There are numerous mysterious scattered throughout Stephen King's fiction. Here are four of the most perplexing.
John Norman
In the short story "The Little Sisters of Eluria." set in Mid-World before the opening of the first Dark Tower novel, Roland of Gilead happens upon a mysterious ghost town, where he encounters a deceased young cowboy named James Norman, and later his brother John, a captive of the "Little Sisters" of the title, alleged Red-Cross nuns/nurses, who are in reality a coven of female vampires who've taken over the town and drained its inhabitants.
The strange thing--and the name stood out to me just glancing over the tale before reading it--is the name of James's brother. Stephen J. Spegnisi, author of the SK Encyclopedia and the SK Quiz Book, noticed it too, and acknowledged in (I think) his Stephen King: an American Master that John Norman is also the name of the author of the Gor books, and opined that perhaps King is a fan. "John Norman" is the pseudonym of John Lange, a philosophy professor, and author of the once widely popular series of sword-and-planet novels set on the planet Gor, a twin of Earth that is always on the other side of the sun. The thing is, while the first five-six Gor books are a decent homage to Edgar Rice Burroughs, wherein he chronicles the adventures of earthman Tarl Cabot. But throughout the rest of the series Norman (Lange) infamously promotes literal female slavery as an ideal. And he repeats and repeats himself regarding this ad infinitum. The entire controversy surrounding the Gor series is too deep and layered to go into here, but suffice to say that it seems almost ludicrous to suggest SK would ever count himself a Gor fan (save perhaps the first very few books, and Norman's general attitude toward women remains present even there), King being a committed feminist, as evidenced by stance of the books like Rose Madder and Delores Clayborne, and the strong pro-choice stance to be found in Insomnia (whatever one's opinion of abortion, the pro-choice position is intended as women's empowerment).
It only occurred to me upon reflection, having read it, the irony that in "Eluria," the character of John Norman is a male completely under the thrall of women! Coincidence, or something more?
Charlie the Choo-Choo
Charlie the Choo-Choo is a bizarre, and seemingly sinister, picture book that young Jake Chambers purchases at a used book store run by Calvin Tower (himself a bit of a controversial character) in The Dark Tower 3: The Wastelands. It tells the story of Engineer Bob and his steam train Charlie, who grow too old for the modern world, until they make one more run that makes them heroes. Then Bob and Charlie get a job giving kids rides at an amusement park. Only Jake seems to sense something sinister about the story and Charlie himself, and in the last picture, the kids on the train look like they're screaming to be let off (Ned Dameron's illustration certainly makes them look that way!), "Char" being the mid-world term for death.. The book was written by someone named Beryl Evans (only they later discover ,on another timeline, that the author is Claudia Inez Bachman, the fictional wife of King's pseudonym, Richard Bachman!). Charlie is apparently revealed to be an analogue to Blaine the Mono, a monorail super-train run by a sentient computer, built --and still running!--back in Mid-World's age of technology. Blaine transport's Roland's Ka-tet, only he also plans to destroy himself and them with it. Eddie defeats Blaine by having him answer "silly questions", taking his cue from a passage in the Charlie book. So it all seems to make sense.
Except that there seems to be more to it than that. When journeying through an abandoned amusement park in an Earth ravaged by the plague of The Stand, they come upon a train that appears to be the real Charlie the Choo Choo, the name on it and everything. And when Jake glances back, thinking "I'm not afraid of you," the train blinks its headlights at him, as if to say I know better, little squint. (Note: "squint" is Mid-World slang, meaning something like "whelp," a contemptuous term for a young boy, which an ultra-repulsive villain named Gasher repeatedly called Jake).
Who was Beryl Evens, and what is the real story of Charlie the Choo-Choo, since it certainly seems to have had a real story that inspired the book?
