I hated this fantasy yarn when I first read it – but now I know that genre-swapping can make great writers grow
There's a lot of debate in some circles about exactly what sort of author Stephen King is. Genres are either dismissive of him, or claim ownership: people who dislike horror claim that he's not a horror writer; people who dislike fantasy seem willing to pretend that The Dark Tower series just doesn't exist; and some seem to dislike the books he's written that take on a more literary bent, simply because they don't feature those things that go bump in the night.
I like to think that I've grown past that now, and that I can take King for who he is, and on a book-by-book basis. I like to think I can do that with anything I read now, frankly – genre be damned. When I was 13, however, that was impossible for me: he wrote horror novels. Anything else, I wasn't really interested.
I hated The Hobbit. I just couldn't imagine why anybody would want to read such a twee, simpering narrative, overwritten and unimaginative. I didn't like it one bit. I was told to try The Lord of the Rings, as something more grown-up, but that was, somehow, worse; just a mess of nonsense to me.
So, when I was going through King's work and came to the cover of this – which proudly declared, over a picture of a wizard and some fancy patterns, that this was "a classic fantasy from the master storyteller" – I just had no interest in it. I brought my own baggage to those 400 pages of dragons and wizards and traditional, fantasy-quest narrative, and I (perhaps inevitably) hated it. Maybe, of all the King novels I have to reread for this project, this was the one I was dreading most; and I'm not alone in that. Many King fans dislike it, simply because it strays into a genre they don't see as his.
What did I specifically hate? I hated the tone. I hated the narrator of this novel-told-as-story, an omniscient wizard (I assumed) with a personality. I even disliked the main characters, Peter and Thomas, for being whiny and having a curious lack of agency. And the ending, which just seemed to fade into nothingness after building up to what, in my mind, should have been a terrific climax, a battle to end all battles. Villains, I thought, should not escape. They should not go unpunished.
One of the issues was that, for some reason, I had read The Eyes of the Dragon before I read The Stand. Don't ask me why – it makes no sense to me either – and yet there it is. So, the fact that the bad guy in the novel is Randall Flagg, antagonist of The Stand and The Dark Tower series, was lost on me. I don't know what that would have changed back then. It would have blown my mind, likely. I don't remember making the connection when I read The Stand, because I think I was trying to forget the earlier fantasy novel I wanted to pretend my hero hadn't written. I shelved it and never looked back. I don't even own my first print copy of it any more.
Which brings us to the present, and to me coming back to this novel for the first time in 20 years. Now, I have read and enjoyed a lot of fantasy novels – even Lord of the Rings. Now – post-Stand, post-Dark Tower books, post-every other hint of Flagg or mid-world in King's other books – I was able to approach this novel in a completely different way.
It's dedicated to Ben (son of Peter) Straub and Naomi King, his then-13-year-old daughter. King wrote it for her, to give her something of his to read. He put her and Ben in the novel as minor characters (even marrying them off in the end), and he created a narrator that, when you pick apart the voice, isn't some wizard at all; it's King himself. It's a storyteller, trying to ease in ideas and concepts, and trying to parlay some of what makes him a storyteller on to the page itself. Compare the voice with the one he uses in his introductions – his "constant reader" invocations – it's the same.
The book is a fantasy novel that feels, for the most part, as if it's aimed at a young adult audience. I couldn't escape the thought in this reread, though I think it made me far prefer the novel this time around.
The narrative voice is what carries it, doing some wonderful things – particularly with regard to narrative point of view, allowing us inside Flagg's head in a way that we are not permitted in his other appearances, and we see him as nearly human, confused and flawed, with just the beginnings of his malignant evil – and come the novel's final chapter, it feels almost as if King is sitting next to you, shutting a book and telling you it's time for bed.
There are life lessons here ("Did they all live happily ever after? They did not. No one ever does, in spite of what the stories might say."), and some rounding off of individual character narratives in way that feels almost CS Lewis-ish.
But then there's also, if you know how Flagg's story ends, a real darkness – and it probably wouldn't be a King novel without it. This is the first chronological appearance of Flagg in King's work, set before The Stand. So when Thomas and Dennis go off in search of Flagg and, as the book says, confront him, we are not told what happens. Instead, the story is left open and hanging, to be revisited; and we know, because we're his constant readers – because Flagg exists past this tale, and into so many other novels – that the story King would tell us simply cannot have a happy ending.
Now I know, of course, that King didn't only write horror novels. He writes a lot of them, sure, but there's so much of his output that is somewhat unclassifiable. The Eyes of the Dragon is not. It's a fantasy novel, through and through. But that doesn't mean it should be shunned. Every writer wants to stretch their wings, and we should let them: it's how great writers can grow.
Now, I can see this as the fun exercise in fantasy genre storytelling that it is. It doesn't need to be The Stand, or It. Not everything can be. Many King fans can't see that. The fact this book exists seems have made some fans (going by some of the more extreme Amazon and Goodreads reviews) not very happy at all; and some Kng fans write it off to this day without having read it, simply because of the shift to another genre.
But maybe their anger is a good thing. Without it, we might not have had Misery – a book about a novelist whose fans won't let him write anything other than what they know and love him for. As The Eyes of the Dragon says at its close, however: "That is another tale, for another day …"
Next: From one Randall Flagg book to another – it's The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three.
via Books: Fiction | guardian.co.uk
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