The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927).

I don't think I've read anything like Stephen King's Dark Tower series.  I'm not even sure it's possible to provide a clear summary of the plot in basic terms without coming off sounding like I've just come down from some mild fever dream high.  For what it's worth, here's the best I can do.  It concerns a remolded version of Clint Eastwood and Sergio Leone's Man with No Name with the serial numbers filed off.  This literary incarnation of Leone's Nameless Outlaw Hero has been given the title of Roland this time around.  The story opens with him trudging through the desert with a mule for his only traveling companion.  We're told that he's looking for the trail of a shady sounding character known at first only as the Man in Black.  So far, so regular sounding, maybe even a little bit intriguing.  To put it in cinematic terms, what King has given his readers here is the kind of opening establishing shot that could, in capable hands, deliver up something along the lines of a maybe interesting example of what was once referred to as a Sagebrush Epic, or an Oat Opera.  So right away, the audience is left with the most important question the artist can plant in their minds, what happens next?  Well, to his credit, King does fill the reader in on a great deal of the main character, his quest, and at least something about the nature of his secondary world.  It's just that to this day, I'm not certain what all that spilled ink amounts to, if you want me to be honest about it.

What starts out sounding like it could be a pastiche tribute to the likes of John Ford and Zane Grey soon takes a very sharp turn into something out of a late 60s acid trip.  I suppose that kind of makes sense, considering what King said about the genesis of his idea.  He claims to have gotten started writing this little oddity sometime back during his college years at the University of Maine.  Turns out one of his friends had gifted him a whole ream of bright green writing paper (307-9).  He was living, at the time, in a part of what I guess you might call a student dorm.  To hear King tell it, however, the place he chose for a Crash Pad was a step or two below the house Abraham Lincoln was born in.  Years later, he would go on to immortalize this little hovel for college alumni in the pages of his 1999 book, Hearts in Atlantis.  It's there he refers to that dormitory setup as follows: "I finished my senior years living off-campus in LSD Acres, the rotting cabins down by the Stillwater river (328)".  I think the name of the place might be an important clue to the exact nature of the curious saga that King eventually spun out from that initial collection of green writing sheets.  The least surprising thing to me about the Dark Tower books is that they get their start in a moment of youthful chemical exhilaration.  In a later essay on the genesis of the series, King explains how "Hobbits were big when I was nineteen...

"There were probably half a dozen Merrys and Pippins slogging through the mud at Max Yasgur’s farm during the Great Woodstock Music Festival, twice as many Frodos, and hippie Gandalfs without number. J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings was madly popular in those days, and while I never made it to Woodstock (say sorry), I suppose I was at least a halfling-hippie. Enough of one, at any rate, to have read the books and fallen in love with them. The Dark Tower books, like most long fantasy tales written by men and women of my generation (The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, by Stephen Donaldson, and The Sword of Shannara, by Terry Brooks, are just two of many), were born out of Tolkien’s.  But although I read the books in 1966 and 1967, I held off writing. I responded (and with rather touching wholeheartedness) to the sweep of Tolkien’s imagination—to the ambition of his story—but I wanted to write my own kind of story, and had I started then, I would have written his. That, as the late Tricky Dick Nixon was fond of saying, would have been wrong. Thanks to Mr. Tolkien, the twentieth century had all the elves and wizards it needed".  Then, so far as the writer can recall, that's when inspiration hit him from what might seem like the most unlikeliest of angles, or places to happen.

"Then, in an almost completely empty movie theater (the Bijou, in Bangor, Maine, if it matters), I saw a film directed by Sergio Leone. It was called The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, and before the film was even half over, I realized that what I wanted to write was a novel that contained Tolkien’s sense of quest and magic, but set against Leone’s almost absurdly majestic Western backdrop. If you’ve only seen this gonzo Western on your television screen, you don’t understand what I’m talking about—cry your pardon, but it’s true. On a movie screen, projected through the correct Panavision lenses, TG, TB, & TU is an epic to rival Ben-Hur. Clint Eastwood appears roughly eighteen feet tall, with each wiry jut of stubble on his cheeks looking roughly the size of a young redwood tree. The grooves bracketing Lee Van Cleef’s mouth are as deep as canyons, and there could be a thinny (see Wizard and Glass) at the bottom of each one. The desert settings appear to stretch at least out as far as the orbit of the planet Neptune. And the barrel of each gun looks to be roughly as large as the Holland Tunnel.

What I wanted even more than the setting was that feeling of epic, apocalyptic size. The fact that Leone knew jack shit about American geography (according to one of the characters, Chicago is somewhere in the vicinity of Phoenix, Arizona) added to the film’s sense of magnificent dislocation. And in my enthusiasm—the sort only a young person can muster, I think—I wanted to write not just a long book, but the longest popular novel in history. I did not succeed in doing that, but I feel I had a decent rip; The Dark Tower, Volumes One through Seven, really comprise a single tale, and the first four volumes run to just over two thousand pages in paperback. The final three volumes run another twenty-five hundred in manuscript. I’m not trying to imply here that length has anything whatsoever to do with quality; I’m just saying that I wanted to write an epic, and in some ways, I succeeded. If you were to ask me why I wanted to do that, I couldn’t tell you. Maybe it’s a part of growing up American: build the tallest, dig the deepest, write the longest. And that head-scratching puzzlement when the question of motivation comes up? Seems to me that that is also part of being an American. In the end we are reduced to saying It seemed like a good idea at the time (web)".  According to scholar Bev Vincent, King "told an audience at Yale in April 2003...he was flying high on mescaline at the time (Road to Tower, 24)".  

Like I say, none of that would surprise me in the least.  If anything, it all helps the whole jumbled mess to make sense (at least as far as any creative concept that gets way too out of hand for its own good can ever be said to have a shred of through-line logic attached to it).  Looking back on it all now, The Dark Tower really is the kind of idea that could only have emerged as a viable notion during a very specific span of time.  It's the kind of Gonzo inspiration that would have had it's best chances either in the lead up to, or somewhere not too long in the aftermath of the Summer of Love.  King was a teenager in those years, and like the rest of his peers, he sort of Turned on, Tuned In, and Dropped Out.  It's a philosophy that I don't think he's ever quite lost, come to think of it.  He might have had to give up the drugs, yet a lot of the philosophy and life lessons he picked up along the way still seem to remain a part of his creative toolbox.  How else do you explain a concept like Mid-World?  I called it a secondary world a moment ago, yet if there's any truth to the way that term applies here, then it does so in one of the most ironic ways imaginable.  Bev Vincent has described the Tower series as an extended work of collective Metafiction.  That is, it's a story whose sole purpose for existing turns out to be the examination of the art and craft of stories, and storytelling.  Think The Simpsons, yet a lot more Ivy League sometimes.

Some of the most famous names who have been able to pull this sort of narrative hat trick off are Vladimir Nabokov, Lewi Carroll, and King's own close friend, Peter Straub.  The key thing about this subgenre is that when it's done right, the results can vary from memorable (in the case of Nabokov, and Straub) to an all out timeless classic (as Carroll was able to prove not once, but twice, in the Alice books).  When it fails, the results can sometimes come off as a hodgepodge of ideas that never quite manage to coalesces together.  King's efforts fall into the latter category, I'm afraid.  It's a collection of interesting notions and concepts that might sound interesting in rough draft.  However, in terms of a finished execution, it's debatable if a lifetime of continuous rewrites and drafting would have been enough to salvage anything of value here.  Don't get me wrong, King has done plenty to earn himself the distinction of being perhaps one of the premiere authors in the history of American Letters, right up there with Mark Twain and Nathaniel Hawthorne.  The trick is none of those accolades are ever bound to come from his work on the Tower, no matter how fond he is of it.  If I had to take a guess, I'm pretty sure King himself is aware of this, and probably isn't all that put out by it.  It also still doesn't change the fundamental nature of The Dark Tower either as a multi-part book series, or even as a literary concept.

