I’ve re-embraced audiobooks lately, which has lured me back to the pursuit of The Dark Tower.
I spend many hours weekly listening to audio media, and for the last few decades podcasts have soaked up the largest chunk of that time. But circa Trump version 2.0, I’ve steadily backed away from political content for reasons that I’d think are pretty clear. And even more recently, I’ve dialed down other chattery podcasts across sports, tech, media, and even pop culture to an extent.
Music is a lifelong balm of course (for evidence of this, I invite you to check out the recently completed best 1,000 albums ever, a 5-year long obsession if there ever was one), and audiobooks have slotted in nicely as a retreat, a solace, and wildly effective entertainment while walking Jack the dog or tackling house projects.
A few months ago, I started thinking about Stephen King’s Richard Bachman era. No surprise there, I suppose, with The Long Walk (haven’t seen yet – looking forward to it) and a new The Running Man movie (mostly meh, sadly) having been released fairly recently.
I decided to give The Long Walk a go via audiobook, figuring that the relatively straightforward plot – literally, in this case, really (picking them up and laying them down) – combined with a story I’m already familiar enough with would be a good way to ease back into fictional storytelling via my earholes.
Not only did I enjoy what was perhaps only my second ever revisit of The Long Walk, but I was riveted. The grim, softly apocalyptic story tracked creepily with what’s going on in the U.S. these days, and yet it was also strange solace, a delightful escape. There’s something lovely and deeply satisfying about letting the right book told by a strong voice actor play out in your mind, and Kirby Heyborne set the perfect mood.
And the wildest part was that I listened to it mostly during walks under gloomy winter skies in Seattle, which conveyed a bizarre level of realism to its story of one hundred young men in a competition to keep walking… until only one remains.
The Running Man was next, and I’ll just say in short that while the ‘80s Arnold Schwarzenegger filmic version is a coked up, violent comic book trip, we still await a movie version that nearly does justice to the gritty, downbeat source material.
Speaking of waiting: finally we get back to the pursuit of The Dark Tower. I’ve been waiting for a proper adaptation for more than half my life.
The Gunslinger, the first novel in the massive series, is one of my all-time favorites, and its opening line never fails to thrill and enthrall me.
The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.
That, matched with Stephen King’s invocation of the desert as not just large, but as the apotheosis of deserts, sparked my imagination as a child. And still does.
In yet another strange way, I grew up with The Dark Tower. The Waste Lands, the third novel, is also a dear favorite of mine. It was released in 1991, and I desperately waited for the fourth edition, Wizard and Glass, throughout the ‘90s even as I crisscrossed through high school and undergrad years.
When Wizard and Glass finally did get released, I recall tearing through it in late 1997 to the detriment of my grad school studies at SUNY Stony Brook.
I ended up bailing on that first go at grad school. In fact, I took a chunk of student loan money and used it to fuel a five-week road trip with my man Adam that took me to California and the west for the first time.* I always think about Jack Kerouac’s On the Road as my literary inspiration for that trip – and my further travels and eventual move to the west coast – but Roland and his ka-tet also play an important role, truth be told.
* P.S. I’m still paying off that loan to this day.
A full 20 years later, my wife and I had recently moved to Seattle. She works in healthcare and wound up taking an initial gig at a rural clinic about an hour and a half south of the city.
It just so happened that while visiting her down there, the single filmic adaptation of The Dark Tower was playing in the tiny town’s tiny movie theater. My wife indulged my ravenous interest in seeing it there, and so she bore witness to my bitter disappointment in the Nikolaj Arcel-directed film.
A mess is an understatement, and even a cast that included the top notch pairing of Idris Elba as Roland Deschain and Matthew McConaughey as Walter/The Man in Black could do little to save it.
Fast forward another nine years, and I segued from the audiobook version of the Richard Bachman novels to a full run through of The Dark Tower in audio form.
And even though I’ve read the early books in the series many times, I’m enthralled all over again.
I’m sure you’re not shocked to learn that I’ve eagerly monitored any and all news of The Dark Tower adaptations over the years.
As luck (fate?) would have it, during this current era when I’ve been lit up anew by the audio retelling of the series, I stumbled across news of serious movement of a new and seemingly serious effort to do right by Stephen King’s masterpiece.
[Mike] Flanagan, who is known for his work on The Haunting of Hill House and Midnight Mass, will be transforming King’s eight-book series into a television adaptation. The fact that the season 1 scripts are complete is only the beginning, as Flanagan will reportedly develop the book series into a five-season series.
I might quibble slightly at plans for “only” five seasons, but I’m going to be bravely optimistic and say this is ecstatically great news for my fellow Dark Tower heads out there.
I could even see some merit to not necessarily tracking every novel to a standalone season, though I’d be somewhat shocked if the first three books don’t roughly get showcased with a season each – with perhaps the journey and confrontation with Blaine the Mono and the escape from Lud wrapping up Season 3.
Speaking of… Lud. I already can’t wait to get to Lud.
For what it’s worth, Flanagan has a fairly deep background adapting Stephen King’s material already, having already directed the film versions of Gerald’s Game, Doctor Sleep, and the critically acclaimed The Life of Chuck, and with a new version of Carrie on deck.
I greatly look forward to covering Dark Tower news for Pop Thruster, and in the meanwhile I’ll happily resume my audiobook travels to Midworld with Jack the Billy-Bumbler… er, dog, at my side.
Also be sure to check out Top 50 Stephen King books ranked (by how much they’ve meant to my life).