Maybe everything you know about addiction is sterile. Maybe, like me, you grew up with addicts whose drug or vice of choice later killed them. Maybe you've read articles or books, or seen two-dimensional movies about "junkies".  Maybe you think Robert Palmer was correct in announcing he was "addicted to love", and you've written your own stories about how being in love is like being addicted to heroin.

We're all wrong sometimes.

After a terrifying prologue where Roland, the protagonist from The Gunslinger, has The Worst Day At The Beach Ever, Stephen King brings the story to 1980s New York, and begins one of the greatest fictional works on addiction that I've read. It's neither romanticized, nor condemned. It's just a story about crime and addiction. 

While the mob, and the police portions of the story are intriguing, and probably thoroughly researched (or else he just pilfered from the best crime movies and tv shows), there is no doubt that he Knows addiction. 

If you can read The Prisoner part of the book, and honestly believe you are "addicted to playing Candy Crush", please Never Talk To Me.

Can you love a person who saved you if you know that the act of saving you was necessary for them to save themselves?

Can you love a person who takes you away from everything you've ever known, even if everything you've ever  known was toxic?

Should you try and save a person you don't love merely because they once saved you?

This section shouldn't work. Stephen King has proven repeatedly that he doesn't understand how to write women or people of color. The idea of a white dude in the 1980s writing about a woman of color having Dissociative Identity Disorder in such a way that part of her is a rich, refined political activist, and the other is an angry delusional woman who speaks like a racist parody of a Black Woman is troubling. It will probably bother you right up to the point where her speech is explained. It may still bother you after that point. I don't know your life. But I was relieved and satisfied by the way the story explained it, in a manner that Stephen King books do not always relieve or satisfy me with their justifications.

This section, too, is a story of addiction and crime, but told in a very different fashion,from a very different perspective. I was surprised how much I enjoyed it.

Can you love someone you can never trust?

Can you love someone who seems to be two different people?

Is there love at first sight?

Can you love two people who hate each other?

What if they are in the same body?

If you need another person to feel whole, are you a person worth loving?

Did-a-chuck?

A friend of several of my friends has a tragic addiction story. After a particular trauma, they ended up in the hospital with a not so promising chance of survival. The family came for support. The friends who had tried to keep them clean came for support. The acquaintances who wished they'd been better at seeing the impending trauma came for support. It was a community effort of people supporting the victim and each other.

Then the person who supplied the instruments of trauma came for support, and a wise friend of the victim chased them out of the hospital before the family of the victim murdered him.

It takes a strong person to protect The Pusher, be it a drug dealer, a loanshark, a domestic abuser. The Pusher is the person who sets someone else on a path of ruin. Be it someone who knowingly destroys the life of someone who loves them, or a complete stranger who just enjoys hurting people. Often, the person who does this is given a tragic backstory to explain their behavior.  I appreciate that King does not waste time on The Pusher in this book. He is not to be pitied, or explained. He is a terrible part of life who has repeatedly hurt people Roland cares about. And he is dealt with.

Remember in middle or high school when you had to read a book that had been made into a movie? How you could get The Cliff Notes and watch the movie and fake your way through 80% of the class discussion? That shit won't fly here.

Creepy twin girls? Not in the book. Elevator full of blood? Not in the book. All Work And No Play Make Homer Go Something Something? Not in the book. Hedge maze? Nope. Jack Nicholson axing his way through the bathroom door? Not so much. 

If you've seen the movie, but not read the book, you may wonder at the wasps  in the above picture. Read the book. 

The Shining is not the Oh Shit Jack Nicholson Is A Scary Trucker Fucker Horror Story you might expect. In fact, the best parts of the book focus on a young couple doing their best to stay together when divorce seems like the healthiest option. It's about last chances, and staying together for a child. It's about how even when you conquer your biggest failings, they will always be a part of your life that you can't forget or forgive yourself for. It's about being human. And not in that Watch These Poor Humans Get Slaughtered way that you expect from horror.

I read this, originally, when I was in high school, and had zero memory of how much of the story takes place before they even get to the hotel. I didn't remember any part of the book taking place outside the hotel, at all. And while the crux of the book is being isolated in a hotel in winter, there are quite a few scenes where you, the reader, are let loose from the hotel, assured that there still exists a world outside the frozen wasteland of The Overlook.

I devoured the beginning of this book, and began to be less and less invested as The Overlook overtook the narrative. I didn't want to watch the supernatural unravel the family, as they were doing such  good job unraveling on their own. But when the slow unraveling gave way to The Great Unraveling, I was back to devouring it.  

Stray observations:

--The first time I read this, I was on break from school, and my family was staying at a hotel in Maine. It added a nice extra creepy layer to the experience, even though we were far from the only people in the hotel, and my father doesn't know how to play roque.

--I also saw the movie for the first time in high school, but don't remember it too clearly. As it was part of a Nicholsonfest where we also watched One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and The Witches Of Eastwick.

