The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger (1982)

My big plan to do "in progress" posts for each book is kind of running out of gas. For anyone who cares, here is what I was thinking about 50 or so pages into this book:

"I really have no idea what any of this is about, so you'll be getting "straight from the gut" reactions here. So far, the book is a Russian nested doll and if I'm tracking things correctly, I've just read a story within a story within a dream. Is this Inception? Does time flow backward? Is the whole book going to be like this?"

So we are just going to move ahead to the finished book post and you can carry that confused snapshot with you throughout the rest of this.

It only took me until now to finally read a Dark Tower book! Stephen King frequently states that he regards this series as one giant book. The rest of the volumes are way bigger than this one, so there is much work to be done. Some of the reviews I've read about this, the opening "chapter" of the megabook, is that we should not judge it too harshly. It is different than everything that comes after it. For one thing, it is actually five short stories, with at least the first one long enough to qualify as a novella. These stories were all previously published in somewhat altered forms in the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in the late 1970's and early 1980's. I can only imagine what any reader that missed the previous installments was thinking reading these stories back then. Also, from what I can tell, King himself cleaned up the original version of this book to make things a little more consistent. It wasn't done to Stand-like proportions, so I'm not too worried about what changed. However, I was a little surprised to find out that the five stories do not differ substantially from how they appeared in F&SF, meaning the we aren't flashing back into the story proper; the original story treats it as a flashback as well. There is essentially no added connective tissue for the sake of making the book flow. This is to say the book does flow in spite of five different publications. Better for the book readers like me than the magazine readers, I suppose.

Going into this, I knew pretty much zilch about the Dark Tower. Although, thanks to hearing a few things on a podcast and seeing a movie trailer well before approaching this book, I sort of knew what was going on here. For the uninitiated, this book literally drops the reader in the middle of nowhere. I'm not misusing the word "literally". It is the middle and it is nowhere. As I wrote it my halfhearted progress report, the first story, the novella "The Gunslinger" is something like three flashbacks nested in one another. Although it shows a writer like King flashing some mad skillz, it is quite confusing. On the other hand, it does get us out of the middle of nowhere, as I don't think anybody needed or wanted 90 pages of chases in a total desert.

Two other stories, "The Way Station" and "The Slow Mutants", also turn on flashbacks. The non-flashback content, as the titles appear to indicate, is a bit ho-hum. The flashbacks, about Jake's previous life in New York City and Roland's in a fantasy novel respectively, are the meat of the story. If you don't care for flashbacks, "The Oracle and the Mountains" and "The Gunslinger and the Dark Man" stick to the present and reward readers who wondered what the big deal was with a magic jawbone. The present day stuff is a good deal more confusing than the flashbacks. For one thing, NYC is familiar territory for most, even if you've never been there. Roland's story is pretty much boilerplate fantasy. The scenes in the present make the reader wonder what the hell this "middle world" is. Did it used to be normal and turned weird? How does anyone get here. The point where Jake is sacrificed while they are traveling inside a mountain in the penultimate story nearly broke my brain. Was this some kind of subway station and our present is their distant past? How does a bridge get inside a tunnel? Are they in Wario's gold mine?!

Hopefully I'm not the only reader who walked away from all of this with more questions that answers, but I'm giving the book a wide berth. It needed a lot of tweaking (but not a full overhaul) from its original published form. It also never intends to stop at a satisfying point, as the next six books appear to indicate. Since it's one big book, the story will simply carry forward in the opening pages of The Drawing of the Three, published five years later. Therefore, I will not think of a witty closing line to this post, but rather just continue where I've left off here.

The Running Man (1987)

Although I've experienced some pretty awful movies done in the name of Stephen King, I think this is the first full-blown "action" movie of the project. If your movie features a pre-Twins Arnold Schwarzenegger, then I guess it is kind of a requirement. And of course, with an action movie, you get lots of corny one-liners, and this movie is full of them.

On the scale of 0 to Lawnmower Man of how much this movie deviates from the book, I'd give this an 8 or 9. It feels like an adaptation done by somebody who read the tease on the back cover and ran with it. Where the book is more like "The Fugitive", the movie fashions itself as "Smash TV", the hit arcade game of 1990, crossed with "American Gladiators". In fact, this movie was a big influence on that game. Where the book focuses on the grim dystopia of the outside world, the movie struts the glamour of the studio, barely acknowledging the crummy world it exists in. On the other hand, while reading the book was a bit of chore, the movie, while not good, was fun in its own ridiculous way.

The Ahnold version of Ben Richards is not a regular guy. In fact he's a straight up hero and police officer with a good heart that the system decides to crush. He does not enter the game willingly, but rather gets put in after his ultimately-unsuccessful prison break. Just to make sure nobody thinks he's a hero, they show the audience doctored surveillance footage of him massacring (not saving) hundreds of innocent people in Bakersfield (???) that looks suspiciously like the first scene of the movie. I guess they have super sophisticated cameras. The game itself isn't a real-world hide-n-seek game, but a real-life video game where the contestants fight "boss"-grade characters to their deaths. Judging from the rather horrified reaction of these bosses getting killed, it seems like they usually win. In fact, any incident of a contestant winning is quickly proven to be patently fake. Of course against all these odds, Ben Richards does not die, not by his own hand or those of others. Instead he bests the hopped-up American Gladiators (including Jesse Ventura, as a reluctant fan-favorite), beating not only the game but launching a revolution over everything wrong in the world. It's a feel-good finish, but not exactly original.

I can't leave this without a couple casting notes. First off, there is no way you can watch classic Family Feud after seeing Richard Dawson in this, and I mean it as a compliment. The guy best known for kissing female contestants in ways that would invalidate any potential run for the Democratic presidential nomination is dropping F-bombs and stage managing on-air death like a stone cold gangster. For all the failings of the movie, Dawson's casting was a stroke of brilliance. On a smaller note, Mick Fleetwood plays a guy named Mick who seems pretty bummed that bands like Fleetwood Mac aren't around in this parallel hell-world. I'd say he's probably pretty happy with our boring wold of tepid reality television, or at least consoling himself with the take from the latest world tour.