It's what happens when an author tries to see if he can turn one of his acid fantasies into a maybe publishable book.  To be fair, there's nothing inherently wrong with such an idea.  If that were the case, then we wouldn't have books like Alice in Wonderland, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, or even works like It (and yes, I still continue to defend the ending; there's a lot more sophistication to it anyway, than just "This is Your Premise on Drugs").  The trick here seems to be down to two choices.  You can either try to rest some semblance of coherence from your daydreams, or else you have to find a way to make it so over the top bonkers that it kind of has no other choice except to be labeled as entertaining.  Again, Lewis Carroll remains the all-time champ at being able to pull the latter creative strategy off without a hitch.  Ken Kesey, meanwhile, was successful in the opposite direction.  He found a way of humanizing all the madness inherent in an acid trip, and made us care about the cast of characters that emerged from his chemical jaunts.  King's Tower, on the other hand, remains something of an unbuilt edifice.  That's down to two major, interlocking reasons.  The first is that the entire series amounts to a poster child warning for what can happen when a writer's ambitions get the better of his ability to live up to whatever kind of hype he's built up for himself in his head.  Works like the Tower have made me realize how futile it is for anybody to try and be the next J.R.R. Tolkien.

In the first place, it can't be done for one simple reason.  Only Tolkien could ever be himself.  It's not the kind of thing anybody else has ever been able to truly replicate.  To those who would point to books like Watership Down or the original Star Wars trilogy, I'd point out that what makes those efforts work is twofold.  First, the stories never extend to such a far off point as that found in the Mid-World saga.  What makes Richard Adams's animal fable work so well is that it is this neat, compact, and above all, standalone fairy tale of the natural world.  The same thing originally applied to the Galaxy Far, Far, Away.  Everything built to a series of more or less well wrought plot beats, and that was it.  Even Lord of the Rings can be said to work because of one very important aspect of its concept.  It's just one, single, book.  It gets marketed today as a trilogy, but in actual truth, Tolkien only ever wrote it as this one, doorstopper of a novel.  There's just one reason for why people are calling it a Trilogy at all now, and that's because book publishers learned you can double your value by taking what is just this one story, and breaking it up into three parts.  This may have been a mistake, in retrospect, as it left even Tolkien's professional fans with the idea that all great epic Fantasy sagas are meant to work this way.

So now you've got guys like Terry Brooks, who have spent an entire lifetime trying to outdo the college professor from Oxford in terms of worldbuilding and output, yet the whole thing remains a cheap knockoff.  That's a problem that has repeated itself over the years, to the point where Tolkien's original achievement runs the risk of being degraded and lost sight of amidst a sea of copy cat mediocrity.  King's efforts in this direction don't quite sink that low, yet the final product can't be called well made, either.  The Dark Tower is one of those stories that seems forever doomed to have never really gotten anywhere past the planning stages.  In distinction to a book like Misery or Salem's Lot, there's the lingering air of looking at the textual equivalent of an unfinished painting.  You can see which bits and pieces of other books and films might have inspired this or that incident.  It might even be possible to catch the faint glimpses of something approaching an over-arching idea to the series as a whole.  However, even if that's the case, the fact remains that, in this instance, at least, King (unlike Tolkien) was never able to find the right way of embodying these ideas within the narrative proper.  In all the best stories, the theme and the narrative are able to blend together so well as to be a seamless whole.  This is an effect King was able to achieve best in works like It or The Shining.  These are instances of the author at the top of his game.  The fact that it's difficult to get that vibe here tells us something.

It leads to the second main reason for why The Dark Tower comes off as such an abortive project.  The simple fact of that matter is that every author has their specific level of strengths and weaknesses.  In King's case, the way this fact of life works out boils down to an ability to create a kind of "portable magic" (in his own words) when sticking to tales set in the genre known as the American Gothic, or else when crafting these neat, and sometimes heartfelt slice of life dramas.  Even in a relatively self-contained work like the Lot, you come away with the sense of the author being able to tap into that same kind of epic scope that Tolkien was able to grant to his work.  The only difference is this time the grandeur of Hobbiton and Mordor are each being applied at once to either a series of fictional small towns, or else to various spots of the American landscape in general.  When he's being himself, King can turn America into an EC Comics version of Middle Earth.  It makes for sort of a fitting irony that the very moment he tries to deliberately copy Tolkien that his inner creative workshop seems to grind to a halt.  I think it might have something to do with the indelible individuality of the author's own true creative voice.  What makes King stand out so well in the field is that he is one of the few artists who has managed to leave an impact on both the vocabulary and even iconography of the Horror genre.

It's an impact that has been able to seep its way into the vernacular of both pop culture, and of common, everyday discourse as well.  It's become so ubiquitous at this point that at least two whole generations have been born unknowing that a certain part of their dialogue is set by books like The Dark Half and The Dead Zone.  There have been efforts on the part of Tower Junkies to make the same thing happen for Mid-World.  However, the fact that names like Cujo or Christine have a greater currency than that of Roland says a lot about which books are more favored by the public at large.  A book like The Stand, meanwhile is interesting, in that it seems to be ubiquitous on one level, while on another, it's almost like it shares the same fate as the Tower saga.  Perhaps a lot of that has to do with the fact that King later tied it into the exploits of Roland and his quest.  By shackling a story commonly touted as his most popular book to such a niche series, King seems to have created an unintended side effect in The Stand's reception history.  It still maintains a certain level of its former popularity.  At the same time, it has begun to garner a reputation as part of a small collection of titles set apart from his more popular writing.  Perhaps part of what has helped this lopsided audience response along can be discerned when you take a look at the tale of Randall Flagg, and then place it alongside the exploits of Roland.

When you do this, the similarities between the two titles kind of have no choice except to jump out at you.  It becomes pretty clear real fast that each set of novels share a lot of the same inspiration in common.  Both works can be thought of as something like the ultimate Counterculture Apocalypse Fantasy.  The Stand is a novel haunted by the 60s decade out of which pretty much all of its inspiration sprang.  This is something that is noticeable in its current incarnation, yet it becomes obvious if you go back and read its original 1978 edited release.  Even in its truncated state, it becomes clear as day that this is the work of a man who's formative years were spent in the crucible of anti-war campus protests and Civil Rights marches.  It's written from a perspective that knows how to survive the love taps of a policeman's nightstick, or the painful sense of suffocation that comes from being teargassed.  It's general outlook is one that was used to seeing Flower Power signs and posters as a normal part of its everyday, waking landscape.  The musical references go no further than the glory years of Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin.  The death of men like Elvis and Jim Morrison are still a fresh memory in the original publication.  A lot of the sentiment of the novel can be found in a simple throwaway line at the start of Chapter 35, the moment where "Larry thought dazedly, give me the sixties and cram 1980 up your ass (286)".  That's a line that transitions to, and loses all its sense of urgency in, the 1900 re-edit edition.

