Stephen King doesn't need much in the way of an introduction as of this writing. There's bound to come a time when that may change. When it does, it will be necessary for proper introductions, if anyone ever decides to get reacquainted with the author and his writings. For the moment, however, we live in a time lucky enough when a goodish enough majority of the audience not only has a workable a familiarity with King, it's also still possible to agree upon a number of facts about the kind of work he does. His life itself reads like the 20th century equivalent of an American Dickensian novel. He was born the proverbial poor kid from the wrong side of the tracks. His dad left him and his mom one night to "go get a pack of smokes" and never came back. King doesn't dwell too much on it in real life, and yet it reverberates through his fiction, especially in the writer's treatment of fathers and father figures.
His major literary influences could also be described as regional. He grew up in the Northernmost half of the eastern United States. His home was and remains the sate of Maine, to be exact. It's one of those factoids that's destined to pop up from now until eternity in every literary dictionary. It's just one of the things most people are aware of, and yet only a handful will ever understand the true meaning of. The crucial thing about it is that being raised as a Northern Yankee has given King a very important, and specific set of literary influences.
It turns out he wound up coming of age in a very storied part of the Country. If he's a kid from the wrong side of the tracks, then it makes sense to claim that authors like Nathaniel Hawthorne were (in a sense) some of his closest neighbors. What I mean is that one of King's most vital influences were the impressions left on his mind by his local surroundings. He was there to witness a lot of the same kind of phenomena as that observed by the writer of such books as The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables. Much like King's work, Hawthorne's writings concern the sometimes insular natures of small, New England towns. Also like his more famous literary descendant, Hawthorne's writings reveals all the ways in which his neck of the literal woods can be described as haunted. Sometimes these ghosts of the past prove to be quite literal. And just as in works like The Shining or Salem's Lot, it turns out that sometimes ghosts can have teeth, and they bite. What brought about this train of creative thoughts turns out to be the same one's as King's. Each writer grew up in the same New England milieu. This means that both King Hawthorne spent their formative years observing, learning about, and later on, rebelling against the kind of ingrained trace remains of their shared Puritan heritage.
This aspect of their lives, in particular, seems to be more or less the heart and origin of their equal artistic abilities to deliver the good frights. I think all American Gothic fiction keeps circling back to its birth place in some way or another. In this case, it was all down to the crimes and atrocities committed by the Plymouth settlers in the early years of this Nation's history. Their acts of violence, first against Native, then African Americans, and finally themselves are what helped to create what might be termed America's original sin. This is the matrix, or historical frame of reference which helped determine the face of the modern Horror story. It's what helps explain the constant lingering presence of some dangerous past fault exerting an often deadly influence on the present action of the ghostly tale. It might be considered the genre's grand motif, and it's something King still appears to be very good at. And it all came about, not just for him but for all of the best writer's in the scare business because once upon a time, the "Pilgrims" forged for this Nation it's collective sense of guilt and fear. These are the notes that Stephen King has been most famous for playing on during the course of his entire career.
To this day it remains his greatest strength as a writer, and it's what's brought him the fame he enjoys now. The Horror genre has become the norm which King has established for himself. He's so synonymous with the genre, in fact, that it's noticeable whenever he deviates from it in any way. It's not something he does often. If that were the case, he would never get lumped in with all the things that go bump in the night. Instead, it's more like a side hobby he's tried to indulge in on occasion. The most notable example of these occasional detours is a series known simply as
The Dark Tower. I'll at least
try and explain what this idea is in a minute. Perhaps the best way to go about that is by asking where the writer even got the idea for such a concept in the first place? This is the way King describes how he got his inspiration for what has to be one of the most obtuse notions in the history of literary fiction.
"Hobbits were big when I was nineteen...There were probably half a dozen Merrys and Pippins
slogging through the mud at Max Yasgur’s farm during the Great Woodstock
Music Festival, twice as many Frodos, and hippie Gandalfs without
number. J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings was madly
popular in those days, and while I never made it to Woodstock (say
sorry), I suppose I was at least a halfling-hippie. Enough of one, at
any rate, to have read the books and fallen in love with them. The Dark Tower books, like most long fantasy tales written by men and women of my generation (The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, by Stephen Donaldson, and The Sword of Shannara, by Terry Brooks, are just two of many), were born out of Tolkien’s.