--The only time I rewatched the movie was in 2009, when I was heavily tripping. Going into the movie, I was afraid of having some horrible mental breakdown during the more horrific scenes, but I ended up spending the entirety of the movie mesmerized by how cool the carpets were in The Overlook Hotel. I didn't interact with the plot at all.

--I read just about all of the 679 pages of this book on the trip back and forth to work, or at night while cooking. That brings the total of pages read for this project  to 2,570. That's over Two Bibles, and this journey is way less likely to turn you into a preachy jerkface.

In September, I suggested a reading order for the extended universe of Stephen King's The Dark Tower, a series I loved, but hadn't read any of since Volume 7: The Dark Tower came out in 2004. I realized that I missed the characters from the series, and wondered if the reading order I suggested would really hold someone's interest all the way through. I scoured some local bookstores, and then the internet for the hardcovers of the books, and prepared for my quest to read a Super Long series of books. ​

Part 4 involved reading one of my least favorite Stephen King books, The Eyes Of The Dragon, which, sadly, I did not gain an appreciation for as I've aged. I hoped that The Gunslinger, the book that starts the official Dark Tower series, was as appealing to me as it was when I first read it. Short answer: No, BUT I enjoyed parts of it even more than I remembered. So, The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.

 I haven't seen the movie. I don't know that I ever want to see the movie But I will probably see the movie. 

Stephen King movies are not known for their excellence. Even so, the reviews for The Gunslinger movie were pretty terrible. The movie that's been inside my head since I first read it was so good that I don't want to have to reconcile it.

I don't think the first section of the book,  "The Gunslinger", has aged particularly well in either my memory or in the world of pop culture. The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed. is still a great opening line. And the scenes that focus on Roland and his journey through the desert still resonate.  The man with the raven scenes are great, but the focus of the first section, the flashback to Roland's time in Tull is a little grueling to read.

Like in The Stand, King's use of Christianity is clumsy and hard to read. I think, if King and I ever had a conversation, we'd agree on how we see Christianity, but I hate reading about it from his perspective. And that made the climax of the Tull flashback very difficult to read, as well as the final section, "The Gunslinger And The Man In Black".

But "The Way Station", "The Oracle And The Mountains", and "The Slow Mutants" is Stephen King at his best.  A Westernish fantasy tale (not scifi, this is straight post-apocalyptic fantasy) about coming of age in a dystopian society. Roland in a timeless barony that resembles The American West myths, and a boy he meets named Jake, who was in the process of coming of age in 1980's New York. The story of their fast forming bond, and their sharing of their upbringings and how they came to meet is worth rereading several times. Unlike the religious sections, King is able to express much of his character's intentions and personality through dialogue and plot developments.  The words in the three middle sections of the book seem as scarce as paper in Roland's world. There are no unnecessary adjectives, and the moral decisions don't involve religion just common human decency vs. the desire to achieve long-term goals.

Stray observations:

-- As I mention in the original post about reading this chronology, try and track down a printing of this book from before 2003. King decided to revamp The Gunslinger in 2003, and those his tweaks seem small, they do change your perspective on Roland. He appears to be trying to make Roland more heroic by giving him a more moral reason for his actions in Tull. Fuck that noise. You should know right from the get-go that Roland is willing to do anything to get to The Dark Tower. That he is mostly a hero is an accident of fate. From the outset of this series he was ruthless in his devotion to the quest, and King shouldn't have changed that anymore than George Lucas should have had edited New Hope so that Greedo shot first, or suggested that The Force wasn't a religious thing, but a scientific force that depended on midifuckenchlorians. Sometimes someone becomes heroic by doing shitty things for what they imagine is a noble purpose. I think the story is much more powerful when it doesn't give Roland a way to feel justified.

-- Forget a movie, the Roland/Jake/Man In Black portion of this book should have been a mini-series or part of a long-form television series. It's such a cool way to explore Roland's humanity, and the ability to crossover between worlds that is essential to the upcoming The Drawing Of The Three.

-- You really should read the first section, "The Gunslinger" for continuity purposes, and for the good parts. But feel free to skip "The Gunslinger And Man In Black" entirely, it's mostly just King being unnecessarily grandiose about the world he's building, and foreshadowing the events of The Drawing Of The Three. But it's not necessary, you're going to read the book, do you care that a character in the previous book tells you the major arc of the next book? 

--251 pages is Chump Change once you've flown through The Stand and suffered through The Eyes Of The Dragon, right? We're 1,891 pages closer to The Dark Tower than we were when we started.

In September,  I suggested a reading order for the extended universe of Stephen King's The Dark Tower, a series I loved, but hadn't read any of since Volume 7: The Dark Tower came out in 2004. I realized that I missed the characters from the series, and wondered if the reading order I suggested would really hold someone's interest all the way through. I scoured some local bookstores, and then the internet for the hardcovers of the books, and prepared for my quest to read a Super Long series of books. ​

In a helpful accident, the next portion of the Dark Tower chronology is a short story that is back to back with the previous version. I say it's an accident because Everything's Eventual the collection was arranged by shuffling a deck of cards. Lucky happenstance. It's not going to be apparent, even when you are finished that this is a Dark Tower story, but it's A Very Good Stephen King short story, and I found it to be the fastest read int he chronology so far.

