Black (novel)
Schwarz (Original title: The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger ) is the title of a novel by the writer Stephen King published in 1982 and forms the prelude to the eight-volume, dark fantasy saga known as the Dark Tower Cycle .
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Roland of Gilead, the last gunslinger of an ancient guild of knight-like lawmen from the line of the Eld, the first gunslinger, has left his youth and his homeland destroyed by betrayal and decay behind and is in search of the dark tower. This tower is a focal point of all the energy in the universe between the worlds, and since the world has moved on, things seem to be going wrong there.
The man in black could help the gunslinger to find the way to the dark tower, but the latter is on the run from Roland, or he is being followed by him. On the way, the mysterious wizard sets some traps for the gunslinger, but Roland can more or less avoid all of them. At first he leaves a village called Tull in a religious madness and Roland has no choice but to wipe out everything and everyone in that village before he can move on. His beloved is also killed.
Finally, in a dilapidated and long-abandoned rest house, he finds the boy Jake, who died in his old life in New York and thus got to the mid-world, the desert world of Roland. The gunslinger takes the frightened and disoriented boy with him on the journey, even if he knows that he is holding him up in pursuit of the Man in Black. What he does not know, however, is that the man in black took the boy to the middle world himself, only to set the gunslinger a new, even more deadly trap.
Their journey leads Roland and Jake past dangerous demons and an ancient oracle, which casts the boy under its spell and almost kills him. The gunslinger saves him in time and looks for the stone circle in which the oracle resides himself. He hopes that he can learn something about his future from the oracle. But he also knows that the oracle demands a price for it. That price is sex. With the help of the drug mescaline , the gunslinger can endure the ordeal and learn a lot about his fate. Eventually they meet the slow mutants deep in the mountains, which they can only escape with difficulty. Under the mountains you will find monuments of a people long gone. These seem to represent a dilapidated subway network, whose worn machines have not yet completely silenced. But time is running out when the trail of the Man in Black warms up for the first time since Roland's long search for the dark tower.
At the end of the eerie journey through the mountains, the man in black confronts Roland with a difficult decision. He reveals himself to the gunslinger for the first time, at the same time Jake threatens to plunge into the depths of the monumental caves. Roland has to choose between the boy, whom he now regards as his symbolic son, and the dark tower and its adjutant, the man in black.
Roland's decision is in favor of the dark tower without hesitation, and he lets Jake die in the depths of the mountains. The boy's last words before he falls are: "Then go, there are other worlds than this." Roland's decision finally brings him close to the man in black, who has apparently been waiting for him and the upcoming interview.
He realizes that the man in black is more than just a magician. Rather, he is the demon from his own youth. He pretends to be Walter, who once cheated on Roland's father together with a man named Marten and is ultimately responsible for his death. But Walter (or the man in black) is not Roland's only opponent. Marten is described by Walter as the Timeless Stranger , a powerful magician who is doomed to live backwards in time. This wizard also goes by various other names, such as Maerlyn, John Farson or Randall Flagg. Flagg himself is Stephen King's personal " antichrist ", his personified evil, which has also been at work in other books, such as The Dragon's Eyes or the comparable The Stand - The Last Stand .
The Man in Black draws seven cards for Roland from a strange set of tarot cards , three of these cards are supposed to represent his three companions, which he still has to "draw" in the course of his search for the dark tower. The cards are named “The Prisoner”, “The Lady of the Shadows” and “The Death” ( “But not for you, gunslinger!” ).
In addition, the man in black reveals some mysteries about the dark tower, its nature and its purpose. However, these explanations are more of the quality that they raise more questions than they actually answer. At the end of the conversation with the man in black, the gunslinger falls asleep and, it seems, only wakes up ten years later in the Golgotha of their conversation and realizes that the man in black has already turned to dust himself.
At the end of Black , Roland finally reaches the Western Sea.
backgrounds
inspiration
In the afterword by Schwarz , King says that he had always wanted to write a long novel about a romantic, quasi-medieval quest ( hero's journey or aventiure ). His main inspirations for the first volume, the last gunslinger Roland introduced there and his world, he drew from the Victorian poem Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came (German as Mr. Roland came to the dark tower ) by Robert Browning , which he addressed in his English studies from the University of Maine , from King Lear by William Shakespeare , from the Celtic Arthurian legend , and from a spaghetti western he had seen shortly before.
With these sources of inspiration and the question of whether it was possible to combine Western and medieval fantasy literature, King began work in 1970. For the writing he used a mysterious pile of green paper "in a strange format" that he was in the university library had found. In the epilogue mentioned, he emphasizes how the feeling of silence and loneliness in his tiny apartment, in which he lived alone at the time and where the only sound was the lonely drop of a tap, helped him with the difficult work of immersing himself in Roland's world and the to strike the right tone that is significantly different from that of his short stories or other novels.
