Teenage Death Songs (Christine, 1983)

Christine (1983)

I broke a thousand hearts 

Before I met you 

I'll break a thousand more, baby 

Before I am through . . . 

--George Thorogood and the Destroyers, "Bad to the Bone"

By the time Stephen King was finishing up his ninth novel (thirteenth if you count the Bachman books, so I suppose we should), it appears that the "Business of King" was already a well-oiled machine. According to Wikipedia, producer Richard Kobritz had his hands on the manuscript for Christine before it was even published. This explains, at least in part, how the hardcover was released in April of 1983, with the movie and first edition paperback following quickly on its heels in December of that same year. King's publishers and agent already knew the score, how to maximize profits and feed the fire while the work was still fresh off the press. 

Christine on the line.

Christine is set primarily during the narrator's senior year in high school (1978-9) and unfolds in three, linear acts. The first and last are from the perspective of popular jock Dennis Guilder, all-American teen athlete, while the second is in the third person, relating parts of the story that Guilder would largely have know way of knowing. The concept, well-known by now, is a simple one: It is a love story between a teenage drip and his very first, too-good-to-be-true, magnificently curvy first love. Of course the love in question is a red and white 1958 Plymouth Fury by the name of Christine. 

Arnie (Keith Gordon) clowns Roseanne (Kelly Preston).

Arnie clowns himself.

When we first meet Christine and her ill-fated, soon-to-be beau, Arnold Cunningham, neither one of them is anyone's concept of a hot date. Christine is a junked wreck slowly rusting to rot in her current owner's yard, Arnie is a classic nerd, his face a wreck of cruel, adolescent acne. Dennis and Arnie are childhood friends, joined at the hip, Arnie always with ideas on what to do with long rainy days, Dennis forever in the business of "keeping Arnie from getting killed." They're driving home from a summer job when Arnie spots Christine and harangues Dennis into going back to have a closer look at her. Dennis is less than enthusiastic. This is the nicest feeling he will ever have about Arnie's new girl, Christine.

Leigh (Alexandra Paul) gets the tour.

Bemis (Doug Warhit) and Dennis (John Stockwell) oogle.

Feather curls and argyle supreme.

The plot tracks across a field packed with adolescent and supernatural landmines alike, each with a touchy trigger and angled to explode. Arnie's parents hate the car immediately, Arnie must shelter her at the disreputable Darnell's Garage, and he soon runs askew the resident bully, Buddy Repperton, and his gang of miscreant mascots. As the school year begins, Arnie struggles with his parents, who are not accustomed to their good boy not only going against their wishes but continuing to do so while spending his college money on fixing Christine. Arnie and Dennis have a scary showdown with Repperton and his buddies in shop class, leading to the expulsion of Buddy and the suspension of the others. Despite everything going wrong for his friend, Dennis can see that Arnie is changing in some ways for the better. His face is clearing up, for one. And he stands up to Repperton in a way he never would have before.

But the biggest changes are yet to come. While Christine's refurbishment comes along back at the garage (in a sort of patchwork, wonky job where nonsensical things are repaired out of order, i.e. half the front grill, which is insane even to a layman), Arnie's face has cleared and he's even dressing better. He's got a new confidence and carries himself accordingly. In a turn of events straight out of high school fantasyland, Arnie lands the new girl in town, Leigh Cabot, a girl all the boys have lusted after ever since the school year began. It seems everything is coming up Arnie, even if his parents are forever in his shadow, even if no one seems to really like his car, not even his other girl, his new girl, Leigh.

 

Leigh unhappy in Christine.

Arnie irate.

Leigh really unhappy in Christine.

Things truly begin to turn darkward when Dennis Guilder is severely injured while playing football and is subsequently hospitalized for weeks, effectively "taking him out of the game" and life, and certainly dampening any efforts he may have made to keep Arnie from "getting killed" under Christine's dark eclipse of influence. Soon after Dennis is hospitalized, Buddy Repperton and his band of merry idiots trash the living hell out of Christine. Dennis and Leigh have already seen the shadowy side to the changes that have been happening to Arnie, but this is where the bottom drops out and the murdering begins.

Don (Stuart Charno), Buddy (William Ostrander), Rich (Steven Tash),
and Moochie (Malcom Danare) about to seal their fate.

Christine is one of the few King works I saw at the movies well before reading the book. My mom and her boyfriend took me and my friends to a wintery evening showing. The gaggle of giggling girls were all around eleven at the time, and I remember having a blast. The adults pre-gamed, buying popcorn and making fun of the premise, while we screamed, cawed, and cackled shrill and self-conscious, over-the-moon excited to see an R-rated movie about a demon car. We were still laughing and joking afterward, though solemnly agreed between hyperactive outbursts of unaccountable mirth that the chase scenes with Christine were very scary and very effective. There was spirited debate over whether a car could really squeeze into a smaller space to smush someone to death (we overzealously agreed it could not) and railed over how stupidly everyone in the movie behaved, like, Moochie, just jump up on the hood and tumble over the bitch? Buddy Repperton, don't run down the middle of the road? Climb a tree? Go high in a building???

A couple of years later, I was well into my King fandom when my aunt Sherry gifted me a worn-to-hell copy of Christine we just happened to find while garage sale-ing one weekend. The cover was nearly falling off and it looked as old and dilapidated as that first, early-eighties shot of Christine, but I didn't care. I was greedy for new King and thrilled to get my hands on it. 