Perhaps that in itself explains another reason for the shifting sense of this book's reputation.  As a lot of those old Flower Children begin to enter the clearing at the end at the path, pretty soon the way people relate to the vibes and outlook of that novel are going to take on a very different tone from the ones that once made it one of King's most well regarded works.  For what it's worth, while it's not my absolute favorite of his (that honor still belongs to, and remains with the ghoulish exploits of Pennywise the Dancing Clown) it is possible to see how all of these elements used to make it such a blockbuster back in the day.  It also probably doesn't hurt that I'm a fan of the 60s, myself.  You might even say I'm something of an informal student of that decade.  Perhaps it's this otherwise quiet bit of personal enthusiasm that has enabled me to see and therefore grasp at all the ways in which the same sense of shared inspiration is able to pass neatly from The Stand in the works of the Tower proper.  In Mid-World, the reader is treated to that same sense of late 60s apocalypticism.  This time, however, true to the roots of the decade that birthed it, the same world of The Stand has now been taken and amplified up into Gonzo levels of lunacy.  Here we're treated to the sight of Clint Eastwood's nameless cowboy as he's taken and transposed into a version of The Stand's Captain Trips Americana as it is shaped and molded in the kind of setting that can only be found within the pages of old issues of Heavy Metal.

The main stage that Roland traverses is a version of America in which the ravages of Flagg and the plague have somehow managed to render everything into the kind of trippy, symbolist landscape that could only have emerged from the mind of graphic artists like Jean "Moebius" Giraud and Alejandro Jodorowsky when they've each taken their share of the same mescaline that King claims to have been on, or else plain old LSD.  This is the kind of inner, mental topography that belongs to someone who remembers what it was like the relax on a Summer day, trying to devour the words of Frank Herbert or Carlos Castaneda, while chilling to the wired folk rock of Traffic, King Crimson, or Blue Oyster Cult on the record player.  All of these influences find themselves mirrored in the terrain Roland finds himself wandering through, and the kind of people he meets along the way.  It's this same landscape that guys like George Lucas was able to take from the pages of Heavy Metal and translate it all in a way that was able to grant it a genuine form of mainstream popularity.  It's pretty clear King was always trying to do the same thing in his own Gothic way.  The difference is here he strayed too far out of his comfort zone for any of it to do any good.  You get the sense its one of those ideas that wanted to go all the way.  If so, it needed someone with the manic intensity of a Harlan Ellison or a Philip K. Dick to pull it off.  

King is neither of those guys, he's just a simple New England Pastoralist, for goodness sake.  His strength's are in tales of American life as it is encroached by the Fantastic.  Anything more than that is the author asking for trouble.  Still, the fact remains that the Tower books amount to a series with a great deal of multiple inspirations that went into it all.  Alissa Burger's The Quest for the Dark Tower is perhaps the best place where the both curious and incredulous reader can trace down the various strands of other narratives that have woven their way into the total patchwork tapestry that is Mid-World.  What I'd like to do here today is devote an article to just one single aspect of King's ambitious, yet flawed attempt at a dark fantasy series.  It involves one of the central ideas governing Roland and his story.  For all it's flaws (and there are many), it is at least possible to say that King tried his best at fleshing out an attempt at yet another secondary world.  The Gunslinger's home is best thought of as something like the jumbled contents of a world library, with characters and settings from various texts all somehow occupying the same space.  One day you find yourself in a Sergio Leone Western, the next day you're in Lyman Frank Baum's Emerald Palace.  Because: Metafiction.  Yeah, it's that kind of world.  Writers like Kelly Link and Jasper Fforde are way better at this kind of thing, and King is always playing catch-up.

Which sort of makes the fact that he was able to weave a number of interesting concepts around the main setting something of a remarkable feat.  What might be called the Reigning Ideas of Mid-World are also the one aspect of the Tower books that I find the most fascinating.  This is because they are the single handful of elements that can be traced back to their original, literary sources.  Once you do that, you'd be surprised to learn that for all the faults of the story proper, it's got some pretty heady influences in back of it.  People like to think of King as the literary equivalent of a Rock n' Roll guitar artist.  It's easy to see why this is the case.  In addition to a lyrical kind of style which can put one in mind of a good piece of R-n-B music at it's best, it doesn't hurt that King came of age with the birth of Rock as an artistic genre.  So it does make a certain amount of sense that this is an influence that is at least capable of encoding itself into the rhythms of modern literate prose.  King just turns out to have been the one to perfect it to an artform.  It's a style that makes its way even into Roland's quest, yet the real point is that he's able to take that guitar riff lyricism, and match it to themes and ideas that stretch all the way back to the eras of guys like Chaucer and Shakespeare.  If that sounds far-fetched, let me assure you it's not.

Near the end of his non-fiction study, Danse Macabre, King makes a statement which probably has no choice except to come off as one hell of a left-field idea.  At the same time, though, for better or worse, he has given us at least some kind of insight into the thinking that powers the themes of his fiction.  The import quote comes in the middle of the author's justification for the value of the modern American Gothic as a genre worth of being called literature.  He suggests that Horror's "main purpose is to reaffirm the virtues of the norm by showing us what awful things happen to people who venture into taboo lands. Within the framework of most horror tales we find a moral code so strong it would make a Puritan smile. In the old E.C. comics, adulterers inevitably came to bad ends and murderers suffered fates that would make the rack and the boot look like kiddy rides at the carnival".  Here's the part where King drops the crucial reigning idea.  "Modem horror stories are not much different from the morality plays of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, when we get right down to it. The horror story most generally not only stands foursquare for the Ten Commandments, it blows them up to tabloid size. We have the comforting knowledge when the lights go down in the theater or when we open the book that the evildoers will almost certainly be punished, and measure will be returned for measure.

"Further, I’ve used one pompously academic metaphor, suggesting that the horror tale generally details the outbreak of some Dionysian madness in an Apollonian existence, and that the horror will continue until the Dionysian forces have been repelled and the Apollonian norm restored again (442)".  The idea that someone who writes the sort of stories King does might very well be plying in the same sort of literate branch office that was once inhabited by the likes of Edmund Spenser is enough to sent any tenured Ivy League Professor of English into an apoplectic fit.  If someone like Harold Bloom had ever read, or heard King repeat those paragraphs in an interview, he might have gone on the warpath.  For the rest of the faces in the audience, however, it's almost like our favorite Horror scribe just handed us some kind of riddle written in a foreign language.  That's because the notions King uses to describe the nature of both his own efforts and Horror as a genre are all taken from the era of the Renaissance.  That's the time period when modern literature was born, and in the process, a lot of the writers of that early modernistic generation utilized all of the words that King just used to describe the American Gothic genre.  He's saying that most Horror fiction makes use of tropes dating all the way far back before the Founding of the American Colonies.  He also says that these concepts make up the nature and content of his own books.  It sounds strange, yet I think King has been of some assistance here.  For better or worse, he's given critics and readers a hitherto overlooked and unexplored aspect of his work.  The interesting thing about it is just how much it helps to make sense of the writer's own fiction. 

Mid-World is a thematic amalgamation of insights, and maybe even philosophical concepts which find their earliest artistic expressions in works like The Canterbury Tales, or the oeuvre of the Globe Theater.  The reason I'm able to say this with a decent enough amount of assurance is because it's ever so often possible to catch King in the act of using words, or phrases that would have been familiar to someone like the Bard of Avon.  Specifically, in nonfiction works like Danse Macabre, King keeps utilizing the same set of terms, over and again.  These are the Microcosm and the Macrocosm.  An attentive reader of that study text will note King's acknowledgment that he got those terms from the writings of sophisticated literary critics such as John G. Parks and Irving Malin.  These are the kind of guys whose reputation goes all the way back to the days of T.S. Eliot, William Empson, and Northrup Frye.  The kind of people who wrote articles you might in journals with names like The Sewanee Review, or other places like it.  What's interesting to note is that King further states that he knows a lot more about the thematic history or background of those terms even beyond what it found in the work of Parks and Malin.  It's clear he knows that they are a shared vocabulary between Shakespeare and Chaucer.  The Macabre paragraph quoted above is proof that King knows where Parks and Malin got it from.  The trick is this is the aspect of his thinking that he chooses to keep and play close to the vest.

