Free The Dark Tower Companion: A Guide to Stephen King’s Epic Fantasy by Bev Vincent Page B

Colorado to Maine after finishing work on
The Shining
miniseries. Ads announcing the book’s upcoming publication appeared in the back of the final four installments of his serial novel,
The Green Mile
.
    The first two chapters of
Wizard and Glass
were released as a promotional booklet that accompanied bundles of his twin novels,
Desperation
and
The Regulators
. Though this delighted fans, there was some complaining, too, as many people had already purchased the books. King chastised the complainers in a harshly worded message posted by his publisher on the Usenet newsgroup alt.books.stephen-king. Penguin released the chapters on their Web site two months later.
    King read from the novel at a conference in October, stating that the first draft was more than fourteen hundred pages long.
Wizard and Glass
, dedicated to his personal assistants and published in August 1997, proved to bethe longest book of the series. The Donald M. Grant limited-trade edition was the first book from a small press publisher to ever appear on the
New York Times
hardcover bestseller list. The trade paperback appeared a few months later.
    The novel picks up where
The Waste Lands
left off, repeating the final section of the earlier book to bring readers up to speed. In terms of the contemporary action, the book covers a four- or five-day period, although there is some uncertainty due to the slippage of time when Roland is telling his story and because of an adventure inside a magical orb. The backstory set in Mejis spans a period of several months, from the day after Roland’s test of manhood until he and his friends return from Mejis.
    The first part of
Wizard and Glass
resolves the cliffhanger involving the suicidal Blaine the Mono. The second part finds Roland and his followers in Topeka, Kansas, in a version of America that is similar to the ones the New Yorkers came from, except in this reality a superflu virus has killed almost everyone. Before they visit a mysterious green palace that has materialized across the interstate, Roland needs to tell his companions a story from his youth. Then the
ka-tet
enters the palace and has a showdown with a wizard who goes by many names, including Marten and Randall Flagg.
    As the monorail hurtles across Mid-World at breakneck speed, Blaine behaves like a petulant child. He hates being corrected or contradicted and demands to be entertained. When crossed, he metes out punishment, as when he amplifies the sound of the Falls of the Hounds.
    Ka
has provided Roland and his followers with a couple of clues about how to handle Blaine. The book of riddles Jake got at the Manhattan Restaurant of the Mind is a red herring—a fact hinted at by the missing answers section at the back. The real clue to cracking Blaine is in
Charlie the Choo-Choo
, and it is Eddie who figures it out. After watching Roland spend hours exhausting all the riddles from Fair-Day contests and after Jake tests Blaine with the hardest entries in
Riddle-De-Dum!
, Eddie starts zinging Blaine with stupid, illogical joke-riddles, shooting with his mind like a gunslinger firing bullets. Though Blaine knows the answers to many of them, it pains him to be forced to respond to these unworthy riddles. His circuits blow, his engines cease and the train coasts into Topeka instead of crashing into the barrier at the terminus. The train derails, but at a slow enough speed that the
ka-tet
survives uninjured.
    They emerge into a version of Topeka, Kansas, that is different from the one known to the New Yorkers. They see unfamiliar automobile models, softdrink brands and sports franchises. A superflu has decimated the population of America. They find a newspaper dated 1986, a year before Roland drew Eddie from New York, so they can’t be in his Earth, but perhaps in a universe that is next door. They also find Gage Park, which has a train that must have inspired Beryl Evans to write
Charlie the Choo-Choo
.
    They’re no longer on the Path of the