Pop Smart - Reading Stephen King, Chapter 4: At odds in the ’00s

(The first “chapters” are here , here and here.)

Turnabout is fair play. In 1989, I resolved to stop reading Stephen King, even though I resumed reading him more obsessively half a decade later. In 2002 King threatened to stop publishing in a cantankerous interview with Entertainment Weekly. Where did that come from?

If King’s near-fatal 1999 accident and painful recuperation could be said to have a silver lining, it lays in the fact that the author planned to fast-track the composition of the final three books in the seven-volume Dark Tower series, rather than risk leaving his magnum opus unfinished. My satisfaction at getting the books within months (as opposed to the decades separating the earlier installments) was tempered by King’s threat to quit and passages like this one, from the “Coda” of the series’ final volume, titled The Dark Tower and published in 2004:

Yet some of you who have provided the ears without which no tale can survive a single day are likely not so willing. You are the grim, goal-oriented ones who will not believe that the joy is in the journey rather than the destination no matter how many times it has been proven to you. You are the unfortunate ones who still get the lovemaking all confused with the paltry squirt that comes to end the lovemaking. … You say you want to know how it all comes out. … I hope most of you know better. Want better. I hope come to hear the tale, and not just munch your way through the pages to the ending. For the ending you only have to turn to the last page and see what is there writ upon. But endings are heartless.

Dude, WTF? If you’re going to end the book, just end it, already – no need to berate me or bring sex into it. What did I do to deserve this?