If I had to say why this is the case, then all I can do is point to the motto from the world of a certain type of stage performer.  "A good magician never reveals his secrets".  If it's a question of where else King might have gotten both an interest in the themes of guys like Shakespeare?  Well, I mean that's sort of a loaded dice question, isn't it?  There's like a ton of places where that can happen for just about anyone who decides to allow themselves to be curious about that sort of thing.  In terms of how King fell into it all, then I'd have to point to a college teacher that the writer has always cited as one of his biggest influences.  His name was Burton Hatlen, and like Parks and Malin, he was the product of both a literate household and background.  Hell, even the guy's doctoral dissertation was about John Milton (web).  What do you suppose that tells you about his level of sophistication?  What it says to me is that King got his interest in the thinking of men like Geoff, Big Bill, and Uncle Milty from first taking part as an enthusiastic student of Hatlen's college courses.  Then going on from there with his tutor's instruction and encouragement to branch out and explore the related topics of Macro and Microcosm for himself.  It wouldn't surprise me to learn that his later friendship with Peter Straub acted as a further encouragement to study these words and the ideas in back of and beyond them.  In fact, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that Peter Straub got King further interested in these arcane subject matters.

It's all a bit esoteric when you get down to it, more or less a form of lost language, yet it seems to have captured King' Imagination in a way that is still visible even in his latest written works.  It's what allows me to make the startling discovery and declaration that King is something of, for all intents and purposes, something of a literal Renaissance Man.  The literary themes and ideas of that Era somehow became a permanent part of his artistic storehouse.  The good news about this is that these are concepts that have a life outside of the Tower series.  You can find them inhabiting the pages of even a simple short story like "The Monkey".  That's an example of King employing his Elizabethan influences at the summit of his creativity.  In Mid-World, by contrast, we're seeing the author spread himself too thin.  Yet it's also the one place where King seems comfortable allowing himself to be more up front about his literary Inspirations.  Which, paradoxically, might be the ultimate explanation for a writer spending so much time and effort on what is otherwise a cistern well that's run dry a long time ago, or else never really worked properly to begin with.  To be fair, it's excavating the themes of The Dark Tower that stands out as the most interesting part about the whole affair.  One particular aspect of these books jumped out at me recently in the middle of a passage found in the series' third book, The Wastelands.

It's a moment that comes relatively early in the proceedings, and one of the interesting things to note about Wastelands is that it seems to have been the volume where you can sense King trying to get down to basics facts, of a sort.  It's the book where he tries to make a concerted effort to layout the nature of Roland's world.  He never really quite succeeds in this endeavor, I'm afraid.  Yet along the way he does manage to throw his readers a bone in terms of allowing us to figure out where he got some of his ideas for the series.  To be specific, there's a point where the author tries to let the characters do some world-building, and it results in the following exchange, where the protagonist tells the characters, and also the readers the meaning of a very specific word, one that King tries to hang a great deal of weight on as the series moved forward.  That word is, "Ka - the word you think of as 'destiny'...although the actual meaning is much more complex and hard to define, as is almost always the case with words of the High Speech. And tet, which means a group of people with the same interests and goals. We three are a tet, for instance. Ka-tet is the place where many lives are joined by fate.” “Like in The Bridge of San Luis Rey,” Susannah murmured. “What’s that?” Roland asked. “A story about some people who die together when the bridge they’re crossing collapses. It’s famous in our world.” Roland nodded his understanding.

That whole bit of lore drop conversation can be found on page 79 of the current trade paperback edition, as of this writing.  It's one of those passages that I think even self-described Tower Junkies tend to overlook.  It's something I'm guilty of myself.  I'd coasted through an audiobook version of this text only once before, and somehow it must have gotten lost in the shuffle of my attention span.  I had a chance to pick up a copy of an book on tape version of Wastelands, recently.  This one was read by the author himself.  Maybe that's what allowed both the word and the nature of the conversation outlined above to jump out at me this time.  Whatever the case, the fact is on this go-round I was either smart or else just attentive enough to realize something.  That name drop of a long forgotten book wasn't just some throwaway piece of literary trivia.  This was the writer signaling to any who could or would listen that this is where he must have got the idea for one of the most intriguing and/or frustrating features of the Tower series.  A great deal of it must have come from The Bridge of San Luis Rey, whatever that was.  It turned out to be one of those accidental discoveries that tends to spark a kind of bulldog curiosity in bookworms like me.  If I'm able to find even the slightest scrap of a topic fascinating, then I'll tend to try and hunt the meaning down to it's source.  Yeah, I'm that kind of reader, if it that matters.

It's not the sort of thing that happens every day.  Yet it is what you might call a normal, standard operating procedure for anyone who decides to take an active interest in the reading and critiquing of stories.  Something you need to do if you ever want to be a professional arts critic, in other words.  If that's the kind of goal you can ever conceptualize for yourself, then you'd be surprised how sometimes even a little hint like the one King provides can go a long way.  It can provide the start of sometimes very intriguing breadcrumb trails that can lead you through all sorts of fascinating textual thickets and forests.  In fact, it's sort of how I learned about King incorporating the themes and ideas of Renaissance literature into the entirety of his work.  In this case, just hearing the title was enough to send me to the posthumous doorstep of a writer by the name of Thornton Wilder.  He's a name I'd heard of before, yet never in anything like a major capacity.  He's the kind of name you run across in passing during English 101.  I guess you could call him something of a literary polymath.  He wasn't just a novelist, but also a playwright, a lecturer, broadcaster, WWII soldier, and maybe even something of a literary theorist.  So far as I can tell, his most famous works are plays like Our Town, and that's about it for most of us.

He counts, in other words, as something of a famous obscurity.  It's the kind of fate that can happen to a lot of talent if you're not too careful.  When most people here the name Jack Nicholson, for instance, most of us think of his role in Kubrick's The Shining, or else it's the Joker from Batman.  It's easy to see why this is the case.  These are the two performances of his that have managed to capture the imagination of pop culture.  With that said, how many people today even remember that he was in a film like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest?  That's the same kind of fate that appears to have caught up with guys like Thornton Wilder, albeit in a more all-encompassing manner.  His fame, such as it is, belongs more to the sequestered halls of high school theater programs than to either the Ivory Tower or pop culture.  It is therefore possible for a flesh and blood human being to become an anachronism.  Still, King must have been impressed with the guy's work if he allowed one of his quaint, curious, and forgotten tomes to shape the lore of the Tower books.  After finding out this is what happened, I then became curious about what it was, or might be, about The Bridge of San Luis Rey that made King want to incorporate it as one of the governing ideas of Mid-World.  So I decided to look into it myself, and the result is the following article.  It's going to be a review of Wilder's text, yet there's a trick to it.

I'm going to do the best I can to give my thoughts about how well the merits of Wilder's novel holds up on it's own.  At the same time, I'm not going to review it in a vacuum, like I do with other texts or films here.  Instead, I'll also examine the fact that it inspired King's notion of literary fate, not just in the Tower saga, but in a lot of his other fiction as well.  What this means in practice is I'm going to keep comparing notes between the two authors.  I want to take a look at what King borrows from Wilder, and how it either fits, or doesn't within the story of the Gunslinger.  In that sense, what happens next will be almost like a double review, in a way.  I'm not only going to be giving a regular critique of Wilder's book, but I'm also going to see how well King does in utilizing this as part of his dark fantasy series.

