I knew that Wizard and Glass meant doubling back to Roland’s young days, and to his first love affair, and I was scared to death of that story. Suspense is relatively easy, at least for me; love is hard. Consequently I dallied, I temporized, I procrastinated, and the book remained unwritten.
I began at last, working in motel rooms on my Macintosh PowerBook, while driving cross-country from Colorado to Maine after finishing my work on the miniseries version of The Shining. It occurred to me as I drove north through the deserted miles of western Nebraska (where I also happened to be, driving back from Colorado, when I got the idea for a story called “Children of the Corn”), that if I didn’t start soon, I would never write the book at all.
But I no longer know the truth of romantic love, I told myself. I know about marriage, and mature love, but forty-eight has a way of forgetting the heat and passion of seventeen.
I will help you with that part, came the reply. I didn’t know who that voice belonged to on that day outside Thetford, Nebraska, but I do now, because I have looked into his eyes across a whore’s bed in a land that exists very clearly in my
imagination. Roland’s love for Susan Delgado (and hers for him) is what was told to me by the boy who began this story. If it’s right, thank him. If it’s wrong, blame whatever got lost in the translation.
Also thank my friend Chuck Verrill, who edited the book and hung with me every step of the way. His encouragement and help were invaluable, as was the encouragement of Elaine Koster, who has published all of these cowboy romances in paperback.
Most thanks of all go to my wife, who supports me in this madness as best she can and helped me on this book in a way she doesn’t even know. Once, in a dark time, she gave me a funny little rubber figure that made me smile. It’s Rocket J.
Squirrel, wearing his blue aviator’s hat and with his arms bravely outstretched. I put that figure on my manuscript as it grew (and grew … and grew), hoping some of the love that came with it would kind of fertilize the work. It must have worked, at least to a degree; the book is here, after all. I don’t know if it’s good or bad—I lost all sense of perspective around page four hundred—but it’s here. That alone seems like a miracle. And I have started to believe I might actually live to complete this cycle of stories. (Knock on wood.)
There are three more to be told, I think, two set chiefly in Mid-World and one almost entirely in our world—that’s the one dealing with the vacant lot on the comer of Second and Forty-sixth, and the rose that grows there. That rose, I must tell you, is in terrible danger.
In the end; Roland’s ka-tet will come to the nightscape which is Thunderclap . . .
and to what lies beyond it. All may not live to reach the Tower, but I believe that those who do reach it will stand and be true.
—Stephen King
Lovell, Maine, October 27, 1996
STEPHEN KING, the world’s best selling novelist, is the author of more than thirty books, most recently Desperation, Rose Madder, Insomnia, and The Green Mile. His four volumes in the Dark Tower series, including The Gunslinger, The Drawing of the Three, and The Waste Lands, are all available in Plume trade paperback editions. He lives in Bangor, Maine, with his wife, novelist Tabitha King.