Stephen King and Rainy Summer Days
The Childe Roland? Come back when it's the Adult Roland damn.
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“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.” These words open Stephen King’s eight book – well eight book and one short story – epic The Dark Tower. Started in 1982 with The Gunslinger and finished in 2012 with the prequel The Wind Through the Keyhold, The Dark Tower is Stephen King’s magnum opus. In addition to selling millions of copies in multiple languages, the series has spawned one truly awful movie, a failed Amazon TV show, and several comic adaptations. Fortunately, the failure of the filmed adaptations has not lessened the impact of the novels themselves. Or at least it shouldn’t. The series dabbles in countless genres, mixing King’s usual horror, with noir, western, science-fiction, and fantasy to name just a few. It references many of King’s other works, borrowing characters, settings, and themes from his vast oeuvre. King himself is even a character in the books. The books do all this without every getting *too much* up their own ass, or impossible to read for those not intimately familiar with King’s work.
The story of The Dark Tower is a deceptively simple one. The Gunslinger aka Roland – think tall, dark, handsome cowboy type – and his compatriots, Jake, Oy, Susannah and Eddie try to make it to The Dark Tower, a building at the center of the universe. Of course, countless adventures, roadblocks, trains that give riddles, robot hunters, vampires, and giant spiders all try to get in our hero’s way. You’ve got to have all those things if you want to have an eight-novel series that’s mostly about people walking. As with all King books, the best part about isn’t the plotting, but the characters. King’s strength is creating characters with rich inner lives, and detailing the way they change and grow throughout the series. The Dark Tower is filled with a full cast of well-drawn and fully-fleshed out people. It’s through these characters that King creates a universe worth reading about.
The Dark Tower, of course, is not without its flaws. King continues to be bad at writing black women who aren’t complete stereotypes, though Susannah Dean eventually gets better throughout the series. The series also loses a little steam by the sixth book, though it is still very enjoyable. The later books can also get a little self-consciously meta, but never enough, at least in my opinion, to ruin the whole thing. There are also a lot of references to specific 80’s pop culture that I did not get. But don’t let any of this stop you from reading them. Like all King books they read quick enough and move quick enough that if you ever don’t like a specific section, you can be assured that in a paragraph or two something else will happen, or a new character will get involved and you’ll be hooked again.
All the above is only incidental to what I want to talk about. Yes, I am doing this rhetorical thing again, where I sort of switch topics halfway through. It’s all I have. Why I really like The Dark Tower is that it’s the perfect series to read on a rainy summer day. Rainy summer days are one of life’s joys. Especially when you’re between the ages of 12-18 and are lucky enough to not have to work a summer job. Not being able to play or hang outside during the summer might not seem like fun, but the occasional break that rain and thunderstorms can provide were quite welcome when I was kid. Sitting inside, watching the storms come in, curling up on the couch, it was all quite comfy. They’re the best days for reading. I’m hardly the first to think or say this. There are whole Instagram accounts devoted to people posting about their rainy-day reading practices. I’m sure Etsy has a treasure trove of stuff related to sitting on your couch drinking tea and reading a book while it pours outside. That seems like a very Etsy thing to do.
While I am not the first person to suggest that reading while it’s raining is nice, I am the first person to suggest that Stephen King/The Dark Tower is best read while it’s raining. Or at least I’m going to pretend that I am because I absolutely do not want to find out that someone has already done this bit. That would be devastating. Whatever the case may be about the originality of this newsletter, the point stands. People, I think, would argue that King should be read in the fall, or winter. These are traditionally the “spooky” seasons. Both times are when things start to die, or are already dead. The rotting of leaves, the tiniest bit of fear that comes with Halloween, the bare branches of February, these things all seem perfect accoutrement to a King book. That’s all fair enough. Whom amongst us hasn’t been spooked while reading/watching The Shining on an October night? Despite all of that however, I argue that a summer rain is the best time for King, and The Dark Tower.
However cozy it might be, there is something off about rain storms during the summer. Summer, in the gestalt psyche of the United States at least, is about being outside, enjoying nature, and the bounties the outside has to offer. Camping, hiking, swimming, fishing, these are all summer activities. Rain forces us inside, to abandon the activities that define summer. It makes the world not as it should be. Of course, rain is natural, and a very important part of the life cycle. Without it we’d all be dead. But thanks to the various cultural forces that have shaped most of my reader’s lives, rain during the summer just doesn’t feel right. It feels off. And that’s what it pairs so perfectly with King’s works. King creates and envisions worlds where things are off. There’s something around every corner that shouldn’t be. A person, a thing, a place, something is always off in the world of King. This is doubly true for The Dark Tower. The whole universe is crumbling. And when there’s rain instead of sun outside your window, thunder instead of laughter, it feels like you too are fighting the end of the world, trying to survive in the face of an endless apocalypse, fighting valiantly but fruitlessly against the slow decay of civilization.
So, next time it rains, skip whatever Netflix show you’re watching and check out The Dark Tower. You won’t be disappointed.
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