Friday, April 11, 2008

Stephen King, Awesome at Any Age

A blog comment linking to a post about series with crappy endings led me to refresh myself on the plots of the Narnia books on Wikipedia (the next movie comes out in May!). I totally didn't remember how (spoiler alert) it all ended with Aslan talking about how in England he was called "Jesus." And actually I was retarded enough when I read those books that it probably still went over my head.

Anyway, somewhere I saw a mention of Stephen King's Dark Tower series, and I was all "oh yeah! I remember those!" I think when I read them there were only three, and I was so anxious about when the next one would come out and how it would all end, and what if Stephen King died in his mid-40's unable to complete the saga? But I guess I forgot about reading them, though I still remember (spoiler alert) the gunslinger fighting lobsters on the beach and learning about tunafish.

And it turns out (spoiler alert) Stephen King still isn't dead! And in fact, he actually finished the Dark Tower series, though I gather it was pretty disappointing in the end and at some point someone needed to obtain "the Pink Grapefruit." And so I've been reading all about Randall Flagg and about Stephen King's other books, and I came across this:
Roland's wine is poisoned, Roland drinks it and dies in three days, Roland's youngest son watches in horror as he drinks the poison. Peter is blamed for it, and is locked up in the enormous tower...Peter has made two requests for things he wants in his cell: his mother's dollhouse, and a napkin with every meal. Peter takes 5 threads from each napkin and with the help of a working loom from the dollhouse weaves them into a rope.

I just want to propose that anyone who comes up with that is awesome. A tip of my hat to you, Stephen King, or to whoever hacked all the Stephen King articles on Wikipedia and made them hilarious.

1 comment:

DU said...

I anxiously devoured the first N of those as well (and they are "lobstrosties" that say "did-a-chick" and "dud-a-chum", IIRC) but never finished. I was very bored and disappointed with the N+1th to the point I didn't want to finish the series.

But yeah, the dollhouse threads. Great part.