Leigh and Arnie make peace.

Arnie sees Christine.

TRASHED. In the book, Arnie keeps her in long-term parking at the airport, 
but even within the confines of Darnell's Garage, you have to wonder why Christine
didn't leap to life the second they laid a hand on her. She's certainly more than 
capable of chasing down multiple targets and going to extraordinary lengths to 
kill her prey. Perhaps she knows that allowing Arnie to see her destroyed so
completely will forge their bond entirely, til death they do part.

The basic plot and outcomes are about the same from book to movie, but the method of death is different in almost every case. There's also a higher body count in the book. The biggest departure, by far, is the source of Christine's supernatural power and reach. In the movie, the LeBay selling is Christine is actually the brother (George) of the original owner, Roland LeBay. Roland LeBay's sad backstory remains the same (his kid choked to death in the car, his wife killed herself in the car), except he is haunted and hounded by Christine, trying at least once to get rid of her, only to have her find her way back to him weeks later. Eventually he kills himself in Christine, too, leaving her behind to his brother to do with as he can. It is George LeBay's great fortune that a starry-eyed geek lays eyes on her in passing one afternoon and never wants to break that gaze again. Christine's supernatural power to move on her own (and play very snarky, plot specific songs at people) started on the assembly line, "on the day she was born" to paraphrase the iconic song that introduces Christine at the beginning of the film.

The book is less clear on Christine's supernatural beginnings, though it seems she was decidedly spooky and could perform contrary to her construction from almost the beginning (four-wheel drive with no kit, the kid choking, the bad vibes). While she was probably imbued with some unnamable power, it was Roland LeBay's complete devotion to her that had lasting consequences, most critically upon LeBay's death, which occurs not long after Arnie purchases Christine. In the novel, LeBay's backstory is far less sympathetic, with the kid and the wife dying in the same exact way, and Roland seeming to care about little else than Christine. It is Roland who sells the car to Arnie, and it is from George LeBay (at Roland's funeral, apparently from natural causes) that Dennis learns the ugly history of Christine. Stories of an mean, violent childhood lead to one, enduring theme: Roland LeBay's "unending fury" and singular devotion to Christine.

In the book, Arnie's changes are the direct result of Roland LeBay spiritually taking over Arnie's living body. While Christine has always had some level of supernatural power, LeBay's "single-minded purpose" and "unending fury" make her into the self-healing, vengeful murder machine of every kicked and cursed teen nerd's darkest dreams. It is mildly annoying (and not at all surprising) that even a possessed car is not allowed the autonomy to be a fully realized, entirely competent she-demon from the deepest cracks of hell without some man coming along to steal her evil thunder. It's interesting to contemplate whether it was the moviemaker's decision to make Christine wholly empowered with vengeful avarice because she didn't need no damn man . . . or because it made the narrative simpler. Probably the latter, but it's fun to dream.

"Show me."

Christine begins.

Self-healing trickery.

I knew the adults found the concept of a possessed, killer car demented and silly, but I was at an age of spongey elasticity, with an imagination open to just about any weird idea. I loved the novel (and never thought twice about killer Christine's autonomy--I was 13 and completely unaware of my own). It felt somehow idealized and authentic at once, a picture of high school that fit my impressions of what it might be like, at the time still imagined from afar. Re-experiencing Christine now, the tropes are so very trope-y--the nerd, the jock, the beauty queen--but credit is due to that underlying authenticity, the voice of the teenager, that at least for the male characters, is dead on.

Do I have to rip King yet again for making a silly femme in Leigh Cabot? Nah. She's not the worst (see Firestarter, Vicky McGee), and while some her dialogue (both inner and spoken) is cringeworthy, she's not entirely flat. I also have to be cool about this because I listened to the audiobook of Christine this time around and it was read in a man's voice. We all know how I feel about the falsetto. It is just . . . no. More on the audiobook later.

When I was thirteen I did not care if Leigh Cabot sounded breathy or vapid or mildly idiotic. I'd seen Christine again on cable at a friend's house not long before reading the novel, and my impression of her had only solidified in the years between viewings. That first shot of Alexandra Paul walking down the hall with all eyes on her, shyly smiling at the boys staring as she passes, was forever locked in my mind as the epitome of Peak Validation. She was crushingly beautiful in her argyle sweater and knee socks, tall and athletic (my mind always translates bowed legs to athleticism), with hair so on-point perfect for the times I catapulted past green oceans of envy straight to the adolescent stars of idolatry. I wanted to be Alexandra Paul. I wanted her exact clothes. I wanted her high cheekbones, feathered hair, gorgeous doe eyes, pointy nose, pouting lips, and that dumbass O-expression of huh she brought to every confrontation with Christine. Reader, I practiced that shit. Gape-mouthed O with distressed damsel ditzyness. In the mirror. At school. In public. The shame.

Run, Moochie, run.

Cornered . . . but safe?

NOTSAFENOTSAFENOTSAFE.