Release history
The individual chapters were initially published as individual short stories in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction between 1978 and 1981 :
| chapter | Initial release | English original title | German title |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | October 1978 | The Gunslinger | The gunslinger |
| 2 | April 1980 | The Way Station |
The intermediate station (in the first translation by Joachim Körber as Das Rasthaus ) |
| 3 | February 1981 | The Oracle and the Mountains | The oracle and the mountains |
| 4th | July 1981 | The Slow Mutants | The slow mutants |
| 5 | November 1981 | The Gunslinger and the Dark Man | The gunslinger and the man in black |
The German first publication of the individual chapters took place in the same way as the American ones: In addition to the monthly Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in the USA, there were biannual so-called "selected volumes" in West Germany under the title The best stories from THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION at Heyne in Munich Publisher (see The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction # German Editions ). Here are the dates of the individual chapters (same German title as in the list above):
| chapter | German Selection tape MFSF | translator |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Volume 55, Heyne SF 06/3718 (1979, Mortal Gods ) | Marcel Bieger |
| 2 | Volume 58, Heyne SF 06/3792 (1980, border raids ) | Wolfgang Schrader |
| 3 | Volume 65, Heyne SF 06/3965 (1983, Cyrion in bronze ) | Wolfgang Schrader |
| 4th | Volume 66, Heyne SF 06/4005 (1983, In the fifth year of travel ) | Jürgen Langowski |
| 5 | Volume 68, Heyne SF 06/4062 (1984, Myths of the Near Future ) | Andreas Becker |
It was not until 1982 that the individual chapters were combined into a volume and, on the one hand, King feared that the completely different tone and style of his other work might scare his fans, but on the other hand, he had already come to the conclusion at the end of the 70s that Roland's world would ultimately be his but too strange to continue telling his story in further books and actually to bring it to an end, this first volume was only published in English in a small edition by Donald M. Grant.
Only in 1988, a year after the English release of the sequel The Drawing of the Three (dt. Three ), a paperback edition was published with a higher edition the publisher Plume and the first German edition of Black in Heyne Verlag .
Black as part of the Dark Tower cycle
In the 6th volume, Song of Susannah (Eng. Susannah ), King makes his own fictional alter ego quite clear that he actually continued the story after the first volume only because of the persistence of his fans who refused to give up before marriage Roland's story continued. In the epilogue of the seventh and final volume The Tower (dt. The tower ) writes King that the end, after everything starts again, was almost a little revenge on these insatiable fans who practically a "never ending story" of it in a world demanded, in which he felt less and less at home after the first volume and at least until the 4th or 5th.
In 2003, after King had successfully completed the Dark Tower cycle after more than 30 years , a revised version of Schwarz appeared in both English and German in order to allow an alignment with the newer volumes, among other things because some details of Roland's world were in the deviated from later volumes and also to incorporate epic foreshadows on the further course of the plot in the later volumes. At the same time, King also referred to the need to align the style of the first volume as a whole with that of the later.
Audio books
In 1989 Heyne Audio published an audio book by Schwarz , read by Klaus Guth , with a total running time of 6 hours, 30 minutes, on 5 audio cassettes. Guth reads the novel himself in German, while between the individual chapters Stephen King himself gives some editorial explanations on the individual chapters in English. Heyne Audio published this audio book in 1995 in an unchanged second edition.
In the early 1990s, an English audio book of the original version by Schwarz , read by Frank Muller , was released on CD and MC in the USA . In 2003, an English audio book of the revised new version of the tape with the voice of George Guidall was published .
In 2006/07 a new German audio book was published by Random House, read by Vittorio Alfieri , which includes the entire series. Black is read by Alfieri in the new version from 2003 and is 8 hours, 12 minutes long.
filming
On March 1, 2016, Stephen King confirmed the filming of the novel on Twitter . The main roles are played by Matthew McConaughey and Idris Elba . The Dark Tower (film) opened in German cinemas on August 10, 2017.
German publications
- Stephen King: Black. The dark tower. Extended and revised new edition. Heyne, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-453-01213-5 . (Translation of the introduction, the foreword and the new passages as well as editing: Patrick Niemeyer)
Literature and web links
- Stephen King: Schwarz , Heyne 2003, ISBN 3-453-87556-7
- Detailed table of contents in KingWiki
- http://screenrant.com/dark-tower-movie-stephen-king-casting-elba-mcconaughey