The San Francisco Examiner from San Francisco, California • 296

I 4 I I 1 King's Baffling Westfantasy :1 THE DARK TOMER: THE GVSLIGER By Stephen King Donald M. Grant; $20 BY JOHN STANLEY II ust when "Carrie" allowed us to peg Stephen King a specialist in extrasensory Campbell's horrors are quite active: they pursue, then pace, and finally head off their mortal victims. His is a grim vision glinting withblack humor, but it does not lack beauty. From the story "Above the World:" "Which lake was that on the horizon? He never before noticed It lay like a fragment' of slate, framed by two hills dark as storms 'yut above it, clouds were opening. Blue sky shone through the tangle of gray; veils of light descer led from the ragged gap.

The lake began to glow f4nn within, intensely calm. Beyond it fields and trees grew clear, minute and luminous. Yes, he was weeping." Campbell's strength lies in his gripping portrayal of character. His subjects are people whose weaknesses are the result of modern life's hollow-ness. Unforgettable are the obsessive alcoholic in "Baby;" the tragic writer in "The Depths" who cannot shake his writer's block except through violent dreaming; the divorce visiting the site of his honeymoon in "Above the World." Isolated from external resources by their stubbornness and inaction, then forced into cul-de-sacs, these people find little strength within themselves; they end-up clinging to their fears until the end.

No wonder there are few survivors. Stephen King: Not his best It reads with the unsteadiness and pretentiousness of something King might have written on an idle evening years ago in college, but couldn't sell until he had become one of the most popular writers of our time. The writing is often as purple as the sage: "Her breasts thrust with overripe grandeur" "his loins were suddenly full of rose light, a light that was soft yet hard." It is also crammed with the kind of neverwords with which he has knifecarved out his own literary kingdom: "heatflesh," "rainlight," "glareblind," "walleyes." There is word power here, but undisciplined, wandering power, uncertain of where its own strengths are taking it. The best scene in "Dark Tower" comes when our enigmatic hero, with the tied down holsters and pistols with sandalwood stocks, guns down in self-defense the entire populace of the prairie town of TulL Yet even this highpoint seems designed for its own shock value. It is a "faint, cloudy haze" that perpetually hangs over King's Westworld that also ultimately hangs over the literary ambitions of "The Dark Tower." I ampbell's characters lose their ration John Stanley suffered through enough horror movies (including Stephen King screen adaptations) to tcrite "The Creature Features Movie Guide." perception, along came "Salem's Lot," a traditional vampire tale.

Just when "The Shining" made him seem a master of haunted house atmosphere, along came "The Stand," a science-fiction epic that explicitly described mankind's Armageddon. And just when the nonfictional "Danse Macabre" seemed to brand him a professor of fantastic literature, along came "Cujo," a mainstream suspense novel with supernatural touches. Readers and critics who have trouble pegging what exactly it is that Stephen King writes for a living will be further baffled by this collection of thinly-connected short stories reprinted from the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. "Dark Tower: The Gunslinger" is fantasy of the purist kind, an undisguised allegory set in a Spaghetti Western landscape disrupted by occasional magical incantations in which a roving cowboy (of good intentions) pursues an ominous Man in Black (of dubious intentions) in an effort to beat him to their common destination: The Dark Tower. The five excellent color illustrations by Michael Whelan suggest a hot summer of the 1880s perhaps, frozen at some point in neverwhen.

What's even stranger than these spur-jangling, living metaphors (and the guest appearances by a brimstone-breathing preacherwoman, burro-loving prospector, saloon whore and boy orphan) is the way this King book is being marketed. Usually a hard-cover King means a print run of no less than 300,000 books. In a strange mood of noncommercial behavior, the best-selling author has granted fantasy specialty publisher Donald M. Grant (West Kingston, Rhode Island 02892) permission to print an edition of only 10,000, possibly on the theory that "The Dark Tower" is too far removed from anything his readers would expect and they would come away cursing their idol. Hence, this is designed for the diehard fans, not the general mass market reader.

To back up his sincerity, King has further announced there will be no second printing or paperback version. In his Afterword, he explains that what we have before us is only the rudimentary beginnings of a much greater epic that could take a lifetime to write. There is possibly another reason he would prefer that "The Dark Tower" not see mass marketing. It is not his best writing; in fact, it is probably the least of his works. "The Gunslinger" is territory better walked by Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name.

If the setting is a barren desert of cactus, tombstones and the cliche images we visualize from our Western movies, so is King's structure barren barren of meaningful exposition about the whys and wherefores of the gunslinger; barren of any real people; and murky in its A Nightmare of Stylish Horror ality in a cold sweat of fear. In "The Show Goes On," a man trapped in a ruined theater regresses under strain: "Panic blinded him. He didn't know whd he was nor where he was going. He knew only that he was very small and at bay in the vast dimness, through which a shape was directing a glow toward him. Behind the glow he could almost see a face from which something pale dangled.

It wasn't a beard, for it was rooted in the gaping mouth." Campbell's horrors are singular: a nightmarish amusement park ride; a possessed pram; a house shot through with spreading cracks; an incantatory acrostic; and a mendicant who terrorizes children. Most of the stories are set in Liverpool, where quiet horror hides in the rush of traffic. When Campbell ventures into the country, his impression of nature is claustrophobic: "Mist hems in a wanderer and herds him toward a twilight encounter." Campbell's prose is stylish, literate, and hypnotic; it effectively draws the reader beneath its reassuring surface into horror. This volume contains three award-winning stories, including "The Companion," which Stephen King says "may be the best horror tale to be written in English in the last 30 years." Campbell is the author of several novels, including "The Parasite" and "The Nameless" but he is at his best in his short fiction. His previous collections, "Demons by Daylight" and i "The Height of the Scream" are available in limited editions from Arkham House Publishers, Marc Laid law is a marketing research analyst uhose science fiction has been published in Omni and the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

DARK By Ramsey Campbell Macmillian; $13.95 BY MARC LAIDLAW "Dark Companions" his fourth collection of short stories Ramsey Campbell distills our world into an essence of fear. He notices and nurtures the seeds of dread that lie deep in the mincU of modern characters, but although his nightmare figures may grow like mushrooms in the dark, it is never long before they take their first steps into the waking world. 10 Review! Ai gist is, 1932.