Fuuuuuu-

The movie is well-acted, with some standard issue jokes and camp, and is far more sexist than the book, as was the norm for any teen-set movie in the 80s. While the movie retains some of the more memorable lines from King's novel, like when Arnie almost offhandedly tells Dennis how "part of being a parent is trying to kill your kids," a lot of the labor of crafting realistic teen characters gets flattened into those well-known stereotypes. Keith Gordon does a phenomenal job with hapless, scared, horn-rimmed Arnie, less so with avarice-stricken, demonoid Arnold held under the hypnotic glow of Christine's dashlights. John Stockwell is a believable Dennis, tending toward mildly amused, mildly annoyed, or mildly distressed. With Alexandra Paul adding that extra point to the teenage love triangle, they are visually and competently a perfect cast.

What the movie only skims is that tremendous churn under the outwardly mild waters of teenhood. Of course, plenty of parents would say "mild waters my EYE" to which I would plead patience. It is a wild time of rampant hormones and unhinged outbursts, but if you were anything like me and my friends, you know that you were keeping a lot of secrets and actively misdirecting parents and adults from what was really going on in your life and, most importantly, in your head. When Arnie makes the comment about parents trying to kill their kids ("As soon as you have a child, you see your own tombstone," he further elucidates), it is well before Christine's influence starts to infiltrate his personality. He's been dealing with overbearing parents his whole life. For the first time, ever, just on the brink of his last year of childhood, Arnie asserts his independence and refuses to budge. Later on, LeBay's personality overlays any independence Arnie had forged, but in the beginning it is his will standing against their once impenetrable front. The angst is well fertilized, deep rooted, and overdue.

Buddy outmatched.

Christine ablaze.

Easily the scariest shot of the movie.

One way or another . . .

. . . I'm gonna getcha getcha getcha getcha.

Buddy down. See the figure in the fire?

Char-broiled.

On the flipside, Dennis Guilder, the narrator of the beginning and end of the story, is a 22-year-old young professional relating events that happened when he was seventeen, just five years prior. Through his eyes the reader sees that inevitable, narrow track to which every child finds himself welded: grade school leads to junior high leads to high school, all the while stacking the rails with activities, clubs, and sports, resolving finally--in the middle-class world of Dennis, Arnie, and Leigh--to one, fated terminal: college. When Arnie threatens to drop his college prep courses if his parents do not allow him to register Christine, his parents--both college professors, naturally--see it as nothing short of leveling nuclear-grade threats at Arnie's future (and their status as parents). While extreme, Arnie knows it is the only thing that will get him what he wants from a strong-willed mother and a father who supports his wife unequivocally. 

For Dennis, the detonation and collateral damage that starts the day they bring Christine home has its own reality-shifting consequences. His closest friendship from childhood is strained, then fractured, and his relationship with the Cunninghams, a family he's grown up with and loves, becomes tense, sad, and estranged. His own well-oiled and dependable track toward a possible football scholarship is blown to hell when he is badly injured on the field, hospitalized, and essentially put on the sidelines of his friend Arnie's increasingly alarming circumstances, first with the wanton destruction (and desecration) of Christine, then with the steadily increasing and inarguably Arnie-linked body count. 

Dennis and Arnie have a heart-to-heart about true love.

"Let me tell you a little something about love, Dennis. It has a voracious
appetite. It eats everything. Friendship. Family. It kills me how much it
eats. But I'll tell you something else. You feed it right, and it can be a
beautiful thing, and that's what we have." (1)

Yet in the midst of all this stress, both mundane-but-future-killing and supernatural "but not in a fun way," Dennis Guilder is still a teenaged boy. This is most apparent when Leigh Cabot makes the scene. For all his smirking and scowling at ugly Arnie's instant obsession with double-ugly Christine, Dennis seems unaware of the fact that he is similarly smitten with Leigh from the start. King's young narrator spends an amusing-bordering-on-embarrassing amount of time extolling the angelic, perfect, too-perfect, beautiful, intoxicating, otherworldly attributes of Leigh Cabot. His eyes run lovingly over her curves just as Arnie runs his hands over Christine's fins. 

It would be easy to dismiss as overwrought and misguided "character" building, but to me it rang crystal true for that teenwired mind. In the midst of death, we are in Hornytown. Dennis Guilder may be experiencing some extraordinarily horrible things in this chapter of his young, middle-class, all-American life, but he's still got time to size up his best friend's girl and grow a boner.

The Final Showdown. Leigh is trapped.

Christine banged up.

This. I practiced this.

Dennis drives the dozer.

Arnie transformed.

Christine reborn.

There's also time to have awkward, half talks with parents who are just trying to understand what's going on with their son and his once-close, now so distant friend. There are wonderful respites of sibling torment, when Dennis steals his little sister's treats and teases her mercilessly as she volleys it right back. There is still time to be a teenager, which in and of itself can be an overwhelming journey, even without the possessed, murderous car full of gnarly ghosts riding shotgun. And there is still time to be short-sided, puerile, and flawed, as Dennis Guilder's entire narrative is threaded throughout with the unselfconscious fat-phobic shaming of a more narrow-minded, less mature perspective. You might try and say it was a sign o the times, but the ratio does not bear that out. By comparison to any other King work up to 1983, Christine's fat-bias is abundant and borderline embarrassing. I'd far rather believe this was a character device rather than some internal, self-hating manifestation of '83 King's subconscious.

Character flaws and unlikely villainous Plymouths aside, King's story of average American kids grappling with the homicidal rampage of a infernal Fury still bristles and shakes with hot thrills and guilty fun. 

Catapulted through Christine's window after another lunge for Leigh,
Arnie has one more jump scare in store for his ex.

