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.

This may have been the first time I've ever read this book. I mentioned in my original post that I stopped reading it when I was younger because Anne Rice and the '90s had ruined vampire stories for me. But I said that "I didn't pick it back up until I was reading Wolves Of Callah over a decade later, and they referenced one of the characters from 'salem's Lot, so I put that book down and went back and actually read 'salem's Lot." Now I'm not so sure that I did. I think the ending I remember is from the flashbacks in Wolves of Callah and maybe Song Of Susannah? I had no idea who would live and who would die (apart from the character who resurfaces in the later books). I didn't remember almost any of the major characters or plot points. Happily, much like at the end of the previous book, when I was finished, I felt like it was my favorite book so far. And it's only the second of King's books ever published. One of the few that's older than me.  

​When interviewed about his role in Glitter: Ancient Vampires Love High School Girls With No Personalities, Robert Pattison was asked if he weren't in the movie, whether he would have enjoyed it. He said he "would have mindlessly hated it." 

It's easy to hate vampire stories, since there have been thirty years of bad television shows and movies where vampires all live sunny California for some reason, and prey on high school girls. At least, that's my assumption. Apart from "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" and "Angel", I haven't devoted any time to vampire shows. And I think "Buffy The Vampire Slayer: The Motion Picture" and "Once Bitten" were the last vampire movies that didn't bore me to sleep.

I read enough of Twilight to mindlessly hate it. It gave me flashbacks of the Anne Rice endless vampire saga, which I started to read in high school, and which completely lost my interest by the second book. Vampires are boring.

A good vampire story isn't about the guilty ancient dude (always a dude as the protagonist, female vampires are almost exclusively minor characters) torn by his past but needing to  feed on the living in order to survive. Good vampire stories are about the people trying to either kill or escape from the vampires. Which is why 'Salem's Lot is one of the best.

In The Shining, the first third of the book was about a failing marriage, and taking a job in order to survive. It was a people story. The horror aspect slowly crept in, but even then, the book isn't about the haunted hotel, it's about the family that falls apart in it. In 'Salem's Lot, the vampires a ridiculous possibility that can't possibly be the real problem until they are.

And when the vampires do come into play, they themselves aren't actually the frightening part of the book. The collapse of a small town, where a person must come to terms with the impossible as everyone around him disappears, is the scary part. Yea, yea, blood, garlic, inviting them in, crosses, holy water, they're all there, but they aren't why you read the story.  They're not why King wrote the story.

"Alone. Yes, that's the key word, the most awful word in the English tongue. Murder doesn't hold a candle to it and hell is only a poor synonym."  I'm sure someone else besides Anne Rice has written a story about how being a vampire is lonely and isolating and boo hoo hoo. They might even be entertaining. But unless you, yourself, are an ancient being who feasts on the flesh of yadda yadda yadda, it's much easier to identify with a human who feels alone because everything they know about life seems to be wrong. Vampires don't exist. There is no boogeyman in your closet. The people you love don't come back as monsters. How lonely would you feel if you had the horrible proof that vampires were alive and massacring the town you lived in? You knew no one would believe your incredulous story, and every time someone does believe you, they're turned. I find that possibility much more relatable, even though none of my dead friends have ever knocked on my window or bitten my neck deep enough to draw blood.

There's a scene coming up in It (my reading is ahead of my posting right now), where the writer character (of which there are many in Stephen King books, including 'Salems Lot), exasperated by an overly-intellectual creative writing course, asks " Why does a story have to be socio-anything? Politics...culture...history...aren't those natural ingredients in any story if it's told well? I mean...can't you guys just let a story be a story?"

Thus, I present you with this line from "just a story" about vampires in which King muses "The evil still went on, but now it went on in the hard, soulless glare of neon tubing, of hundred watt bulbs by the billions. Generals planned strategic air strikes beneath the no-nonsense glow of alternating current, and it was all out of control, like a kid's soapbox racer going downhill with no brakes: I was following orders. Yes, that was true, patently true. We were all soldiers, simply following what was written on our walking papers. But where were those orders coming from, ultimately? Take me to your leader. But where is his office? I was just following orders. The people elected me. But who elected the people?"

I'll take that kind of vampire story philosophy over Anne Rice's "Evil is always possible. And goodness is eternally difficult." any night.

Stray observations:

--I just remembered a time when I was  camp counselor and I was bitten on the neck enough to draw blood. I did get sick for a day, but a couple of state mandated shots seems to have staved off the vampirism. Though I do love rare red meat. And I do tend towards nocturnalism. Hmmmmm....

--Father Callahan is a fairly minor player in this story, but he has the most interesting journey. I'm glad he's the character who we will eventually get to spend more time with. 

--3,890 pages toward the tower. Where has everyone else gone?

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.