"But although I read the books in 1966 and 1967, I held off writing. I
responded (and with rather touching wholeheartedness) to the sweep of
Tolkien’s imagination—to the ambition of his story—but I wanted to write
my own kind of story, and had I started then, I would have written his.
That, as the late Tricky Dick Nixon was fond of saying, would have been
wrong. Thanks to Mr. Tolkien, the twentieth century had all the elves
and wizards it needed. In 1967, I didn’t have any idea what my kind of story might be, but that
didn’t matter; I felt positive I’d know it when it passed me on the
street...
"I think novelists come in two types, and that includes
the sort of fledgling novelist I was by 1970. Those who are bound for
the more literary or “serious” side of the job examine every possible
subject in light of this question:
What would writing this sort of story mean to me? Those whose destiny (or ka, if you like) is to include the writing of popular novels are apt to ask a very different one:
What would writing this sort of story mean to others?
The “serious” novelist is looking for answers and keys to the self; the
“popular” novelist is looking for an audience. Both kinds of writer are
equally selfish. I’ve known a good many, and will set my watch and
warrant upon it.
"Anyway, I believe that even at the age of nineteen, I
recognized the story of Frodo and his efforts to rid himself of the One
Great Ring as one belonging to the second group. They were the
adventures of an essentially British band of pilgrims set against a
backdrop of vaguely Norse mythology. I liked the idea of the quest—
loved it,
in fact—but I had no interest in either Tolkien’s sturdy peasant
characters (that’s not to say I didn’t like them, because I did) or his
bosky Scandinavian settings. If I tried going in that direction, I’d get
it all wrong.
"So I waited. By 1970 I was twenty-two, the first strands
of gray had showed up in my beard (I think smoking two and a half packs
of Pall Malls a day probably had something to do with that), but even
at twenty-two, one can afford to wait. At twenty-two, time is still on
one’s side, although even then that bad old Patrol Boy’s in the
neighborhood and asking questions.
"Then, in an almost completely empty movie theater (the
Bijou, in Bangor, Maine, if it matters), I saw a film directed by Sergio
Leone. It was called The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, and
before the film was even half over, I realized that what I wanted to
write was a novel that contained Tolkien’s sense of quest and magic, but
set against Leone’s almost absurdly majestic Western backdrop. If
you’ve only seen this gonzo Western on your television screen, you don’t
understand what I’m talking about—cry your pardon, but it’s true. On a
movie screen, projected through the correct Panavision lenses, TG, TB, & TU is an epic to rival Ben-Hur.
Clint Eastwood appears roughly eighteen feet tall, with each wiry jut
of stubble on his cheeks looking roughly the size of a young redwood
tree. The grooves bracketing Lee Van Cleef’s mouth are as deep as
canyons, and there could be a thinny (see Wizard and Glass) at
the bottom of each one. The desert settings appear to stretch at least
out as far as the orbit of the planet Neptune. And the barrel of each
gun looks to be roughly as large as the Holland Tunnel.
"What I wanted even more than the setting was that feeling of epic, apocalyptic size.
The fact that Leone knew jack shit about American geography (according
to one of the characters, Chicago is somewhere in the vicinity of
Phoenix, Arizona) added to the film’s sense of magnificent dislocation.
And in my enthusiasm—the sort only a young person can muster, I think—I
wanted to write not just a long book, but the longest popular novel in history. I did not succeed in doing that, but I feel I had a decent rip; The Dark Tower,
Volumes One through Seven, really comprise a single tale, and the first
four volumes run to just over two thousand pages in paperback. The
final three volumes run another twenty-five hundred in manuscript. I’m
not trying to imply here that length has anything whatsoever to do with
quality; I’m just saying that I wanted to write an epic, and in some
ways, I succeeded. If you were to ask me why I wanted to do that, I
couldn’t tell you. Maybe it’s a part of growing up American: build the
tallest, dig the deepest, write the longest. And that head-scratching
puzzlement when the question of motivation comes up? Seems to me that
that is also part of being an American. In the end we are reduced to
saying It seemed like a good idea at the time (web)".
There's the actual truth of where he got this particular idea from, for better or worse, and I don't know how much or little that helps matters. The very ironic truth of the matter appears to be very much as King says. Perhaps this explains why it's so difficult to describe in any coherent way. It might also be an explanation of why it both took so long for Hollywood to try and adapt the author's concept to the big screen, and why the final results turned out to be such a shambles. Let's take a closer look.
