Dichotomy...

Just finished Song of Susannah. 15 days after I bought it. I didn't mean to finish it tonight, but I couldn't stop reading. The Dark Tower series has pulled in things from so many of King's other books that as a Constant Reader, I'm so engrossed by the one-ness of his writing that I can't make myself close the cover. As I told Emily in an email earlier today, when I was reading last night suddenly I had this "a-ha!" moment (my exact barely uttered words were "oh shit...") where all of a sudden all the various references fell into place. It was when Eddie asked Stephen King (yes, the author is a character in his own novel, a rather important, yet periphery, one at that) who Gloria y Inez Bachman was and he laughed and replied that it was Richard Bachman's (King's pseudonym) equally imaginary wife, only her name was lacking the y. The y of course was added to the author's name on Charlie the Choo-Choo to make 19 a name of nineteen characters. When I read that she was Richard Bachman's wife everything suddenly clicked, like someone turned on a lightswtich, and it was like suddenly I was seeing the world for the first time and everything was so clear. It was sort of a bizarre experience. I'm so entranced by the Dark Tower story that I'm even having scarily vivid dreams about it. Now I just have to wait until September for the 7th and final volume, afterwhich King claims that he plans to retire. I would too after having finally finished a 3000+ page story I started 30 years ago.

Posted by Rev. Adam on Wednesday, June 30, 2004 at 3:16 AM | Permalink