The Dark Tower Companion: A Guide to Stephen King’s Epic Fantasy Read Online Free PDF

an ordinary man, but Gilead fell in the distant past—perhaps centuries or millennia ago. Roland claims that he has skipped entire generations, without explaining what that means, and says that he has spent athousand years learning the skills of a gunslinger. After his palaver with the man in black, he ages ten years overnight. Is he slipping through time, or is time slipping past him? Stephen King addresses that issue in the interview found later in this book.
    At the heart of the story is the Dark Tower, though its nature is not explained in this book. Roland needs to reach it, and it is in some kind of danger, but King did not yet understand what all of this meant to Roland’s world when he wrote the novel.
    Though
The Gunslinger
focuses primarily on Roland and his pursuit of the man in black, Jake Chambers is also important. Though he dies twice over the course of the book—once offstage, before he arrives at the Way Station—this is not the last that readers will see of the boy. One of the subtle changes King made to the book when revising it in 2003 was to strengthen Jake’s character, given his future importance to Roland’s quest. In the first version, he was docile and weaker, whereas in the revised version, he speaks up for himself. Though he understands his fate and is powerless to change it, he does not go gently.
    King must have sensed that Jake would be important to the story, given how much time he spends exploring the boy’s past life. Jake is a latchkey kid whose father is an executive at a major television network and whose mother neglects him. That’s not to say he isn’t loved—the housekeeper, Greta Shaw, is tender toward him, and even Roland comes to love the boy soon after they meet. Jake’s introduction into the story reveals the fact that there is a connection between Roland’s world and ours, and that there are ways of getting from one to the other. Roland has always heard this was possible—a religious order called the Manni were said to be able to travel between worlds—but he had believed it to be a myth, like many stories about his world.
    One major difference between Roland’s world and ours is the presence of magic. The clearest example of this is when Walter raises Nort the Weedeater from the dead, but there are other signs of the supernatural as well. Demons live in Roland’s world, including the Speaking Demon he encounters in the basement of the Way Station and the succubus he consults in the Speaking Ring shortly before they reach the mountains. These are not unexpected encounters. Roland knows the rules of dealing with demons. He is not amazed to discover that the man in black can perform magic tricks. In fact, he relies on magic constantly. He carries a “grow bag,” in which things miraculously appear when he needs them.
    Though the Oracle’s message and the details revealed by the man in blackwhen he reads the tarot cards for Roland lay out some of what will transpire in
The Drawing of the Three
, an argument could be made that Roland does not gain much assistance from these insights. He is told what will happen, and it happens. He doesn’t even remember a lot of what the man in black tells him, shrugging it off as if it doesn’t matter.
    However, he sacrificed a lot—much more than is apparent at this point in his story—to gain this information. Given the fact that the man in black is a habitual liar, he cannot place much faith in what he is told during their palaver at the golgotha. Walter is, after all, a minion of the Crimson King, who wants nothing more than to see Roland fail. He may claim that Jake must die before they can palaver, or that he has to talk if Roland catches him, but that doesn’t mean he’s speaking the truth. By encouraging Roland to sacrifice the boy, he adds significantly to the moral imbalance of the gunslinger’s soul.
    The tarot reading ends with Death,