One last caress goodbye. Y'all, there's a shot where his fingers linger
at the Plymouth's V and I seriously CAN NOT.

Teenage Death Songs.

Christine's odometer rolls back to zero.

But Dennis dozes her down. In the end, she ends up
cubed at the junkyard, finally defeated.


Or is she . . . ?

(All subsequent comments are reserved for the book)

Grade: B+ Classic King

Scary? (0-nope to 10-you will die): 6. It undoubtedly rates higher with other fans, and I do give a big hat-tip to the thriller aspect of the hunt-chase-kill scenes, but the scare factor is never going to exceed the mid-range for me as long as it has anything to do with "possession" or "devils." I am the person who laughs through The Exorcist and only gets mad that they made that little girl Linda Blair say and do those seriously horrifying things. I know, I know, I am only tempting the devil to possess me for my sass, but seriously, don't demons have more interesting prey to jump than me? Like, get over yourself no demon wants you. Also they aren't real. Except for the inner ones. Those effers are everywhere.

Warnings: Bigotry abound. Typical high school, mean-mouthed, dirt-kicking, low-class jibes. The adults do not fare better, with the low/poor and criminal class giving the high school kids a run for the money. All the terrible words are present, repeatedly. 

Artifact: The Internet Archive is under siege! As we speak, a syndicate of publishers is suing the IA for "copyright infringement," to which the IA has politely responded "bullllllllllshit." A brief summary of the conflict can be found here and the Internet Archive's full response can be found here. Wherever you fall on the open source spectrum (which the IA never has been, certainly not in the way the publishers would have you believe), it would be GREAT if everyone could finally and completely remove their heads from their asses and realize that we are in COVID TIMES, not to be confused with a brief squall, or a tornado that torpedos your cow across the county, or an earthquake that knocks over Aunt Rose's antique salt shaker and shatters it all to hell. Also not to be confused with a partisan hoax, an overblown disaster porn wetdream, or a worldwide conspiracy to ruin your good time. Covid is real and covid is SERIOUS. 

Suddenly finding the King selection on IA decimated, I reached out to the Wichita library to see what was being done with books during these "highly contagious but still so many people won't wear masks" times. They sent a prompt reply, detailing the logical, reasonable efforts they are taking to ensure that they do not contribute to the spread of Covid-19. The stacks are off limits to the public, minimal services are available, but groupings of folks are not permitted. Staff handle the returned books masked and gloved and essentially let the books sit for a spell, sort of a book quarantine, until they should be good and ready to be reshelved or set aside for the next person on the wait list. It was all very conscientious and wonderful to hear. The Terror Rat that scurries through the walls of my brain does not agree. 

Terror Rat insists that the particles are, in fact, everywhere. Everywhere everywhere. Terror Rat can barely stand to touch library books during normal times. Terror Rat's favorite word is contaminated. And while Terror Rat needs to calm the fuck down, she does have one very good argument that I just can't shake. By the time everything in Kansas was essentially "shut down," let's say April 1 2020, we'd seen just over 420 cases with 9 deaths from Covid-19. To date (September 29 2020), Kansas has weathered 58,629 cases and 637 deaths. Considering the nature of airborne, infectious disease and the insanely uneven and nonsensical public policies to mitigate the spread of coronavirus, is it fair to assume that there are many, many more active cases now than there were when we "shut everything down" in March? Terror Rat wants to know how "opening up" the country now, when there are more cases in more places, makes any kind of sense? Terror Rat is waiting.

In the meantime, I had to find some other way to read Christine. The free Audible trial beckoned, I figured beggars can't be choosers, and leapt. I am so happy I did.

First, let's get this out of the way right now: the narrator is that gawdam kid from Maximum Overdrive y'all. The kid on the bike, riding through the streets, seeing the hilarious carnage (remember the bloody ice cream truck). He was also a near-victim to a particularly homicidal soda machine. It's that kid! Who is a man now, but oh my God, I love the symmetry. And I love that he found a real niche. Holter Graham is a very talented voice actor.

It was such a delight to be able to really sink into the story and just let it ride, cruise if you will, until it was time to stop for the night. While I will likely never get used to that falsetto for the female characters, Graham handled it far more smoothly than my previous King audiobook experience. Let's face it, Leigh Cabot was always going to be especially grating with her repetitive "what do we do what do we do" dialogue, so I was prepared for that. It was clear that the shortcomings of the character were just as responsible for drawing my ire as any fakery on the reader's account, especially whenever Graham voiced Dennis Guilder's sister or Arnold Cunningham's mother. Neither took me out of the story the way Leigh Cabot's murmuring mopery did . . . in fact, it was really just that babyish tinge, missing from the other two female voices, that really set my teeth on edge. Just like it did with Charlie in Firestarter. It's funny because Alexandra Paul's voice was all breathy baby through much of the movie adaption. Guess I don't like men doing baby voices? The audience already has to stretch the accommodation for the suspension of disbelief when listening to an audiobook, particularly when each person has their own inner voice cultivated over decades of reading. Allowing some "other" into your headspace like that is more than a little intimate. The more unnatural or unreliable that voice (girl baby voices, per se), the more likely the listener is to reject it.

By far my very favorite quote from the book, made all

the better by Holter Graham.