The Twilight Zone: One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty (1986)

I first learned about him through Star Trek.  I don't know if it's the most common way for people to become fans of his, yet that's how it happened for me.  When it comes to speaking of a writer like Harlan Ellison, there are always going to be a number of factors in play.  The first is how it's difficult to avoid anecdote and bombast.  We're dealing here with one of those writers who liked to cultivate an air of folklore about himself.  It's not too difficult to see why he might do this, either.  In many ways, Harlan was his own best publicity agent.  All he had to do was insert himself into any public situation, act out, and then exit.  No matter what he did, he knew how to make sure his actions were always talked about.  It's a strange way to guarantee immortality for yourself, though in his case, it worked well enough when he was alive.  In the years after his passing, however, Ellison's impact on pop culture seems to show signs of being in danger of slipping away into obscurity.  There will be some inclined to say good riddance, yet I am not one of them.  There's a lot to complain about with an artist like him, yet there is also, thankfully, enough genuine talent on display to be worth celebrating, even if it does drive you up the wall, sometimes.  I said that there were always two factors at play when talking about this particular writer.  If the first amounts to a legacy of notorious self-promotion, then the second has to do with a constant, sliding scale of aesthetic and personal response that Ellison was able to dredge up from his readers and viewers.

He's the kind of author whose fame and literary reputation will always exist somewhere between the poles of Derision and Enthusiasm.  This is an important, perhaps the key point to keep in mind.  This guy likes to force his audience into a spectrum between these two results of reaction.  He didn't care to do anything else.  If he ever got less than something between censure and approbation, then he'd come away feeling like a total failure, and probably then proceed to tear a new one into his own work as the most unglorified trash ever written, something not even fit for the tabloids and men's magazines.  For those that don't know who on Earth I'm talking about, you really are going to have to trust me on this.  I am not making up a single word I've said about this guy, so far.  You can take my word further when I say things are just getting started here.  The challenge will be finding a way to keep this article from becoming a book, and the book ranging anywhere from a tirade to an ode.  This is the kind of effect Ellison was always happiest with from his audience.  If he were to read this now, I'd have to prepare myself for anything from a raging bull scream fest to the warmest sort of congratulations, with maybe even a publicity boost for a moment or two.  At least it could go that way until I said or wrote something that pissed Harlan off, then it would all be a game of mortal enemies at daggers drawn.  Again, I can't say that I'm making much of anything up here about the guy.  It's all just a matter of who he was.

When it comes to the response scale between Acclaim and Derision, I always find myself moving back and forth between the two poles in my regard for this author.  If there's any comfort to be had in this kind of situation, it's knowing that it would make Ellison proud, even if it is at your own expense.  I can't believe I just wrote that.  At the same time, I'm forced to admit that this also is the truth.  If the guy I'm talking about sounds like he fits the general description of "Quite the character"...Go home....You have no bloody idea what you're about to get into.  I feel a warning of that nature is necessary, because while Ellison could be one of the wittiest, charitable, and urbane souls when he was in a good mood, when he was in a bad one...Let's just say, there are folks out there with a million stories they can tell you about him.  I think the best introduction I can give about this facet of his life is best told in the way he seemed to like the most, through folkloric anecdote.  With that in mind, this all happened once upon a time.  I'm going all the way back here not just to another time, but also something of another world.  I'm in a used bookstore chain, and I'm at the height of my Sci Fi movie and TV show geek out phase.  This was the point in my life when I was just getting to know the ins and outs of pop culture, and would eagerly grab off the shelf and gobble up the contents of any book that would sate this very desire.

On the particular day I recall now, I was lounging my way through the upstairs Entertainment section of this second-hand booksellers shop (an institution and pastime which will forever be precious to "we happy few" who have a surreal yet devoted following to the written word) and I happen to notice this neat looking book with the title Inside Star Trek, by Herbert F. Solo and Robert H. Justman.  I already owned a copy of William Shatner's Star Trek Memories, and so I was intrigued by this book promising a lot of further backstage anecdotes of The Original Series by two of the show's executive producers.  So I decided to give it a shot, paid my fee, and took the copy home with me.  Before we get into the main topic, let me just say here, that I now regard Justman and Solo's text to be perhaps one of the key Primary sources related to Gene Roddenberry's initial star fairing brainchild.  It is here that you will find a great deal of insight into the how the entire concept of the Starfleet universe was first pitched, and the struggles Gene, Bob, and Herb all went through in just getting the pilot greenlit, and letting the show's first season both find and then be able to keep it's voice.  It really is that good of a backstage history.

However, I'm not here to talk about any of that.  My concern is with one erstwhile member of the show's rotating roster of famous (or at least once famous) part-time contributors.  Solo and Justman emphasize that Gene really wanted his concept to be seen as legit in the eyes of the Sci-Fi community.  To that end, they had the very smart idea of reaching out to the best writing talent within that then burgeoning field, and asking them if they would be willing to leave their mark on the show by submitting scripts for potential broadcast.  "Scientific fact notwithstanding", the producers write, "it was Roddenberry's intent to employ the world's most famous science-fiction writers and convert their futuristic ideas into the visual medium of dramatic television.  The "future" belonged to them, to the science-fiction magazine writers and novelists, and to the sprinkling of science-fiction screenwriters, and Gene wanted to share their excitement.  Richard Matheson was the most experienced film writer and, as such, found less of a challenge than did the others.  Several, like A.E. Van Vogt, failed in their efforts to understand this plot-and-budget constrained medium.  Van Vogt submitted a number of story idea premises that contained unusual ideas and characters.  But his premises lacked story ideas and plot twists and contained elements that were unshootable.

"Some of them - Robert Bloch, Ted Sturgeon, Richard Matheson, Jerry Sohl, Jerome Bixby, Norman Spinard, George Clayton Johnson, and science fictions incredibly angry young man, Harlan Ellison - actually wrote episodes for the show.  But to his dismay, Roddenberry soon discovered that some of the science-fiction writers had great difficulty with the transition.  While their inventiveness ran amok with wild and exciting concepts, they were often incapable of developing them into believable dramas and do-able scripts.  Unfortunately, they were both marvelous storytellers and lousy dramatists.  And unfortunately, Roddenberry had given himself yet another problem.  Most of the science-fiction writer scripts had to be heavily rewritten - and he had to do it (127-28)".  Producer Herb Solo then recalls a brief anecdote about how this process worked with scribbling fellows like Theodore Sturgeon.  If he's remembered for anything at all, now, then it would have to be for just two things.  The first is the classic line that has since become known as Sturgeon's Law.  It's the one that goes, "99 percent of everything is crap".  The other thing he might be known for is in helping Gene to pioneer the concept of the Vulcans.  He did this by coming up with the ideas in a script that became the now classic episode, Amok Time.

It was there that the character of Spock, or more precisely his background, culture, and way of life were shown for the first time.  It might not seem like much, yet for Trekkers everywhere, this was the start of one the most famous of intergalactic beings in the history of Sci-Fi.  Bear in mind, this is what it was like to work with any of these guys on a good day, when the ideas could fit the limited budget of a mid-60s TV show.  Here is how Solo sums up what it was like to work with one of the most creative minds in the field on a regular basis.  After asking Sturgeon to whittle down his original novella Killdozer to fit the regular format of an ABC Movie of the Week, he gets back a rewrite that is still too complex and expensive, so he asks Sturgeon a question.  "Teddy, listen.  You were going to concentrate on character and conflicts.  What happened?"  The reply he got was simple, "Nothing".  Solo concludes, "I quickly realized Ted's world didn't permit him to accept that flying pterodactyls were out of the realm of character conflict.  Needless to say, much judicious rewriting was needed before the film was made (128)".  Let this stand as an introduction to the crux of the later conflict that Ellison had with the show.

