While we've still got a few books to go before we reach the first entry in King's Dark Tower series, I've been thinking about the untapped potential of the series lately. I already talked about the anti-climactic battle with the Crimson King, as well as the coda, to which I'm still pretty ambivalent. There's something else though that came to mind when I think about what the series could've accomplished.
This series was supposed to be Stephen King's rug, one of its main purposes was to tie the literary room together. It did this quite well. It acted as the spine of King's work that cemented the idea that all of King's works were part of an intricate web.
This was also supposed to be King's mega-event. As an avid comic reader, I can tell you that most events like this have a team of heroes assemble to battle whatever threat may be looming on the horizon. This was the case here as well, Jack Sawyer did his part in Black House, Father Callahan and Patrick Danville returned, and even the joining of the ka-tet isn't too dissimilar from a comic book plot.
The most apt comparison would be to DC's now classic Crisis on Infinite Earths. It was one of the prototypical universe spanning events that required all of the heroes to join forces to save the day. If you think about it, the Dark Tower books are a crisis on infinite earths. Both feature an ancient entity who is bent on destroying all of existence to serve its own ends. The villain in the comic, named the Anti-Monitor, required pretty much every hero, along with the villains, to unite to wage war on this threat.
While King had a few characters return, more probably could've been worked in. Psychics played a pretty big part in the later novels, Danny Torrance or John Smith making an appearance wouldn't have been that out of left field. While Eyes of the Dragon is a Dark Tower tie in, the characters only get mentioned. I'm also pretty sure that a pyrokinetic would've been a useful ally, why not recruit Charlie in the war as well? Or maybe the telekinetic Carrie?
It also works for the villains as well. One of the main subplots was Stephen King getting hit by a van, rather than have him avoid it, he could've gotten hit and taken in by that world's Annie Wilkes. Most of King's fandom has accepted and embraced the idea that He Who Walks Behind the Rows is in fact Randall Flagg, I wouldn't have minded seeing that worked in somehow. The Ka-tet could've wandered into Gatlin and gotten themselves into another fine mess. Heck, even an offhand mention of it (similar to how Flagg gave a shout out to Trashcan Man in The Wastelands) would've been pretty cool.
On the other side of the coin, some people were getting frustrated with the fact that King was linking everything to the series and turning everything into a tie-in. Throwing all the characters in, as I'm suggesting, probably wouldn't have helped in that regard.
What say you, readers? Should King have cranked the crossovers up a notch or was he pushing it as is? Would trying to include characters from more of his books just cluttered the issue or would it have made it more epic?
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