The Other Jack Sawyer
In The Talisman, a collabrative fantasy jointly authored by Stephen King and Peter Straub (with definite Dark Tower connections), young protagonist Jack Sawyer embarks on a cross-country quest to find a magic talisman to save his mother, who is dying of cancer. Jack possesses the ability to jump and forth to a magical realm called the Territories, which is somehow connected to Roland's Mid-World. Most of the adventures and perils Jack encounters, however, take place in our world.
Though Jack completes his quest and saves his mother, there was, for a time, an odd bit of controversy following the publication of King's The Tommyknockers. One of the characters meets a young boy on an East Coast beach, who relates that his mother has recently died in a car accident. Some readers identified this as Jack Sawyer, and Heidi Strengell, author of Dissecting Stephen King: From the Gothic to Literary Naturalism, refers to Jack's supposed cameo appearance, asserting that all of the perils and hardships came to virtually nothing. There was at least one other book which identified the young unnamed kid as Jack Sawyer.
However, this identification since has been proven false. Straub related that he never made the connection with the unknown kid and Jack, and when he and SK collaberated once again for Black House, the sequel to Talisman, we learn that Jack's mother did NOT die in an accident, and lived for many years afterward.
Except....giving King's pessimism around the time The Talisman was written, could it not have been possible that King had at first intended the boy to have been Sawyer after all? It was not long after he'd penned such brutally heart-breaking tragedies as Cujo and Pet Semetary. The Talisman certainly had its own brutal episodes, and since he was collaberating with Straub on a fantasy, they both may have wanted to keep things fairly upbeat, with the rousing triumph of Good over Evil at the end (Jack's recovery of the talisman caused a chain reaction of defeat for evil characters throughout the multiverse). But left to his own devices, could King have intended for Jack's quest to have ended in heartbreak after all, but then changed his tune, once he found it just didn't work for that story, and that Jack's story was to pick up later?
The Eyes of the Dragon
The Eyes of the Dragon, SK's one foray into straight fantasy, takes place in the Kingdom of Garlan in a magical land ruled by good king Roland. and concerns two young princes, Peter and Thomas. At the conclusion, Prince Peter, who has been wrongfully imprisoned, escapes the tower by means of a rope woven of the threads of napkins ("The Napkins" being King's proposed original title). Peter and Thomas expose and defeat the villain who framed him, court magician Randal Flagg, and all ends well, so uncharacteristic for an SK story. At the end, the brothers strike out for unknown lands, and the author tells us they had many adventures that are to be told "another time."
Only those stories never got told. King wrote Eyes of the Dragon for his teenage daughter, who did not care for the pessimism so characteristic of her father's stories. It was an intentional departure for SK, and though he stated that he enjoyed the experience, he apparently had no desire to return to the kingdom of Garlan. When asked once about a sequel to the tale, he reportedly just said "keep reading the Dark Tower books."
Now this might seem to suggest--as I supposed at the time--that Roland's Ka-Tet would at some point cross paths with Peter and Thomas, or at least there would be an explanation for what happened to them. The world of Eyes of the Dragon certainly has connections with Roland's. For one thing, dragons roamed Mid-World during the time of Arthur Eld, and a fabulous bird called the Featherex, a relative of phoenix, is known both to Roland and Peter. It is often supposed that Garlan is in fact part of Mid-World, though there is some discrepancy with this, and some have argued that Gilead and Garlan don't exist on the same world, despite the similarities. For one thing, I've found it striking that there is no mention in Eyes of the Dragon of an age of high technology, no remnants of past civilization resembling our own, and most telling, no firearms.
But the main controversy I'm talking about here is why SK never picked up the story again, or even intersected with it. Roland's Ka-Tet, after all, could jump to multiple time lines, and often did druing their quest, so it wouldn't matter whether Garlan was part of Mid-World or not. As for Flagg, he had a habit of showing up in multiple timelines anyway. It is therefore possible that what King meant was really, "I'm not writing more about Peter and Thomas. So if you want fantasy, just keep reading the Dark Tower books."
And that's just four of the most perplexing mysteries in King's fiction. There's much more of course, but I'll save that for later. If any answers arise to these or other questions, for now, we'll just have to wait.
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