Since the first volume of the series was published in 1982, Stephen King's magical and
mysterious Dark Tower universe has expanded until it's now woven into almost every story
he writes. Amazon.com editor Ben Reese caught up with King to chat about the
as-yet-unpublished volumes of his Dark Tower series, rumors of his retirement, and the
horrors of genre classification.
Amazon.com:
The first four volumes of your Dark Tower series were re-released this
summer and I understand that the first book, The Gunslinger, has been altered from its original version. What exactly has been
changed?
Stephen King:
I re-wrote the whole thing. I mean, I always thought that one was different from the other ones in that it was
written when I was so young. It always seemed to me like it was trying too hard to be something really, really important. So I
tried to simplify it a little bit.
It's got a lot of stuff in it that fits better into what came later. Actually, it's quite a bit different. I guess the acid test is, if you had
read the first one already would you want to get the new one? I guess if you were a completist you would, but otherwise maybe
no.
"I can't see me reaching a point where I would stop working, because I really enjoy what I'm doing and it
passes the time. I'm entertaining myself." -- Stephen King
Amazon.com:
Has the Dark Tower series been finished now?
King:
Yes. It has.
Amazon.com:
The first Dark Tower book was published in 1982, and in the afterword you say you started writing it in 1970,
over 30 years ago, before even Carrie, your first published novel. When you finally completed the last book of the Dark Tower
series, was there a different feeling than you experienced upon completion of your other books?
King:
There's always a feeling. You get a feeling when you finish any book because it's a fairly long project. The longer the
project, the stronger the feeling you get. With this one it was so…I've never felt anything like it. It was really strange. I don't
know how to describe it really.
Amazon.com:
The fifth book in the series, The Wolves of the Calla, is scheduled for publication in November 2003, and
then the remaining books will be released in fairly quick succession, with Song of Susannah set for release in the summer of
2004 and the final book, The Dark Tower, coming in November of the same year. There was a long period of time between
the publication of the previous titles in the series. Why the rush with these final books?
King:
Because it seemed to me that once I got started with the actual writing, this time it felt like one of those WWF wrestling
matches where it's for all the beans. It's for everything. And I felt like if I didn't finish this time I never would. So I thought, I'll sit
down and I'll just hammer away until they're done. And once they were done, there was no reason not to publish them as soon
as possible. My original request to the publisher was to publish all three at once. For various reasons they didn't want to do that.
One of the reasons was just trying to get as many people as possible interested in the books that had already been published.
When I go places and ask people, "How many of you have read one of my books?," they're there because I'm there, so they all
raise their hands. Then I say, "Put your hand down if you've never read any of the Dark Tower books," and always 50 percent
of the audience puts their hands down.
Amazon.com:
Why is that?
King:
I think there are a couple of reasons. First, they think it's really different from everything else I've written, and it's really
not. I mean, the same mind, the same intelligence, the same twisted, warped person wrote it all. But the other thing is, I think a
lot of people kind of felt like "I don't want to get started on something that isn't finished." And now they are. So I wanted to give
them a bit of a chance at Viking to reissue the backlist. I think the other thing is that it kind of makes up in a way for all the
waiting people had to do, to be able to say to them that these books are going to come in fairly rapid succession.
A lot of people were pissed at me at the end of The Wastelands because it ends with them on this train that's going to kill them
if they don't win this riddling contest. And then Blaine says, "So, cast your nets, wanderers! Try me with your questions, and let
the contest begin!" and then... there's a three-year silence. And there were a lot of people who were just ripshit about that. And
so to kind of make up for this I wanted to publish these as closely together as I could.
The other thing, Wolves of the Calla and Song of Susannah, they both end on notes that you really want to know what
happens next. They're sort of cliffhangers, but I would say I didn't do that on purpose. It's just that if I'm doing my job, then all
the time that you're reading the books you should want to know what happens next.
"I don't like classifying things--just saying, we can put this guy in a pigeon hole and that's the way it is.
The people who read my stuff understand and fortunately there are enough of them so I don't have to
explain myself very often."
Amazon.com:
With 30 years between the first page and the final page of this series, did it end as you'd always planned it to
end?
King:
It's like shooting a nuclear missile over 3,000 miles. You're happy if it lands in the same neighborhood where you wanted
it to finish up. And that's pretty much what I did. I would say that once I got a little way down the path, I was pretty well locked
in on where it was going to come out. Some of the other books express that. The non-Gunslinger books that refer to the
Gunslinger refer to where it's going. I think that if I did my job correctly, people are going to be really surprised but then they're
going to say, "Yes, it just has to be this way."