If you are like me, still essentially sequestered, still cooking, baking bread, and you, too, have a germaphobe Terror Rat ripping around your skull, digging furrows in your circuits and sparking shorts and misfires through your synaptic ability to cope with This Covid Bulllllshit, I'd recommend giving audiobooks a whirl, especially ones narrated by Holter Graham. He does a fantastic job, especially taking the wheel as the narrator, slouched cool and sullen in the cab of Christine, to give this particular listener one hell of a ride.

Terrible quality screenshot of a first edition, movie
tie-in paperback, the same edition I once owned. 

(Movie screenshots via YouTube from Movieclips and Columbia Pictures. Artistic interpretation gif via tumblr with audio from Christine, Stephen King, unabridged audiobook, released 1/1/16, Simon and Schuster, narrated by Holter Graham.)

Rewriting HIStory and The Gunslinger Blues (The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger, 1982, 2003)

The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger (1982, 2003)

The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.

So much potential in that opening line, words bending worlds with such heft and grace and unblinking audacity. The Gunslinger is chock full of lines like this ("Go, then. There are other worlds than these." *shiver*), moments that bear the weight of millions of swirling galaxies, the dazzling, dizzying spell of Walter's whipcrack tour of infinity all balanced on the edge of the shift-T on Stephen King's rickety old "office-model Underwood with the chipped 'm' and the flying capital 'O.'" (King, "Afterword," The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger, c. Donald M. Grant, 1982). He set that sentence to paper during his senior year in college and, whether he sensed it or not, his grand opus had begun.

This post will no doubt reflect the wildly schizophrenic relationship I've had with The Dark Tower series since day one, specifically because it centers on the introductory novel that kicked it all off . . . and the revised edition King felt compelled to publish twenty years later. King's own assurances that the changes were, indeed, a "mere thirty-five pages" (and nothing in comparison to the revised edition of The Stand) are even less a comfort when he goes on to say that he's less concerned with the possible grumblings from the "purists" than with the "readers who have never encountered Roland and his ka-tet" (King, "Foreword," The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger, Revised and Expanded Throughout, Plume, 2003).

Wee baby King!

First of all: Wow. Okay. Snotrockets launched, I see. Noted. Let's assume this completely unnecessary barb was due to some residual defensiveness having just completed the last two works in the Dark Tower series at the time he wrote the preface for the revised edition of The Gunslinger. He knows he did a bad thing. Even if he doesn't know it, know it. We'll talk about The Bad Thing in some future post, after I've endured the Song of Susannah once more. I've only read it one time. I was so angry I almost levitated.

Snotrockets be damned, I was happy to read The Gunslinger again. It had been awhile since I'd stepped into the shadow of the Dark Tower (I think I made an attempt during the dark days between 2008-2014, though I am not sure--if I did, I didn't make it far) so I was eager to get back to the source material and embrace dusty old Roland and his crooked world the way I once did, before things moved on, as it were. Before the movie happened, for instance.

Sometimes I talk about the movies, sometimes not, but in this case I'm going to keep it brief: I didn't like it. I wanted to like it. I had hopes. Not high hopes, mind you, but guarded hopes. The casting was magical and brimming with possibilities; Idris Elba's cool charm, Matthew McConaughey's glittery-eyed fervor . . . they just needed to be wound up and set in the right direction. Decisions were made and a terrible, terrible film flopped out of the hybrid nightmare factory, pulled its jittering carcass across the screen, and died in our memories foreveraftermore. At least that's what happened for me. I saw it in the theaters, got a stomach ache, then forgot almost everything about it. After it was released on DVD I picked it up at the library to see if a second viewing would change my opinion. It didn't. Most of it has, yet again, fallen out of my head and evaporated into the ether. I couldn't tell you the plot to save my life. The one thing I enjoyed--the one and only thing--was the depiction of Roland's shooting/reloading abilities. They got it deliciously right, which made all the rest of it so much more disappointing. 

This leads me to The Problem at hand, and one of the reasons that movie will not stick no matter how many times I watch it. Those "mere thirty-five pages" in the revised edition of The Gunslinger are primarily meant to sync the first book with themes King introduced later in the series. Most of these themes (and details, and dialectical conventions) don't start popping up until after the third book in the series, The Waste Lands (1991). It wasn't until 1994's Insomnia that some of those major themes (the Crimson King, for example) started to appear in any of King's works. After that, all bets were off. There is an exhaustive list of connections between the Dark Tower books and the rest of King's work, but chronologically I'm pretty certain it all started with Insomnia. The latter books pull characters and references from earlier King works, and the revisions introduce them, but the nexus in real time is Insomnia.

I liked The Gunslinger, a novel I'd eventually gotten around to reading sometime in high school, but I absolutely adored next two novels in the series, The Drawing of the Three (1987) and the aforementioned Waste Lands. I finally scored the paperback for Drawing of the Three early in my freshman year in college (1990) and devoured it like air, then waited impatiently for the paperback of Waste Lands to release in the Spring semester of my sophomore year. It was more than I could have hoped for: transformative, joyous, wild, terrifying, everything. What an epic this was turning out to be. What a magnificent yarn.