I reached a weird stumbling point in continuity, where I got about 250 pages into what I intended to be the eleventh book, It, and realized it was in the wrong place. I tried to barrel through it anyway, as I was enjoying it, but I had a weird mental block, and finally gave up to read the next book on my list: The Waste Lands. And it was while reading Waste Lands that I had a realization. Waste Lands, as an independent book, shouldn't exist. The first half of the book "Jake: Fear In A Handful Of Dust" really belongs at the end of The Drawing Of The Three. The second part, "Lud: A Heap Of Broken Images" is really the beginning of Wizard And Glass, so, for the chronology, I'm going to pretend that's the way it went down. So I recommend picking up Waste Lands right after finishing The Drawing Of The Three, but putting it down at the conclusion of "Jake: Fear In A Handful of Dust", and THEN reading Salem's Lot and It. I wouldn't normally suggest splitting up a book, but in this case, it makes for a much more satisfying narrative. ​

I am two men. In 1999, I lived on Cape Cod. As a responsible adult, I remembered to put my new insurance sticker on my license plate, and my car was never towed. I drove to Florida, where I lived for several years, selling fudge, and living with my boss's parents, until I got my own place. After five years, I decided to take my stories about selling fudge at the various renaissance and folk fairs, and become a writer who made money. I moved as far south as I could get, into The Keys. It wasn't quite like retiring. I still did three or four faires a year, and made and supplied the fudge, and later cupcakes, that my employees sold at the faires that I chose not to go to. I also opened a roadside alligator-focused restaurant.  By 2012, my partner and I still ran the restaurant, but I sold off the fudge/faire business to the son of the original owner. I should have been happy, but something always nagged me. Every time I heard the words "poetry slam", I would start to get heart palpitations. I refused to set foot in a comic book store.  I wrote a series of cultishly popular humorous memoirs under the name Scott Woods, infuriating a librarian in Columbus who I never met. I should have been happy, and I was happy, but there was also a feeling like some part of my life had gone awry.

What went awry was in 1999, I forgot to put my insurance sticker on my license plate, my car got towed with a full trunk of fudge. It took me a week to get the car back, at which point, I'd missed the first two days of the faire I was supposed to work, so I moved in with a friend in Quincy, and became a weekly regular at a poetry slam in Boston. I sold the car. I moved to Vermont. I moved back to Boston. I moved to Arizona. I moved back to Boston. My mother moved to Florida. I got a job in a comic book store. I got into an altercation with the owner when he suspended me for making a phone call to my father the week his wife died. I quit. I went to Florida, but only for a week to visit my mother. I got a job at a different comic book store. I continued to do poetry slam, years after it held any appeal to me. It was just a thing I was used to. And since I also tended bar at a poetry slam venue, it was just easier to keep going and collect money, even though it no longer made me happy.

Don't we all have these moments where we imagine our timeline should have diverged, and there is another version of ourselves living a life we feel we'd appreciate more?

But if that's true of us, then what about the people we impacted in the life we were currently living? There live would surely also be doubled. And ripple. And expand. And a cow farts in a flamethrower factory, and our wonderful life has to deal with the weird rise of President Harvey Weinstein. What a horrible, unimaginable world.

In "Jake: Fear In A Handful Of Dust" we deal with the doubling of The Gunslinger's world. In The Gunslinger, he encountered the boy, Jake, at a way station. Jake was from a New York, where he'd been hit by a car and somehow ended up in Roland's world. And, eventually, Roland let him die. In The Drawing Of The Three, we briefly encountered Jake again, as Roland ended up possessing the man who killed Jake, and thus, Jake lived. And thus, Jake never went to the way station. And, thus, The Gunslinger never met him. This paradox is slowly driving Roland crazy. And, in New York, it's also driving the not-dead-Jake crazy, as he remembers not only dying, but existing in another world that can't be real.

It's a nice balance to "The Lady In The Shadow" and "The Pusher" portions of The Drawing Of The Three, where a character with dual personalities induced by two traumas, committed by the same person who killed Jake, confronts her own duality and becomes an incredibly strong individual whose able to access and  shift between the strengths of her previously split personalities.

In that world where I am a cultishly popular writer living in The Florida Keys, I read this directly after The Drawing Of The Three, and didn't have a stray observations list. Lucky for you (and the real Scott Woods), in this world, I did read them out of order which allowed me to notice:

-- This book largely sets up It.

--This book introduces the concept of the Twelve Guardians Of The Beam, and The Beam is going to show up in almost every book left in the chronology.

--"See the Turtle of enormous girth, on his back he holds the Earth" probably isn't meant to imply that Terry Pratchett's Discworld series exists within this universe, but it does set up the references to "the Turtle" in It, a reference that starts early in the book, and, without this book prefacing it, doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense.

--Jake buys a book called Charlie The Choo-Choo, which now exists and can be bought in our world, but is one of Stephen King's creations (and its entire story is contained in this section of the book). The appearance of the book here, combined with Eddie Kaspbrack's encounters with the dying railroads of Derry, foreshadow a major portion of "Lud: A Heap Of Broken Images" and Wizard And Glass. 

--Jake's encounter with the haunted mansion is also a nice appetizer for the haunted house aspects of 'Salem's Lot, but it's an unimpressive callback, if you read 'Salem's Lot first. 

--for extra credit, you would read all of L Frank Baum's Oz books, and Richard Adams's Watership Down​ before you read this

--we are now 3, 240 pages along the path of Shardik The Bear