Amazon.com:
Your novels have always been notable for their self-reference, the way characters in one story will mention
events or characters from another story entirely, connecting the plots of all your titles. In recent years, your books have been
peppered with more and more connections to the Dark Tower series, with Black House, which was marketed as something of
a sequel to The Talisman, being really more of a Dark Tower book than anything else. Have you been doing this purposely or
has the Dark Tower universe just been wending its way into your plots unconsciously?
King:
Well, it became more and more conscious as time went by. There came a point, I'd say probably when writing The
Wastelands, when I realized Father Callahan from Jerusalem's Lot was going to be a character in the Dark Tower stories. I
knew from the time I wrote Salem's Lot in 1974 that when Father Callahan walked out of the story, that eventually he would
show up again somewhere. And then there came a time when I realized he was going to be in the Dark Tower world. And there
also came a time when I realized everybody from all these books, their courses are changed by the pull of the Tower. And, as a
result, pretty much everybody from all the books where the Tower is referred to will turn up in the novels. There's Father
Callahan. There's Ted Brautigan from Hearts in Atlantis. There's Dinky Earnshaw from Everything's Eventual. Shimi comes
back, the tavern boy in Wizard and Glass. A lot of characters just sort of come together at the end, including one person that
people will recognize very well.
Amazon.com:
And who's that?
King:
Nope.
Amazon.com:
Oh, come on. You won't say?
King:
Well, actually it's me. I guess I can say that.
Amazon.com:
Your publisher mentions J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings books as a comparison to the Dark Tower series.
Do you see them that way too?
King:
For me, I would say that starting the thing, there were a lot of young fantasy writers at the end of the '60s and in the early
'70s who were influenced by those books. Robert Jordan is one. Terry Brooks is another one. Stephen Donaldson would be a
third one and the list goes on and one. I was one of those writers who read those books and was just knocked out by the magic
of the stories, by the idea of the quest, and just by the scope, the broadness of it, by how long it took to tell the tales and how
thrilling they were. And I said, I want to write something like that. When I was in the process of writing the first one I said, you
know you've got to be really really careful here or else you'll find yourself duplicating what Tolkien did. And I didn't want to do
that. But I did love the idea of the quest, of trying to go somewhere far, far away in order to set things right. I wanted it to be
more closely tied to our world. I didn't want it to be entirely a fantasy world. I wanted it to have a connection with our own
world. So that's sort of what I did.
Amazon.com:
Which would make the Dark Tower books more fantasy in your mind? Or what?
King:
I never paid any attention to that. I don't care what you call me as long as your check doesn't bounce. I have to feed my
family. I have to pay the light bill and all the other stuff.
A woman once came up to me in a supermarket down in Sarasota and said "I know you're Stephen King and it's wonderful,
blah, blah, blah, that you're a writer and that I'm standing here in the supermarket talking to you, but I don't read any of your
books and I don't see any of your movies because I don't like horror." And I said, "Well, what do you like?"
And she said, "I like that movie Shawshank Redemption." She said a few others, but I know she said that movie. And I said, "I
wrote that." And she said, "No you didn't." And I said, "Yes, I did." And she said, "No you didn't."
There's such a strong identification a public perception of me as a horror writer. But I think of The Dead Zone as a love story. I
think of Wizard and Glass as a love story. I've written some things that don't have any elements of the supernatural in them at
all. I just write what I write.
If you classify the Dark Tower stories as anything, I'd classify them as fantasy novels. But they're not high fantasy in the sense
that they don't deal with elves and warlocks and that sort of thing, but there is a witch. There are some really horrible sorts of
things, but there's also some high drama, I think. And there's a love story with Susan and Roland. There's a lot of different
things. And really that's what I think fiction should be. I don't like classifying things--just saying, we can put this guy in a pigeon
hole and that's the way it is. The people who read my stuff understand and fortunately there are enough of them so I don't have
to explain myself very often.
Amazon.com:
Do you consider the Dark Tower series your opus?