I was expected to go to college right out of high school, so I did. But after one terrible semester, I moved back home...ish. I say home...ish because I moved into a condo that my mother owned but did not live in.

I immediately enrolled in the community college near me, and started a series of odd jobs: an after school program, managing a CD store, managing a liquor store, stage managing in a local theater, waiting tables, teaching swimming lessons. I had various spheres of friends who I would occasionally intersect into Venn Diagram parties that were sometimes epically fun, and sometimes just resulted in an epic cleaning project.

I never knew precisely what I was doing, but I always ended up doing something that I found interesting. And apart from a one-day stint as a telemarketer, I never felt morally repulsed by what I had to do for money.

"Everything's Eventual", the title story from this collection follows a high school dropout from his life working a menial job to a morally quagmirous job that allows him to live a comfortable life on his own.

It's not a horror story. It doesn't have a Western or apocalyptic motif. As I said in the preface, you might wonder how this ties into The Dark Tower at all. Trust me. You will see this character again. Eventually.

Unlike in The Eyes Of The Dragon, I don't insert this book into the chronology purely because the character shows up later. I think this is a solid story, and it's tonally different from everything that's come before it, and anything you're going to see for a while. 

If you've ever been young, unsure of what you were doing in your life, and had an opportunity that seems to good to be true dropped into your lap, you will likely identify with a portion of this story. If you haven't, you can probably at least understand being young and doing a questionable job for money. Though, hopefully, not to the extent of Dinky's job.

Stray observations:

-- There are a couple of scenes in this book which could portray a secondary character as creepy. I think it's to King's credit that the protagonist tells the reader straight up that he understands how the action could be perceived as creepy, but it wasn't creepy to him. It's especially helpful since the protagonist is problematic about sexuality in a total believable suburban teenager in the late 20th/early 21st century way. Unlike the racist language in The Stand, the problematic language is spare and is clearly to illustrate that this protagonist is not a piece-of-shit homophobe, he's just ignorant and has zero world experience.

-- If I had the power this kid has, and was offered the life that this job offers, I would probably have taken it, too. I, too, was an idiot when I was a teenager.

-- I'm slightly annoyed at how long it's going to be before this story is super relevant to the chronology, but trust me, it's best to read this now since it starts the page after "The Little Sisters Of Eluria", and reinforces that there are going to be powers in this universe. It's highly suggested that there regular humans have some powers in The Stand, but this is a very specific power that will be an important part of the later Dark Tower books. 

--Pffft....54 pages? That's the shortest hop yet. We're 1,640 pages into this beast. But who's counting?

In September,  I suggested a reading order for the extended universe of Stephen King's The Dark Tower, a series I loved, but hadn't read any of since Volume 7: The Dark Tower came out in 2004. I realized that I missed the characters from the series, and wondered if the reading order I suggested would really hold someone's interest all the way through. I scoured some local bookstores, and then the internet for the hardcovers of the books, and prepared for my quest to read a Super Long series of books. ​

When I created the chronology, I placed The Gunslinger as part 5, with "The Little Sisters Of Eluria" as part 6, a flashback. But, upon reading both of them, I think Little Sisters Of Eluria" is a better introduction to Roland. So, here we are, part 5, and it's time to meet to meet our protagonist. 

During my writing about The Stand, and coming back when I talk about The Gunslinger (I read it in my originally intended order, and started to write about it before composing this entry), I mention that I don't enjoy Stephen King's relationship to religion, particularly Christianity. It's usually exhausting, as he over-examines the importance of that particular Childrens' Book Club For Frightened Bigots.

And yet, "The Little Sisters Of Eluria" (from his short story collection, Everything's Eventual) is, at its heart, a story about using the symbolism of Christianity to overcome evil. And I like it. I don't love it. But I like it more than Mother Abigail's role in The Stand.

Like most of The Gunslinger, this is a Western motif with just a tinge of fantasy. Gunslinger finds a ghost town, but it's not as it seems. It's the premise of a thousand movies that my father watches on cable. It's also mercifully brief at sixty-six pages (throw a pinch of salt over your shoulder and show the sigul of the evil eye).

Because it's short, and because I never intend to give plot recaps or spoilers, I'll simply say that this is a better introduction to Roland than The Gunslinger, not because it's better written, but because it's significantly briefer, and I think it's important to get a glimpse of Roland now before we take another, also very brief, detour to see how The Dark Tower interacts with our world.

Stray observations:

--I enjoy that many of the allusions in this story read as foreshadowing in this continuity, though they were written as fan service, since this book came out between Wizard And Glass and Wolves Of Calla. 

--The brevity of this story seems so necessary after the previous two books. Enjoy it. While I don't think any of the other books are as long as The Stand, they're not short stories, either.

--This tiny morsel brings our Total Page Count on this journey to 1,586. A breeze!