For what it's worth, I'm reminded of something to do with Tolkien's work and the question of adapting the Rings novel to the big screen.  I've been told the author himself always held a very healthy skepticism about such a prospect, even as he was busy shopping the rights over to whichever Silver Age Hollywood studio was the next in line to show interest that week.  For what it's worth (and I know I'm going to get flack for this), I think Tolkien was essentially correct.  I've never seen any film version that was ever able to capture the full reality of that one single book that so many of its fans still mistake for a trilogy.  For me, it all comes down to a simple case of the Imagination forever outpacing our ability to set it down in anything like a definitive adapted image.  Even just the artwork of the great Alan Lee still never comes quite as close as it should.  For whatever it's further worth, I also believe this problem applies to any possible adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune, no matter what the current fans of the films say.  If you want, it might be possible to try for something like a radio adaptation, where the question of capturing the right imagery is neatly sidestepped.  For the rest, however, we've still got the pages, and that's enough for me.  Tolkien, however, kept a level head about the whole thing.  Harlan Ellison, on the other hand, turned out to be a whole different sort of beast altogether.  Here's where the legend begins.

From all accounts, the first season of The Original Series was pretty hectic to begin with in general, and that makes a goodish amount of sense.  Part of the problem facing the cast and crew was the need and ability to see if they would even be able to conjure up an entire secondary world from nowhere but the mind of this one inspired ex-cop and airline pilot.  Considering that an agreement was made to give Trek a chance only on the condition that an entire initial run of episodes was to be in the can and ready to ship to network stations by a certain given date, it's not too difficult to imagine those first initial efforts as one big scramble against the clock and the calendar.  That's the least ideal of conditions for any production to labor under.  The last thing a setup like that needs is an intemperate teammate to act as a kind firebrand willing to gum up the works all for the sake of making a point.  So the way Gene and company brought this blight upon themselves was when he made the most brilliant mistake of his life.  He decided to reach out to Harlan to see if there were any ideas he could throw their way as they were getting the show off the ground.  Ellison claimed his original idea came after he'd just read the biography of this old school Evangelist named Aimee Semple McPherson "and thought that it would be an interesting idea to have Kirk travel back in time and fall in love with a similar woman of good intent, but someone who must die in order to preserve the future. Ellison considered that it would have a heartrending effect on Kirk (web)".  With this in mind, Harlan began to work on a script for the show.

The rest of the process of was something of a self-created nightmare for all parties concerned.  To start with, the writing process itself was something of an endurance test.  Ellison would take his sweet time in bashing out the initial idea, and when it was handed in, the routine went something like this.  What Justman and the showrunners had on their hands was the draft outlines for the making of a great Sci-Fi romance.  It was also too damned uncontrollable to work as a Trek episode.  The worst part is that once this was explained to Harlan, he sort of went into warpath mode.  The man was notorious for insisting that his original idea not be tampered with, and it put Gene and his crew in a real bind of their own.  What makes this one of the most fascinating creative clashes I've ever read about is that it's just possible to see how both sides have legitimate points to make.  It is just possible to make a cautious and careful defense of Ellison's idea that a story should not be messed with up to a certain point.  This is when the Creative Idea can be said to have achieved it's fullest possible artistic expression.  The moment when the narrative can be said to have found its own natural voice, for lack of a better word.  It's the goal that every story at least tries to work toward.  All that's required is a writer with enough skill to work as much of the fossil out of the ground as possible.  Ellison seems to have had this sort of idea in mind.

If that's the only point he's trying to make, well, then, I'll have to admit I can't really disagree at all.  Stories can be fragile things, in the wrong hands.  The trick with any good narrative is that in order to be itself, it's voice must not be interfered with.  The moment someone does that, if a character or a scenario is bent out of the wrong sort of joint, if the story is "emasculated" (to use Harlan's word) in any way, shape, or form, it loses its own particular brand of "magic"; it dies.  I have no idea how that must sound.  All I can say is that it is a core concept of the Romantic Movement, and Ellison appears to have developed a liking for it, making him something of an inheritor of this outlook.  He's not the only one who thinks of storytelling like this, by the way.  It undergirds everything I'll ever write on this blog.  So if that's the perspective he's coming from, then I'll have no choice but to say it's the correct one.  The best possible irony comes in when you turn to chapter 18 of Inside Star Trek and read the following paragraph.  "Despite their hopes, it was evident to Roddenberry and Justman that the first draft of "City" was far from being shootable.  There were more than budgetary problems with this first Ellison script.  Both men were concerned that some of the "guest" Starship officers, as written by Ellison for this episode, didn't behave in the upright manner Roddenberry expected from proper Starfleet personnel.

"And Justman had other concerns: 'Although Harlan's writing is beautiful, it is not Star Trek that he has written.  It is a lovely story for an anthology television series or a feature (279-80)".  Now tell me something.  How familiar does this complaint sound in the aftermath of shows like Picard and Discovery?  Without ever meaning to at all, Justman has more or less summed up the key problem confronting the modern incarnation of a very lopsided Sci-Fi franchise that for some reason is calling itself by the name of Star Trek.  It's not opening a can of worms, so much as triggering a chain reaction in a very old, yet still dangerous minefield.  There's been a lot of spilled ink on the problems that Gene's brainchild has had to put up with in recent years.  I think Patrick Stewart was right about one thing, in a very ironic sense.  "It wasn't Starfleet".  That's the whole point Justman made years ago.  I'll say no more about the still recent enough kerfuffle that Trek finds itself embroiled in, except to point out that this is not a lone phenomenon, but rather one besetting multiple film and TV franchises, plus the Hollywood industry at large.  This is not the place to look for solutions, though most us know that would be a big help.  Instead, I'll just say this.  No matter what problems Ellison may have had while working on Gene's series, he never once took any of it as far as it's gone now.  For proof of this, go pick up a copy of Steve King's Danse Macabre, and you'll hear yet another touching Ellison anecdote.

It features Sci-Fi's Angry Young Man going to bat for none other than the Great Bird of the Galaxy himself in the face of a bunch of uncomprehending movie producers.  Say what you will about the man (and believe me, many have, and probably continue to always do so; he liked to give even his staunchest fans plenty of ammunition to work with) he knew how to stick up for the integrity of the Creative Idea, even when it came to secondary worlds that weren't his own.  It's also in King's pages where he'll tell you one of the most obvious traits about the author under discussion here today.  The guy never met a controversy he didn't like to court.  He's put all of these ingredients of himself into a blender and out pops one of the most talented and mercurial careers in the history of the Popular Genre fiction.  Not too long ago, I had the chance to catch another of this man's works adapted to the small screen.  What's funny about it is that once the final credits had rolled around, I came away with the impression that I'd gotten to know the writer a lot better than I ever had before.  It's this sense of learning a lot of vital information about the artist that finally made me decide to write up what I found out and share it here in this article.  This is the story of One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty.

The Thing in the Forest (2002).