King:
Yep. I do. Each time I would stop, I would come back and say "This time it's going to be really hard and this time I'm
really going to have to dig and force myself to do the job." And every time it was like the story was just waiting to take me back
in. I would say to myself when I was working on it, "Why did I ever stop for as long as I did?" There's no real answer to that
except that when I finished each book there seemed to have to be a pause for the well to refill. And when I got to the end and
sat down to finish, I think it was in probably July of the year 2000, I'd had an accident and I was in a lot of pain. And that made
it physically more difficult than some of the other ones have been. But still, it's the greatest pain reliever in the world, to just go
into that other world. I love it.
Amazon.com:
Awhile back there were quite a few rumors circulating saying that you were planning to retire from writing
soon. How did these get started? And is there any truth to the rumors?
King:
I did an interview with a lady from, I think, The LA Times, and she said, "What's in the future?" I told her everything I
was doing, which at that time was finishing the Dark Tower books, and I was working on writing 13 episodes of a TV series
called Kingdom Hospital. I said, once I get those things done I'm going to push back because I've pretty well said everything
that I have to say. And she jumped from that and said, "You're retiring?" And I said, I've said pretty much all I have to say and
if that's retiring that's what I'm doing. So, the story came out. Stephen King is retiring...or whatever.
I can't see me reaching a point where I would stop working, because I really enjoy what I'm doing and it passes the time. I'm
entertaining myself. John D. MacDonald said that once. "I'm entertaining myself before I entertain anybody else."
But, having said that, I would say, in a way, having finished the Dark Tower, it puts a real bow on the whole package. It does
kind of summarize everything else. And I think, after that, that everything would be almost kind of like an epilogue to what I've
done with my life's work.
I think that I will slow way down in terms of publishing because, frankly a lot of it's a pain in the ass--the celebrity part of it,
having people recognize you. That's a direct outgrowth of all the publicity, which is a good thing as far as the publishers and
sellers are concerned because it means you have a high recognition factor. But if I want to go to a baseball game or go to
dinner, maybe it's not such a good thing. I mean, it's a double-edged sword. You go out and if the restaurant is full they find a
table for you, but then everybody comes up to the table and they want you to sign menus or something like that. It's not a very
private deal. It works both ways.
Amazon.com:
So will we see any other new Stephen King titles published between June's re-issue of The Gunslinger and
The Dark Tower in November, 2004?
King:
I have not started a new novel since finishing the Dark Tower novels. This is March. I finished the last one, I think, in
October. This would be an ordinary fallow period for me anyway. I have some ideas, but not anything I've started to work on
yet. I think the Dark Tower novels will be published and then you might see a period of silence from me that would maybe go
from two to five years. But there would definitely be something, I think, unless I should keel over dead.
Amazon.com:
God forbid.
King:
God forbid. Oh yes.
Amazon.com:
Your ghost story Bag of Bones will please die-hard
horror fans, but there's a new tone in it. It's a romance,
but full of yearning; one feels the tug of time,
a bit like one does in Toni Morrison's Beloved or the novel
that helped inspire your book The Stand--Earth Abides.
Stephen King:
Yeah, the George Stewart book. There's a sadness in this book, a sadness and a
feeling of things passing, I agree. That sort of melancholy yearning--it's very hard to
talk about subjects like romance and lost love in an interview. It is a romance, and I
hope that it will fill you up emotionally.
Amazon.com:
It's scary, too. Now, Amazon.com is a two-way medium, and several
of our customers want to know this: Do your books ever scare you?
King:
It's funny, people will say, "Have you ever scared yourself when you write?" And my
response is always one of curiosity, to say to people, "Well, if you're ticklish, can you tickle
yourself in those ticklish spots?" And most people can't tickle themselves--it has to be from an
outside source. So I don't generally scare myself. I feel like I'm in control; I feel like I'm behind the
monsters that I create, where I can more or less see the zippers that run up their backs.
Amazon.com:
You have confessed to several fears over the years: the number 13, flying, Friday
the 13th, flying on Friday the 13th, as you once had to do. Scarily, it is on page 13 that Bag of
Bones's hero finds the emotionally significant book his late wife was reading, The Moon and
Sixpence, under their bed. You've also said you're afraid of the dark. Wasn't there a bit of
darkness in your own home that scared you in the midst of writing Bag of Bones?
King:
Well, the cellar stairway. There have been a few occasions when I have scared myself.
