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23/09/2004
King's final 'Dark Tower' sees the light of day
Stephen King has written more than 40 books but says he never was troubled by a deadline until his latest novel.
The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower, published Tuesday, on the author's 57th birthday, is the final volume in King's epic fantasy/Western.
Set in a mystical Mid-World and a vampire-populated New York, it has been called his magnum opus. One character, a writer named Stephen King, dies after a traffic accident.
It took the real Stephen King 34 years and 3,872 pages to reveal what Roland Deschain, the last gunslinger in a world that has lost its sense of time, finds at the end of his quest.
King says he couldn't stop tinkering with the 845-page Dark Tower VII (Grant/Scrib-ner, $35), until his publisher "ripped the manuscript from me. ... I didn't want it done. You don't have to dig too deeply to get at the psychology."
The series grew out of short stories he began in 1970. He wrote the final three volumes after he was nearly killed in 1999 by what he calls "a close encounter with a Plymouth minivan" while walking in Maine. Had it not been for his reminder of mortality, he's not sure when he would have finished: "It would have been something I put off." Now, "I'm just glad I lived to finish it."
In recent years, King has talked about retiring. "If you have read these last three Dark Tower volumes, you'll see that my talk of retirement makes more sense in this context," he writes in an author's note. "In a sense, there's nothing left to say now that Roland has reached his goal."
In the next 10 years, "if I'm still alive," King says he wants to rewrite the other early books in the series and reissue them in two or three massive volumes. "It's really one big book."
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