced at all by whatever's going on in the comics and indeed might run contradictory to what's in the comics. You know what Roland always says: There are other worlds than these.

A:   No. I really don't. What happened after
Wizard and Glass
, Marsha and Julie in the office started to bug me about all these letters they were getting. “When is he going to finish this?” So finally I said to myself: “I'm going to sit down and I'm going to write these things—the whole thing—as one novel.” By then I had a good starting place with
Wolves of the Calla
, because I knew what I wanted to do with it, which was kind of like
Seven Samurai
and
The Magnificent Seven
, the Western, the John Sturges thing. Once
I started there, the whole thing just sort of spun itself out and I thought I was done with it.

A:   I don't know. I never know. I know that I sort of left the door open to go back to Mid-World. I guess the one story that I might want to tell, that Robin and her gang [at Marvel] have already told—is Jericho Hill. I don't know how they did that. I
really
didn't want to read that, because if I went back to Roland at all, that would have to be the story.

A:   I don't know. I don't know anything about this stuff. I just know that when this thing comes up, every time I've gone into one of these things, I've gone in with a feeling of…this will never work. And every time it does. From the time you sit down, you know you're in the right place. And it was great to be with Roland and his friends again and to see Eddie alive and Susannah, Oy. It was great. I really do think the book has the feel of some of those old stories.

A:   Sheb knows him from when he came to Mejis, not exactly as a child but as an adolescent. I don't know any of these things. Your guess is as good as mine, really. My assumption is that something
happened to Roland after Gilead fell and it has to do with the Beams and time getting funny and that he really has lived a more or less normal life, that it's time itself that's gone off the rails. That's all I know. The only other thing that I can say is that my concept of the book when I started, when I was very young, like twenty-two years old, probably mutated to something that was a little less mythic as time went by.

A:   I certainly felt it happening in
11/22/63,
partly because it was Derry again. The guy shows up in Derry. But also because of the very idea of the yellow card man saying, “You guys think that you haven't been changing anything when in fact you've been changing everything and the whole structure of the universe is getting ready to topple.” At that point I thought to myself, I can very easily reference the Dark Tower here, but in a way I didn't want to do that. I wanted the book to kind of stand apart, I think because of the historical basis—the whole idea of the Kennedy assassination. I wanted to make it as least fantastical as I could. So I think that people who have read the Dark Tower books and who read
11/22/63
will say that this is certainly a Tower-ish situation at the end of the book.

A:   You're right. It is Marten Broadcloak, but Chuck Verrill edited the book and said, Why don't you take out references to him until the very end when you talk about Roland's mother, so that's what I did. But, sure. That guy is undoubtedly Marten Broadcloak. Who's also lived a very long life.

A:   Farson has nothing to do with Marten Broadcloak. Farson is a guy, and there could be stories about him, except I've never known how to write them, except maybe for Jericho Hill, because he never figures in. Roland is never sent to palaver with Farson or to have
anything to do with him. I'm sure that Farson is a minion of the Crimson King, and Marten Broadcloak is as well, and I think there's a reference to the two of them actually being in contact in
Wizard and Glass
. What I could never figure out was whether Marten Broadcloak was Flagg.

A:   These stories all want to cohere. The Dark Tower books are always trying to get back to some kind of central myth core, but I could never define it and I never tried to, because I'm not that kind of writer. I'm very instinctive. It's not anything that I'm really thinking of ahead of time.

A:   I don't know if it's a project that anyone would care about and I'm a little bit leery about doing it. The first book really had to be done because it had to be brought in line with the way book seven ends. If I went and rewrote the rest of them, I know that I could do work that would please me as the author, but I think that a lot of people might pick up the books and pay the money and say, geez, I don't know why I bought this. He sold me the same book. The changes would be there, but they would be subtle. The real Dark Tower junkies would know but, for the general reader, I don't think so.

A:   Yeah, he is. It's nothing that I ever thought of consciously. I think that if I drew from anything there, I might have drawn from T. H. White's
The Sword in the Stone
. His Merlin is sort of cranky, too. I may have drawn a little bit from that. But basically I wanted to play against type. I didn't want any big, magnificent Disney-animated Merlin. I wanted somebody who seemed like he could be a real person. I love it when the kid says to him, “Was his magic stronger than yours?” And Maerlyn says, “No, but I was drunk.” That's a very human thing.

A:   I knew how things were going to end from probably
Wolves of the Calla
or
Wizard and Glass
. There was always a question of what was going to happen when Roland got to the Tower. One possibility was that we would never know. That he would blow his horn and go to the Tower and that would be the end of the series. I've never had a lot of patience for that kind of thing. I feel like you have to give people everything and if they like it they like it, and if they don't, they don't. A lot of people didn't like the way the thing ended, but after all the things that I'd written about how
ka
is a wheel and it always comes back to where it started, I don't see how anybody could have expected anything different, really. That's the way it works. The same idea exists in
Ghost Brothers of Darkland County
, that until you get things right, you have to do them over and over and over again. That's human nature, as I understand it. That's how we do what we do. If you want to quit smoking, for instance, if you fail, then you're smoking again. You're back where you were. Maybe you try again, and sooner or later something changes, but only through that process of repetition and incremental learning.

A:   Sure. I do. I know exactly what he's got to do. You have to go back to the first book and look at that and then you'll know the answer.

A:   No. But after the accident, I was thinking if I had died in that accident it would have been like
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
. There would have been this whole setup with no conclusion, and to me that was
kind of an awful thought—that I would not have a chance to finish what I started. I began to think, well, I am the god of these people's world. I'm sort of the over-soul that they don't know anything about, and if all things serve the Beam, then I'm a part of that because I've written all these books with the Dark Tower in it and everything, and I thought it was really a neat thing to do. The idea that if they saved me, then the story continued. You know, that's kind of an old idea, too, the idea of saving the creator so the story continues.

A:   Nope.

A:   Everlynne at Serenity knows everything that there is about Roland's sister, whose name is Clarissa Deschain. Everlynne knows a lot about that family. It would be kind of good to go back and talk about her a little bit. She's a good character. That's all I know. I don't know a lot about these things.

A:   I think something is going to happen with it at Warner Bros., but I haven't heard anything from Ron [Howard] in a while, and I let them go their own course. I can just say that if the movie does get made from the script that I read, I think that the people who read the books will be in equal parts delighted and infuriated by what they see, but I also think that they'll keep coming back because, to me, they got a brilliant take on the whole thing. My lips are sealed. I can't say. But I can tell you that the character of Jake Chambers is very important, and Akiva Goldsman did a brilliant job of integrating the fantasy world of Mid-World with the real world of New York City, and the two things interchange in a way—I was just delighted by it and by the way that they use Blaine the Mono. I hope it happens, but I'm not counting the days or anything. Ron's very determined to make it, and I think in the end he will.