There's a scene in Bag of Bones where the main character, Mike Noonan, goes downstairs to
look for something in the cellar, and the door shuts behind him, and something begins to thump on
the wall insulation. And he realizes that he's with a spirit he can talk to by asking "yes" or "no"
questions, and the thing will thump once for "yes" and twice for "no." And I found myself visualizing
our stairway in our home, which has insulation on the walls--probably that's why [there's insulation
on Noonan's cellar walls]. So that now, whenever I go down that stairwell, I'm immediately
reminded of that scene in the book, and I'm afraid that the door's going to swing shut behind me
and the lights are gonna go out, and something's going to start thumping on the wall.
O-WOOO-hooo! Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!
Amazon.com:
One Amazon.com customer asks, "Which of your characters is most like the
nonpublic Stephen King?" Of course, really, they're all you.
King:
Sure, yeah. "You do the police in different voices," as T.S. Eliot says. [The original title of
The Waste Land was He Do the Police in Different Voices.] But Mike Noonan is probably as
close as you could get to me, even though I've been careful to distance myself from him. He's not
as successful, he has no children, his wife is dead, he has writer's block. But our take on what the
writing is about and how the writing works is very similar.
Amazon.com:
He's what you could have become if your wife, Tabitha, had not retrieved Carrie
from the trash, where you had thrown the manuscript. [This novel and Brian De
Palma's sublime film Carrie made King a star.]
King:
Uh-huh, that's right. And the other part of it is, if I were to identify most closely
with one of the villains, I'd never say that anyway. Writers are always lying, so you
really can't trust anything that I say!
Amazon.com:
One customer asks whether you know the story you want to tell from the
beginning, or does it come to you in the process of writing? Did you know this book's finale from
the get-go? Another customer praises Bag of Bones for its "scary, supernatural, and quite moving
ending"--he feels that some of your endings "drag on for days," but this one is "unusually tight."
King:
I think that reader is perceptive. I knew where I was going from the beginning and got a
clearer fix on that position all the time. But for me [chuckles] this is not an exact
science. A lot of times I feel like a guy who is shooting a missile from a silo in Iowa,
and you wanna land it down a chimney in Iraq, you know, on Jihad Street. You might
miss by three streets, or three blocks, but if you've got a big enough warhead, you get
it all anyway. Do you see what I mean?
[SPOILER WARNING: King is about to reveal the end of Cujo.] But you know, it's funny. Like when I wrote Cujo, I was positive that the little boy would live at the end. I had no intentions of writing a 350-page manuscript only to see this little kid die of heat stroke, and that's exactly what happened. So I don't feel entirely in control of the endings, and it's best to let the book ... the book's an organic thing, and you let it grow in the course of the telling. But usually I have a pretty good idea where I'm going.
Amazon.com:
Amazon.com customers' most common question is, when are you going to finish the
Dark Tower series? In fact, when Newsweek calls Bag of Bones your "most
romantic book," it may be right, but its 1997 predecessor, The Dark Tower IV:
Wizard and Glass, is a love story too. How does it compare with Bag of Bones?
King:
Wizard and Glass is a kind of Romeo and Juliet story [about] what it's like to
be 16 years old and deeply in love--sexually, spiritually, mentally, the whole thing.
Mike Noonan is 40, and his wife has died four years before, at 36, so this is a more mature love
relationship.
Amazon.com:
And after Mike's wife, Jo, dies, life blindsides him with a beautiful young widowed
mother in terrible danger.
King:
People think they sorta had the kid stuff--you know, the romance, noon-June-spoon, and all
the rest of it--so that sometimes when romance comes again, it comes as a complete surprise. And
it's much more uplifting 'cause you feel so grateful to have a return. It feels like a new spring when
you didn't expect it to happen.
Amazon.com:
One Amazon.com fan of Dark Tower is afraid you're no spring chicken. "At six
years per book, that's another 23 years," she writes. "Does he really think he's going to live long
enough to finish the series or is he going to do a quicker job, or is he just going to leave us serious
Dark Tower fans without an end to our favorite story?"
King:
Yeah, I'm going to do a quicker job. I think that I would have a better-than-even chance of
living 23 years--that would still only make me 74! So the question is, how long can you go before
you start to lose the snap off your curve and the jump off your fastball?
Amazon.com:
Is that the same reason you've been pulling all these surprises lately? A serial novel
(The Green Mile); weirdly divergent versions of the same story (Desperation, The
Regulators); your strange, history-making, big-money deal with your new
publisher--isn't it all basically just a way to make it more interesting?
