September 11th And The Dark Tower

Our World Tied To The Dark Tower
The last three Dark Tower novels not only pick up the pace of the story, they began to pull things together.  Three things are tied together by the Dark Tower: King's own life, the Dark Tower and our world's history.  These three things are tied together in a not so neat knot.

Stephen King The Character

Stephen King makes himself a character in the Dark Tower.  It is one of my favorite sections of the book!  Fictional Stephen King darting all through a Dark Tower novel! 

In The Song of Susanna, Stephen King’s life becomes intertwined with the world of the Dark Tower. It is not an instance of King falling into the book -- the direction such plots usually take. In the Dark Tower, the book comes to him! Roland enters our world searching his creator.

I love the scene where Roland Deschain finds Stephen King.  The Gunslinger's reaction is delightful.  He actually has twinge of dislike for his creator -- that's Brilliant!  No one but Stephen King would have had the guts to do that.


The Towers:

In a sense we are all part of the Dark Tower narrative.  How?  We all have the shared experience of September 11, 2001.  Certainly those killed were most directly impacted, but the nation and world were tied together in that single event.  We all saw it together.  We experienced it together. And so the nation and the world are invited into the Dark Tower to imagine a twist.

What if the villains in the Dark Tower played a role in the destruction of the Twin Towers?

No longer did the Dark Tower simply loom over Roland – it looms over all of us.

In New York of 1999, Jake and Father Callahan need to destroy black thirteen.  How can they remove such an item?  They hide the item in a locker inside the world Trade Center.  Naturally, when the towers fall, Black 13 will be destroyed with them.


Bev Vincent explains,

The idea is that Black 13 will be buried at the bottom of tons of rubble and will therefore be out of anyone's reach. As Callahan says, "one glass ball under a hundred and ten stories of concrete and steel? Even a glass ball filled with deep magic? That'd be one way to take care of the nasty thing, I guess."

I love the way King draws our world together with the world of fiction.  Not just his own life, he boldly grabs events we all have an emotional connection to.