Have you ever heard the phrase "Now we're cooking with gas"? I imagine someone believes this is true. I didn't dislike the rest of the books in the series, but the addition of the Crimson King, the low men, Father Callahan, and other random elements of the chronicle leave me slow mutant rubbery cold. Wet raspberries for everyone. Now we're cooking with fart gas. I remember little snippets of the remaining novels, a bit here and some more there, but most of it a blank to me. I remember some plot points, some deaths, and that one Very Bad Thing that made me absolutely furious, but a lot of it is a mystery. Like the movie, those last books in the series just slipped right off the surface of my brain. I've never even read the come-lately book 4.5 Wind in the Keyhole. I bought it and it grew a velvety coat of dust on my shelf. 

So I took King's word for it, even after he gently dismissed the loyal readers from ago, and went ahead and dove into the 2003 revised edition of The Gunslinger for this chronological reread of all things Stephen King. Cleaning up factual errors and aligning book one with the latter books in the series was not the end of it, however. If that had been the case, I could have just rolled with it. Unfortunately, there was also strange tinkering with character development and details that should have been let stand. For want of an editor with a big red pen to STET STET STET all over that revised manuscript, the gunslinger was skewed soft and blurry, and for no damn reason at all.

I knew it was off from the start; the modifications and omissions were impossible to ignore. While I didn't have the original edition of The Gunslinger memorized, I have read it at least seven times. I am sure I am not the only fan who would go back and reread the previous volumes in the series before breaking open the brand new one from the bookstore. I would plan ahead, checking the pub date and starting off with The Gunslinger a couple of months (or more) ahead of time, followed by Drawing of the Three, The Waste Lands, and so on and so on. Since the last two novels in the series were released just a few months apart, I read them together as one very long tome . . . after I'd finished my last read through of the four proceeding novels. The Gunslinger isn't memorized, but I know it, you know? It's a familiar room in the rambling manse of my brainworks.

Some very kind and patient souls put together a list of most of the revisions on ye olde TheDarkTower.Net, but they missed a few, the first of which I noticed because it struck me so odd every time I read through The Gunslinger anew. On only the second page of the tale, Roland is brooding about the campfires left behind by the man in black, and he wonders if they are "a message, spelled out letter by letter. Take a powder. Or, the end draweth nigh. Or maybe even, Eat at Joe's. It didn't matter." In the revision, the quirky reference to our world is gone: "Perhaps the campfires were a message, spelled out one Great Letter at a time. Keep your distance, partner, it might say. Or, The end draweth nigh. Or maybe even, Come and get me. It didn't matter what they said or didn't say."

Clearly this is about more than just being a kid when King
first set out to write The Gunslinger. Not to worry, this
won't be the last reference to the ominous "nineteen."
 

In this case, replacing the "Eat at Joe's" reference is a sound decision. It never really fit. Too casual. Too out of the blue. Later, when people in a bar are singing "Hey Jude," the reference becomes all the more curious. This isn't our world. Or is it? One could fathom a Beatles song surviving eons, like a lullaby from centuries past, but "Eat at Joe's"? Or is this another world entirely? Are these just echoes of shared culture across time and space? On page two of the first book in the Dark Tower series, the reader simply does not know. It is all on the horizon, yet to be discovered. The "Eat at Joe's" reference was jarring and it had to go.

But take note of the additions, too, and how the once economical reverie is suddenly burdened with exposition that needlessly slows the pace. There are cuts, additions, and revisions throughout the novel that simply do not belong and speak more to a heavy-handed, highly biased perspective than to a clear eye with full-scope knowledge of what might benefit this particular part of the story, sync it naturally to the latter novels, while retaining the overarching voice and pacing of the original. 

One of the most riveting parts of The Gunslinger is when Roland meets 10-year-old Jake at the Way Station. The abandoned structures are in the middle of literal nowhere, with desert surrounding for miles in every direction, and the boy is lost in every way he could be: time, space, and mind. He's been stranded alone for days, maybe weeks, and as time progresses, he loses memory of the place he existed before the new and terrible now. Roland hypnotizes the boy and the narrative transitions into an italicized dream sequence, skittering through a whirlwind of gutting worldly facts and cutting personal revelations. The revelations that Jake is from our world and not Roland's come fast and hard. The careening perspective from the dry desert nothing to the shining 1970s skyscrapers of New York are dizzying and electrifying with implications. Just what the hell is going on here? How did the kid get there? Why? It sizzles and sparks.

This is page xxviii (28) of the prelims, verso
to the next page which serves as a sort of
subtitle to this first installment of the
Dark Tower series.

But this part of the narrative relies on the matter of fact, ruthless pace, each fact slamming into focus as the next comes swinging all sharp edges and more alienated from Roland's world than the last. In the original version, King cuts a quick sketch of Jake's father in hard, bludgeoning strokes: "His father works for The Network, and Jake could pick him out of a line-up. Probably." In the revised version, he expands: "His father works for The Network, and Jake could pick him out of a line-up of skinny men with crewcuts. Probably." The first version is telling and brutal. The second softens it for no discernible reason. 

I could stand the additions and revisions that align The Gunslinger with the rest of the series, even if I don't particularly think much of it is cooking with gas per se, but there were a couple of changes that were just complete nonsense. King, for reasons I cannot fathom (but will perhaps be clearer when I reread the rest of the series?? maybe????), was compelled to modify aspects of Roland's character. If these declawing measures were consistent, maybe the reader could accept them (begrudgingly), but this is not the case. A minor change occurs during the flashback to Roland's coming of age, after he's bested his instructor Cort with the aid of the hawk David. The animal does remarkable damage to Cort, but does not survive the fight. Roland's friend Cuthbert asks if he would like help burying David. In the original, a very Roland "Yes" was the response. In the revision, Roland says, "Yes . . . That would be lovely, Bert."