King:
Yeah, it is. It is. And as far as the Dark Tower books, my schedule is: I've
done Bag of Bones, which I think of as a novel and a half, 'cause it's a gothic and it's
got buckets of plot. And there's a book of four new pieces of fiction next year called Hearts in
Atlantis. And then there's a book called On Writing, which is a memoir of my early life, and the
rest of it is almost a textbook about how to write, or at least how I do it. And beyond that are the
three Gunslinger [Dark Tower] books, which I'm gonna write as one book.
And beyond that, I really don't have any plans to publish anything. I always intend to write, but I
do think that I've gotten to the point where I'm reaching the limits of my ability to publish stuff
confidently and feel that I'm still doing original work, fresh work; and I feel that, ah, the water
coming out of the well is nice and clean. I started to see some air in the pipes, and that means that
it's time to either quit or drastically curtail what I'm up to. I've got to rest. I've worked a lot.
Amazon.com:
"My question for Mr. King would be: Does he consider himself a religious or
spiritual man?" writes one Amazon.com reader. You've said that your problem with Stanley
Kubrick's The Shining stems from his cold unbelief in God.
King:
Yeah, I think of myself as both religious and spiritual. I don't go to church; I don't believe in
organized religion. Sometimes it makes me nervous, 'cause they want people to behave in a certain
way, and all walk in lockstep. I think that with a lot of churches, the hidden agenda is fascism. The
first step toward any kind of religious identity is believing that there is a God, and the second step is
understanding that you're not him. For anybody who looks at the way the world interlocks, it's very
difficult not to believe that there's a watchmaker somewhere.
Amazon.com:
Here are a few quick questions from our subscribers. If you could have coffee with
anyone, living or dead, who would it be?
King:
I'd like to maybe have coffee with Lee Harvey Oswald and just say, "Now, c'mon, Lee, just
between us guys, tell me the truth: Did you do it? And did you do it alone?"
Amazon.com: Which book do you wish you'd written?
King:
Lord of the Flies, by William Golding.
Amazon.com:
Which song do you never want to hear again?
King:
"Hotel California," by the Eagles. I could also do without hearing "Seasons in
the Sun," by Terry Jacks [found on Seventies].
Amazon.com:
One presence who looms large in Bag of Bones is the blues singer Sara Tidwell.
What did you listen to while writing the book?
King:
I did listen to some rhythm and blues on the rewrite, but when I actually wrote the book, I
was listening to a lot of George Strait [Carrying Your Love with Me], real shit-kickin' music. It
was great. Shania Twain, the most beautiful midriff in America [Come on Over].
Amazon.com:
An Amazon.com customer asks whether your wife, Tabitha King, was interested in
writing before you met, and do you influence each other's writing?
King:
I met her at a writing seminar, and I thought she was the best writer in that seminar, including
myself, because she knew exactly what she was up to. She understood what syntax was, and she
understood the various building blocks of fiction and poetry in a way that a lot of the other writers
didn't. They wanted to go off into metaphysical frenzies about how they were freeing the voice in
their soul and a lot of bullshit like that.
I have a tendency to keep manuscripts to myself until I've finished a first draft, and she generally
does the same, so that the first reader of any book of mine is Tabby. She makes comments; I listen
very carefully.
Amazon.com:
Did she have any influence on Bag of Bones?
King:
Oh, sure, from the very jump. When it opens, Jo Noonan dies coming out of the pharmacy,
and in the first draft all she had in her purse was her ordinary rickrack and a piece of candy--the
last thing that she'd bought on earth before dying. And Tabby said to me, "She's pregnant. What if
she had a home pregnancy test in there?" I said, "That'd be fantastic!" So immediately I dumped it
in there.
Amazon.com:
You married the right woman.
King:
I did, I married the right woman, sure.
Amazon.com:
One last question from an Amazon.com customer: How do you want your epitaph
to read?
King:
Um--"Husband. Father. Writer."
Amazon.com:
You wrote in Night Shift, "If the story holds you, all else can be forgiven." Is there
anything you should be forgiven for?
King:
Oh, I'm not gonna ask forgiveness for anything. I guess if there's anything I
regret, it's having published Rage, which is about a kid who carries a rifle to school
and shoots people. I feel like I don't think it causes anybody to do that, but I think in
several cases it's been what arson inspectors call an "accelerant." And I've now
withdrawn it from publication. And all I can say in my own defense is, I had no idea at the time. I
don't think anybody did.
But otherwise? Nah, fuck 'em if they can't take a joke
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