Sometimes the biggest challenge for a critic is getting to know a new writer.  That's kind of a misstatement, in this case, however.  For one thing, not only is the English novelist A.S. Byatt an established name in her own right, she's also one of those authors who often gets touted as a very Important Name.  Entertain conjecture of a time when it was possible to speak of something known as an Ivory Tower.  It is, or was (once upon a time) something like a catch-all term to describe the hallowed halls of academe.  To tell you the truth, I don't know what that's like.  I never got the chance to experience whatever this type of setting was supposed to be.  However, everything I've either read or heard on the subject tells of a brief span of time (possibly from an inception dating to somewhere in or about the 1920s, all the way to a quiet and unremarked upon downfall at or near the mid-60s) when this academic establishment was meant to be a summation of all the best and brightest in terms of the Arts and Sciences.  In the fields of literary study, this amounted to the creation of a kind of hierarchy of what was considered the "Best Kind" of literature, if you can believe it.  I'm not sure that this was a mindset that ever took a real hold of the general audience, yet it was a criterion of a collection of critics and college professors such as Edmund Wilson, William Empson, and F.R. Leavis.  If you don't know who I'm talking about, let that be history's verdict on guys like them.

In retrospect, it becomes easy to see just how misguided the whole idea of an Upper Echelon of the Written Word is, when you stop and think it over.  There will always be too many stories for even a single lifetime (at least I hope that's true), and beyond a general ability to say that this narrative works while the other one doesn't. it's always going to be perhaps impossible to claim any one text as the Greatest Novel Ever Written!  I think the best any of us will ever be able to do is to point to which stories are our favorites, and then see if we have it in us to defend our enthusiasms.  As long as you're not hurting anyone while doing so, then go nuts, I say.  Still, the historical record does show that there was a time when a lot forgotten critics and English Lit 101 instructors seemed to have concocted a shared mission to both define and limit whatever it was that constituted a real book.  Looking back on all that now, the one defining feature that probably still stands out the most about the thought of guys like Wilson and Harold Bloom is that most of them saw fit to dismiss the Literature of the Fantastic as beneath consideration.  This is something they took as a fundamental, axial type of mindset.  It meant there was always going to be this disconnect between what Bloom thought Literature with a capital L was supposed to be, and the actual reading and movie going habits of the public at large.  They were all working with a picture which, due to their snobbery, was always going to remain incomplete.

It meant that there was always going to be a very short list roster of Important Names that would ever be considered worthy of the Ivory Tower.  Here is where you'd find the likes of John Cheever, John Updike, Eudora Welty, Williams Carlo Williams, and Henry James.  The upshot of all this academic hoarding was that it now looks like this close guarding and proselytizing means that there were a lot of good literary talents that had their chances at fame squandered by a bunch of opinion makers who were more concerned with being the In-Crowd, rather than alerting readers to the merits of the artist.  It's a categorical shirking of the critic's proper job, and perhaps that's the most telling verdict of the efforts of Bloom, Leavis, and the artistic outlook they once represented.  The funny part is that they claimed to set their sights forever against the Popular Genres, while also allowing in a handful of scribblers who just so happened to give Horror, Fantasy, and Science Fiction their modern identities.  Hence the Tower could admit the presence of Fantasists like Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges, John Milton, Dante, Homer, and or course, Shakespeare and Charles Dickens.  The idea that any of these guys might have considered themselves popular authors writing to entertain the popular masses never seems to have occurred to Bloom, or a lot of the former chalk dusted gate keepers of the Tower who preceded him.

A.S. Byatt was one of the few women authors who were allowed to have a seat this once so vaunted table.  Looking at the works that bear her name, it's kind of easy to see why they would be willing to let her past the gate (even if she was just a girl).  Not that sexism ever had anything to do with it, heavens no.  After all, didn't Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters have their own spot in the Tower (they'd helpfully point out, all while ignoring the emergence of new talents like Shirley Jackson, Flannery O'Connor, Angela Carter, and Toni Morrison).  The Tower cares nothing for the gender of a writer, of course it doesn't.  All that matters is that you write what we deem our kind of story.  I guess the subgenre of Slice of Life social dramas of the kind pioneered by the likes of Updike and Arthur Miller in the 40s and 60s was considered the "right kind" of literature for them.  Let's just ignore the presence of a Gothic bodice ripper like The Witches of Eastwick, or the haunted presentation of the Salem Witch Trials in The Crucible.  A bit of dystopian Fantasy such as Toward the End of Time, meanwhile can always be written away as a one-off.  Let's just bury these facts under a tailor-made identity that we've constructed for all of these ink-stained wretches, one that is meant to occlude their otherwise obvious liking for, and considerable skill in both the Popular and Dramatic forms of art and storytelling.

Looking back on her career now, it makes the most sense to claim that a combination of luck and timing was one Byatt's side.  When she was allowed entrance to the Tower, her two biggest works at the time (Shadow of a Sun, and The Virgin in the Garden) could both be said to have fit the mold the gatekeepers were looking for.  Both works just mentioned almost deserve to be described as a pair of roman a clef as more than anything else, and so it's it's not too difficult to see why the Ivy Covered Citadel might have thought her to be a worth addition to their trophy collection Library.  As time went on, Byatt proved herself to be one of those literary types who also possessed a deft skill at handling the settings and characterizations from the worlds of Myth.  This appears to have always been something of a latent ability with Byatt, though I think it's telling that she never brought this aspect of her skills as far out to the fore until sometime starting in the early 90s, when it was clear that the heydays of the Tower had begun their long recede into the current level of cultural obscurity that it continues to enjoy today.  It was with novels like Possession, The Children's Book, and in particular short story collections like The Djinn and the Nightingale's Eye that the writer began to show the extent her true literary colors.

The curious thing about all this lies in the way she almost had to allow, or learn to grant herself permission to shrug off the demands of the Ivory Tower, and learn how the realm of Myth might be a safe haven for her own true voice.  It's curious because there's the sense of the author learning how to work her way toward an understanding of the proper expression of the Fantastic that she was able to call herself comfortable with.  It's this idea of struggling to know how to be at ease in the world of once upon a time that is the most striking and permanent feature of just about every word that Byatt wrote.  It starts out as a muted background note in early novels like The Game, until it becomes the over-arching theme in Ragnarök which was her last published work.  It's this notion of finding out if you can ever be at ease with the Fairy Tale that is the hallmark not just of Byatt's novels, but also of the semi short story that's placed under the microscope here today.  This is the modern myth of The Thing in the Forest.

Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (2022).

There's an element of the Sonic franchise that began to puzzle me after a while.  I couldn't for the life of me figure out where all those video games were set.  It's not something I ever lost sleep over, or anything.  It was always just one of those vague, free-floating curiosities that cropped into my mind on occasion.  As I think back on my interactions with the Blue Blur, however (infrequent as it might have been), I began to realize a kind of irony taking shape.  It always seemed (to me, at least) that the more artists tried to expand upon the mythos of the games, the greater a sense of complexity began to evolve, at least in terms of the story's setting.  The more I thought it over, it soon became clear of just what kind of stage setting the world's most famous video game speedster belongs to.  Right about now is when a lot of readers are thinking, "How can you not know any of this?  Haven't you been paying attention"?  Well, time for a bit of a re-confession.  I said just a second or two ago that my interactions with the Sonic franchise was infrequent, and I mean every cent of that word.  I've never been what you might call a die-hard gamer.  The last major period in which my attention was focused on platform console entertainment was way back somewhere from 1991 or abouts to, say 94 to 5.  Somewhere along that timeline, my interest in either Sega or Nintendo just began to taper off, and I've never really been back to revisit either ever since.