In the same realm of whyyyy as the epigraph: this.

It struck me so strange I had to look it up. Luckily for me, there is a PDF of the original up on the web (it won't last, they never do). Is it impossible that Roland would suddenly transform into a cordial, drinks-on-the-veranda 50s housewife immediately after a bloody all-or-nothing showdown where the stakes were his whole future and the cost was his hawk friend, David? Is it impossible that the usually stoic, reticent Roland who kicked in Cort's door with murder for another on his mind, his blood boiling, and now beaten, cut, bruised, but triumphant, would suddenly turn into a kindergarten teacher thanking her little students for pushing in their chairs after snacks? Thank you, Bert, for helping me bury my bloody, twisted, murdered hawk which is one hundred percent my bad, ha ha, THAT WOULD BE LOVELY.

The gloss insert, full color art is phenomenal, but I've love the inset 
black and white sketches the most. They only get better from here.
All art copyright Michael Whelan.

No, not impossible. Just not true to the character. And lest you think I nitpick, the very worst alteration to Roland's character is yet to come. This one is widely documented and well known. Most references to it across the internet have stayed diplomatically neutral, but no. Can't. Won't.

On his way across the desert, on the trail for the man in black, the gunslinger comes upon a town called Tull. The man in black has left his mark by way of resurrecting the town drunk (or the Mid-world equivalent, devil grass addict) and allegedly impregnating the resident religious cult leader. Roland stays in town longer than he intended, mollified by the attention and bed of Allie, the proprietor of Tull's only barroom. Roland eventually forces his own hand by confronting and assaulting the cult leader to get more information about the man in black and the whole town (save poor Allie) turns against him. In the original, as the crowd closes in, all brandishing some sort of weapon (though never guns, which are dear in Roland's world), the gunslinger's reaction is "automatic, instantaneous, inbred" and he begins to fire even as he sees Allie being held as hostage and shield, pleading, "'He's got me O jesus don't shoot.'" He guns her down with the rest of them, "the hands were trained."

Messiah Gunslinger

It is a painful moment for the reader, not that Roland's done much to garner sympathy already, but it reveals the gunslinger's past as much as anything, the training, the years between, the struggle and survival. In the revision, the showdown rolls out the same as before, but instead of pleading for her life, Allie screams, "'Kill me, Roland, kill me! I said the word, nineteen, I said, and he told me . . . I can't bear it--' The hands were trained to give her what she wanted." 

Let me stop a second and breathe. If I could punch a sentence in the face . . . well, that would be lovely.

This circles us back to The Problem, e.g. the sort-of matchy, half-baked themes that snaked their tendrils through so many of King's works and became, for better or worse, central to The Dark Tower narrative. In the original Gunslinger, the man in black, Walter, may be the same as the dark man (i.e. Randall Flagg from The Stand) but it's never an established fact. A fan could draw a conclusion, but only if you are really vibing for interconnected story lines and fun Easter eggs. And he is never identified as Marten, the duplicitous usurper behind the upheavals the drove Roland from home and toward his eventual quest to find the man in black. But in the revision, Walter is revealed to be Marten (not in a particularly well executed way, either, which confuses the reader and makes her back track to reread these parts again and wonder whhhyyyy someone didn't fix it before sending this edition to print). In later books, Walter is also revealed to be the dark man, Randall Flagg, the Walkin' Dude because why not. And just like the "nineteen" story that drives Allie mad, it's shoehorned in there with a battering ram.

"There the gunslinger sat, his face turned up into the fading light 
(the gunslinger and the man in black)"--last glossy insert, copyright
Michael Whelan. 

Was it so essential to ensure that Roland could never be so bad that he'd (unintentionally or not) shoot his lover in the in the middle of a town-wide melee? Could the reader not empathize with his plight, the turn of the wheel of ka, the brutal, immediate reality of the situation? The disgusting rape/abortion scene with the cult leader that precedes the town showdown is still in the revised edition, so I'm not sure that changing Allie's fate helps all that much, especially when followed by "his hands were trained to give her what she wanted." In light of what he's already done in Tull, this just makes it worse.

Or was this more about that "nineteen" subplot, the silly, capering clown note from Walter practically daring Allie to speak the incantation that would bring with it unbearable truths from the afterlife? As I said, I don't remember much after The Waste Lands, so maybe that's where the compulsion to jam this revision in there lies. Whatever the case, it's a bloated square peg hammered into a broken round hole. I would think even a first-time reader would see the seams, where the new overlays the old, where the economy of words and emotion are metered, then flattened by a fatuous overextension of "corrections."

The revised Gunslinger came out between Wizard
and Glass and Wolves of the Calla (Wind Through
the Keyhole wouldn't exist until ten years later).

