the dark tower

[kradeelav]

read stephen king’s the gunslinger this past weekend.  needed it.

me gusta for sheer visual haunting sticking power despite not being a laser-targeted bias book.  it’ll stick with me enough to finish the dark tower series after the Fifth Season, but in the meantime … a few scattered thoughts:

• being in the middle of my FNV playthrough made me link the two like whoa - haven’t had much exposure to the ‘weird west’ trope beforehand, but those two feel like they practically define it from opposite ends of the spectrum.  (thematically hard vs soft stories and how seriously they take themselves - I really do need to dust off that essay)… something about how I’ve been playing Shrike and simultaneously running from a past / running from the future fit bizarrely well here.  Also got mega Majora’s Mask vibes towards the end with the Man In Black being analogous to a trickster deity(?) that’s (arguably) unsympathetic* but deeply tragic at the same time; there’s that dreamlike surreal vibe I got not only from the setting (hello that climax in the bone graveyard *chef kisses*) but from the outrageously … id-like archetypes of the characters that wouldn’t feel out of place from a jungian breakdown.  the tarot cards were maybe a bit on the nose but you know what, it works.
  • It was weird but a good Weird, basically. 
  • also wow those settings would be gorgeous as a game or a vampire hunter d-skin’d anime just saying
  • ( why the ever living fuck has king’s books not been made into an anime yet, he’s got the exact same shameless dRAMA! needed for it.. )

• bluntly: king’s got one of the most … consistently raw, striking ways of writing sex despite almost never mentioning the, mmm… sensations themselves? it’s almost like the sheer inverse of fanfiction, ironically; because I feel like fics tend to focus on the immediacy of the act almost myopically so unless if they’re written by authors who’ve been around few a few decades.  there’s some anarchic parts to wince a little these days (lol @ making sure everyone knows the virility of the male protags with all the screwing), but god damn, he knows what makes meatbags in general tick, and it’s really amusing to see what specific, vulnerable, private thoughts he consistently calls back to (seen in lisey’s story too - it’s a little weird and it’s a little taboo to talk about, but honestly i felt like the grief she had for her deceased husband was the most profound when it was in those sparse offhand comments about those moments with his hands on her, etc.)

• actually, speaking of Fallout, I got huge Fo3 vibes especially with the underground liminal space of the railroad with Jake and the fluorescent lights (him touching the book that turned to dust, etc).  Fo3 felt a little more … survivalistic, cold, animalistic - you tended to sort of … loose yourself a little, in those sewers under the Capitol - and pausing in that space (both of those spaces) in the light after running in the dark and changing into a different person feels like a profound message in itself.

• the more i read classic Timeless™ fiction (pulp or not), the more i feel like … a key consistent strength is describing a scene that reaches in with deep deep hooks into an id-part of your brain and … unlocks? those weird visual and emotional settings that are universal to us - for whatever reason, EoE (the entirety of it) feels like a quintessential example, so does the dark link battle in OoT - and I don’t know why those two popped up, other than that  they’re both sparsely minimalistic (the latter being nothing but like literally … a flat sheet of water, fog, and a tree), but god the layers; it’s shit that shakes you to the core for a long long while after.

- reading back on this is funny because i clearly enjoyed the setting and the mood more than the characters (even though the gunslinger himself is, grudgingly, annoyingly (l u l ), Remarkably My Type) - but arranging those delightful set pieces to weave something in between is the real fun that king had.

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* (mumbles i maybe don’t like trickster archetypes very much sorry, several people who i respect immensely who I know do :P)