Wandering Outlaw
On one of the front pages of Stephen King's Song of Susannah, there is a list of his books. The interesting bit is that Dark-Tower related tomes are now listed in bold. Some of them are more obviously linked into the Roland mythology than others and, with the current direction that the Dark Tower series is taking, the connective tissue on the others may become more evident once King rambles to his final conclusion. I'm not entirely convinced that The Stand was a Dark Tower book when King first wrote it, but when Roland's ka-tet wandered through that world in Wizard and Glass, a thread that may have been in the back of King's head for years was made more evident. Though, Flagg is pretty synonymous with the Man in Black when you get right down to it.
I'm still not over my diappointment with the end of The Wolves of the Calla. The intrusion of our world's pop culture into the symbolic -- and literal -- space of King's Mid World was annoying and threatened to turn the delightfully rich world King had created into nothing more than a series of in-jokes that would only have relevance to modern children, thereby destroying the mythic and timeliness of his work. While it was okay that King turned his entire oeuvre into a circular structure, the intrusion of Harry Potter and Star Wars drove me to book throwing.
However, I'm back for Song of Susannah only because it isn't six million pages long. And, if he's going to piss me off again, at least I won't have slogged through all gazillion pages. Kind of a masochistic relationship I've got here. But, part of the reason that I'm back is that I remembered one of the key lines from "Childe Harolde's Pilgrimage" which King has said that the Dark Tower series is based on. "A wandering outlaw of his own dark mind." If I'm right, then he's had this ending planned for almost thirty years.
And when I'm thinking about the whole idea of serial fiction and about spending a couple of decades finishing a complete work, this becomes too tantalizing not to follow through to its end.