In the end, The Gunslinger has always served as a sort of preface to the larger story, the meat of the thing, char(youtree) broiled and juicy, a shock of salt and mean grit of the rub. Despite my extreme irritation at the revised edition of The Gunslinger (which I had never read until now), I  know the next two books in the series are going to deliver the storytelling goods, the world-building awe and mystery. The truth that was lost in translation, so important I can't overstate it, is the careful unfolding of it, each secret piece uncovered in it's own time. In the original Gunslinger, we know there were technologically advanced "old ones" that died out long ago because Roland and Jake come upon a station frozen in time as they travel through the depths of the mountain. The reader doesn't need the added details, like making the handcart speak commercials or adding the North Central Positronics label to the water pump at the way station. The morsels of mystery handed out so sparingly in the beginning primes our hunger . . . and when more details are revealed in later books, the payoff is immense.

It is all the more baffling that King decided to add an all-new epigraph to kick off the revised edition of The Gunslinger. The original didn't have one. The revision shouldn't have one. It is a quote from Thomas Wolfe:

The epigraph is certainly relevant to The Gunslinger, sure, but even more slyly relevant to the Dark Tower series as a whole. I may not remember much of the latter books, but I remember what happens to Roland at the end. A lot of people were Very, Very Mad about it, but I wasn't one of them. Considering the entirety of the work, it fit. I won't spoil it here, except to say that Stephen King seems to be trying to spoil it for everyone with the very first epigraph in the very first (revised) book in the series. I could see why he dug the quote, why he wanted to include it, but it skates too close to saying too much . . . and for what? That little, winking zing of relevance? I think back to that new line from Allie, where she begs to be killed, "I said the word, nineteen, I said" . . . as if we wouldn't remember. Or were too dumb to make the connection from a few short pages back. Doesn't he trust us?

Hands down, one of my very favorite author photos.

I would recommend, without hesitation, reading the original over the revision, especially to those special lil newbies who have never read The Dark Tower series. The Gunslinger is an introduction, a meditation on a mindset, and the first foray into the life Roland Deschain has lived, in pursuit of the man in black, in pursuit of the dark tower, time and again forced to make terrible choices and suffer inevitable sacrifices. A few of the corrections in the revised edition are warranted and sound, but far too many of the changes are needless, invasive, and nonsensical. Readers should be allowed to see Roland's world, and all the worlds that come alive across thousands of pages, unfurl and brighten with color and clarity over the natural progression of the tale.

It should go without saying that everyone can choose their own path: read the original, read the revised edition. Both editions are out there, though the first is obviously out of print. I will choose to reread the original should I ever wish to take this path again, clutch my tattered old original paperback copy close and go cry in a corner. It doesn't matter. The stories, and the very best parts of them, which still stand and set the world to quake with all that beautiful, shattering world building--dream infused, winsome and dangerously wild--are still a hot ride: emotional, riveting, bold, true. It's important to note that. My love is querulous and cutting, but it's is forevermore true blue.

Grade: B (for the original--it wouldn't be fair of me to grade the revision when I'm so clearly biased against it)
Scary? (0-nope to 10-you will die): 1. While there are intense scenes of violence, even the scariest stuff (slow mutants) isn't terribly scary. 
Warnings: Heavy-handed tinkering, irrational editing, forced revisionist tomfoolery, author-induced spoiler alerts, cockadoodie rewrites. On the bright side, the bigot-y stuff is almost nonexistent save the description of the ill-fated cook, Hax ("quarter yellow"). Whether this was a bi-product of the revisions, I do not know (or recall), but it was a nice respite.

Artifact: The Internet Archive wins the day (and every day, knock on wood)! This time I read the scanned in Plume paperback. It was in good condition (no stains) and evenly scanned (no cut pages). I continue to be incredibly grateful to have a resource like the Internet Archive still available to me (and those like me). According to the CDC website, as of today 8/8, there have been 4.8 million cases and almost 159,000 deaths in the US from Covid 19. Members of my household have been hospitalized for respiratory illnesses in the past and none of us can take any chances contracting this disease. As a former smoker who suffered from chronic shortness of breath, I cannot fathom a more horrible way to die than drowning in your own lungs. The fact that there is no strong, centralized governing body that could have controlled the messaging, the lockdowns, and the subsequent flattening of the curve country wide is heartbreaking and infuriating. While witnessing others go about their lives as if nothing has changed while I scuttle to pick up groceries & prescriptions masked up and sanitizer at the ready, my fury only intensifies. The only comfort has been the voices of others like us piping up on social media to ask, "Am I the only one still sequestering?" only to be met by an avalanche of replies yelling, "Me, too! Me, too!" It is shocking how many people simply do not care about the welfare of others.

So even though the libraries are open (though not entirely), I cannot bear the idea of going and picking up books to take home and read. I don't know what they are doing to disinfect the books, if anything, but it isn't enough. They're made of paper, so really what could they do? One of the things I was working on pre-Covid was my germaphobia, something I was directly confronting by checking out books from the library. Here is the thing, though: It's not like I just lolled in bed and fell asleep reading them or anything so . . . normal. Nope! Hell to the nope. I would get out my lap desk and sit rigidly upright on my bed, touching nothing but the book. If I needed a break for anything, I would wash my hands first. When I was done, I'd tuck it away and wash my hands again. Once the book was finished and safely returned to the library, I would disinfect the lap desk. Being able to do any of this at all was an immense improvement from the days when I could not even enter a library, let alone touch the books or check anything out.

As glum as it makes me to even consider it, this is the first true reason I've found to finally buy an e-reader. As long as the Internet Archive continues to deliver, I can push those ugly thoughts aside, but for the first time ever, I see the appeal.