That's not just a long time ago, it's practically a whole other world, another life.  It also does a good job of establishing my non-gamer credentials.  My understanding of the major franchises came to an end with Sonic and Mario.  There was a brief moment when I was kind of interested in the original Resident Evil 2, yet that went just as quickly as it arrived.  Let that stand as a testament to my lack of place in the Gaming world.  It's a fandom I've never really belonged to, in the end.  I've always been more of an outsider gazing in every now and then.  In fact, now that I think about it, the last time I ever bothered with the world's greatest chili dog fanatic was not with any of the games.  It was with the two kid's TV shows.  I'm talking, of course, about Adventures and Sonic SatAM.  For better, worse, a reversal of the two, or even a little of both, those two incarnations where the last time I ever paid attention to the little speed demon.  I bring these two portrayals up because both were like the main template by which not just me, but fans everywhere viewed the world-building of the games.  The stages, or levels of the original video games were presented as almost the exact opposite of Mario's Mushroom Kingdom.  

In the strictest sense, all we were ever given as players was a series of digitized backgrounds that were just elaborate enough to suggest hints of some kind of undisclosed identity, yet they were also generic enough so that the ambience of one level was allowed to bleed over into another with a seamlessness that made the transition barely noticeable.  It was pretty clear, even to the children at the controls that the original focus of the series was always on platforming first, and story second.  There's nothing so unusual about that.  For the longest time it was little more than just the standard approach that most consoles aimed for.  The thing to keep in mind about both Mario and Sonic is that each character emerged out of the classic era of the video game arcade world.  This was a time when the basic "story" of any game amounted to little more than the threadbarest excuse plot that existed for no other reason than to set things in motion.  In other words, it was gameplay and not plot that was the sole purpose of video games for the longest time.  In many ways, it still is.  Mario, for instance, has mostly managed to cling to it's arcade origins by keeping any semblance of plot simple and to the point.  At the same time, the makers of Sonic seemed a bit more willing to expand on the lore and nature of their creation.

That's part of how the two Hedgehog shows came to be almost at the same time.  For a brief period, Nintendo was even willing to let Mario get in on the act.  It was from Adventures and SatAM that both constant and casual fans (like me), along with average Saturday Morning Audiences in general were given our first ever idea of where our little blue hero came from.  For the longest time, I was always under the impression that Sonic was this extra-terrestrial, along with all of his friends, on a far distant planet named Moebius.  Some viewers might have wondered how human looking figures like the Eggman could exist in this other world, though that one's easily accounted for.  Just imagine them as an alternate version of the Time Lords that never developed TARDIS technology, or the ability to transform, and there you have it, problem solved.  It might not have any bearing on the logic of real life, yet that's the fun of Science Fantasy stories like this.  They're so far removed from the real world, it's like the Imagination has been given carte-blanche to go as far out and wild as it can.  So this was my first introduction to the idea of the World of Sonic the Hedgehog.  For the longest time, that seemed to be all the world-building explanation I was given about the character, and it looked like that would be the only scraps of information we would ever have.  It would also have been all that we needed.

Even the introduction of characters like Knuckles, or McGuffins like the Chaos Emeralds did little to shake things up.  Then, as time went on, more human characters began to play a bigger role in the series, and it began to get a lot harder to tell if the Blue Blur's world was just this other alien planet (which would make a certain amount of Imaginative sense) or were we dealing with this weird, Planet of the Apes style twist, where it turns out the setting was Earth all along (which just raises all sorts of headscratchers).  To be fair, there is a scenario where this kind of revelation can be made to carry dramatic weight.  All you'd have to do is introduce a game with a more plot based design.  All you'd need to do then is create a riff on the above mentioned Charlton Heston story line.  You could write the scenario so that as you complete each level, Sonic and the gamer learns a bit more about the backstory of Moebius, until when you reach the end and discover that Sonic, Tails, and everyone else are living on this technologically re-shaped version of a post-apocalyptic Earth.  That sounds a bit grim to me, yet that's all it would take to set up a perfectly reasonable imaginative explanation for how guys like Sonic and his world came to be.  Then the franchise started transporting all it's characters to the actual Earth.

To say the confusion only deepened for me there is a bit like saying everything about showbiz appears to be in freefall these days.  For whatever reason, somewhere along the line, Sega partnered up with TMS Entertainment to give us the first successful Sonic anime series.  It the one where some BS science accident ends up sending all the main cast of the games up to that point through a wormhole that drops them all straight into the middle of the contemporary modern day, human centric Terra Firma that we call home even outside the make-believe confines of the franchise.  In retrospect, this show might have turned out to be the one installment that was able to create a shift in the nature of the original platformers, in and of themselves.  Even before the premiere of X, there had been Sonic film and video game entries that had tried to incorporate  human characters, or else Class M human-looking aliens that amounted to Homo Sapiens in all but name, and the file numbers scratched off.  These all seemed to have been an effort on Sega's part to try and take their star mascot in a more experimental, plot and lore oriented direction.  However, these early attempts (such as an infamous OVA and a trial console title called Sonic Adventures) did little to move the needle, and the company folded not too long after.

It's therefore interesting to note that the Hedgehog's current owners felt obliged to try and continue with this strategy going forward.  That seems to be how we got the Anime series which transports just about everything to Earth, while the video games themselves appear to have undergone a retcon where Moebius turns out to have just been our own planet all along.  In other words, what we've got on our hands here has been this almost constant, decades long shuffling of the deck with just a handful of the main cast remaining more or less the same in terms of personality and purpose, while always in danger of having their backgrounds, and hence, their motivations changing on a number of levels, while still being the same in essence.  It just goes to beg the question.  Is anyone else reading this as confused as I am?  I get the impression I've stumbled onto one of those classic rabbit holes in video game history.  One where anything like talk of an official, settled canon is almost ludicrous for the game developers involved.  What's remarkable about all of these shenanigans to me is how none of this constant re-arranging of the deck chairs has managed to deliver anything like a permanent sense of damage to the character and brand.  Throughout it all, Sonic and his main friends remain more or less the same.

He's just this Hedgehog with a remarkable ability for speed who goes on various adventures with his two somewhat equally fast friends as they fight a never-ending battle against the machinations of a twisted mad scientist.  And since you come to think of it, with setup as basic and simple of as that, is it really any wonder that the developers and producers have been able to create so many shifts and changes in the backstory while the basic outlines of the cast and crew more or less stand still as they are?  It's pretty clear all of this is on purpose at some level.  Sonic is designed as this one size fits all protagonist.  Someone you are meant to be able take and place in whatever scenario sounds the most profitable regardless of lore and continuity and still be identifiable as himself.  This creates an idea of who Sonic is at his core which is worth exploring in further depth later on in this review.  For now, we'll simply note how this fundamental sense of malleability was to apply even to his transition onto the big screen.  When the first official Sonic film came out way back in 2020, it amounted to yet another reset of the character's backstory.  There was nothing all that novel in the setup of that film's plot.  All it amounts to is a re-using of the basic concept of Sonic X, where the First Speedster of Gaming was born and raised on another planet (presumably Moebius) and due to plot contrivance gets sent to Earth.

The major novelty to be found in how the 2020 film approached its material was in the way it strove to give the protagonist this almost quasi-Spielbergian feel to his exploits.  I'll have to admit, out of all the direction the first movie could have taken, I'm still not sure this affectionate parody of the E.T. setup was what I had in mind.  At the same time, this one aspect of the film might be a pointer to one of the reasons it amounted to such a cozy success upon release.  That's another factor I'll have to discuss when we get into the review proper.  For now, it's enough to note that since the first Sonic Movie was such a big hit, it was inevitable that sooner or later a sequel would makes its way onto screens.  The real question was just how good of a follow up could you make to a film and character like the Blue Blur?