This is hands down my favourite book in Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. The scenes played out like a film in my mind. The descriptions are just spectacular (including one of the most beautiful love scenes I have ever read!). Here I will highlight my favourite pieces of prose from Wizard and Glass by Stephen King.
Let’s celebrate some excellent prose!
prose
A bloated rat, blind and dragging its guts behind it in a sac like a rotten placenta, struggled over the posse robot’s feet.
When Blaine the Mono blammed overhead, running up the night like a bullet running up the barrel of a gun, windows broke, dust sifted down, and several of the skulls disintegrated like ancient pottery vases.
The posse robot tried to voice one final warning: “Elevated rad—” and then quit for good, facing into its corner like a child that has been bad.
The doe was killed instantly by the concussion of Blaine’s passage. Too large to be sucked in the mono’s wake, she was still yanked forward almost seventy yards, with water dripping from her muzzle and hoofs. Much of her hide (and the boneless fifth leg) was torn from her body and pulled after Blaine like a discarded garment.
“Don’t get him mad,” the voice of Little Blaine begged. Each time it spoke, Susannah found herself imagining a sweaty little bald man whose every movement was a kind of cringe.
Not the Send, unless the rivers in Roland’s world were somehow able to run in different directions at different points in their courses (and Jake didn’t know enough about Mid-World to entirely discount that possibility); also, this river was not placid but raging, a torrent that came tumbling out of the mountains like something that was pissed off and wanted to brawl.
Only that voice, mocking and just about two steps from laughter; the voice of a cruel little boy watching bugs run around on top of a hot stove.
It was the image of Jake striking flint and steel that kept recurring; he would allow his mind to dwell on it for a second or two, like a bee alighting on some sweet flower, and then he would take off again.
“HELLO, JAKE OF NEW YORK.” The voice was kindly—the voice, perhaps, of a nice old fellow with a habit of molesting the children he from time to time leads into the bushes.
There was a peculiar smile on Eddie’s face, a peculiar shine in Eddie’s eyes, and Jake found that hope hadn’t deserted him, after all. It suddenly flowered anew in his mind, red and hot and vivid. Like... well, like a rose. A rose in the full fever of its summer.
“YES, EDDIE OF NEW YORK.” Unmistakable disdain.
What had he done to deserve such enthusiastic protectors? What, besides tear them out of their known and ordinary lives as ruthlessly as a man might tear weeds out of his garden?
Roland shook his head. “You shall hear my tale—this part of it, at least—but not on top of this metal carcass.”
“Yeah,” Jake said. “Being up here is like playing on a dead dinosaur or something...”
“What you want that for?” Susannah asked truculently. She always sounded truculent when the harness came into view.
Roland said the trouble was spreading... that things like the superflu were eating through the fabric of existence like battery acid eating its way into a piece of cloth.
“Jake! Jake, what’s wrong!” It was Eddie, and Jake could hear the genuine concern in his voice, but it seemed to be coming over a bad long-distance connection.
They all stood looking... except for Jake, who sat looking.
He supposed that strength and feeling would come back into his legs eventually and he would get up, but right now they felt like limp macaroni.
Beyond the off-ramp there hulked a massive old red brick edifice with tiny windows peering like desperate eyes out of the climbing ivy.
By the time they were finished, they could see the Milky Way scattered across the walls of the castle ahead of them, fierce points of reflection that burned like fire in still water.
He drank, tilting the waterskin up on his elbow like some hick drinking moonshine from a jug, head back, eyes on the stars.
He fetched a sigh—the deep sigh of a man who contemplates some arduous piece of work—and then tossed fresh wood on the fire.
She put the cat down. It walked slowly toward the hearth, where a late fire lazed, desultorily eating at a single log.
The old woman’s fingers were as chilly as those of a corpse, but Susan had touched chilly fingers before (“Cold hands, warm heart,” Aunt Cord sometimes said). The real unpleasantness was in the texture, the feel of cold flesh spongy and loose on the bones, as if the woman to whom they were attached had drowned and lain long in some pool.
She stepped forward, and before she could let herself think about what she was doing, she put her hands on his shoulders, stood on her toes, and kissed him on the mouth. The kiss was brief but not sisterly.
“Aye, very well met, Will.” But when he moved toward her (as thoughtlessly as a flower turning its face to follow the sun), wishing to repeat the experience, she pushed him back a step, gently but firmly.
He took up the reins like a man in a dream, looked at them for a moment as if he didn’t know what in the world they were, and then looked back at her. She could see him working to clear his mind and emotions of the impact her kiss had made. She liked him for it. And she was very glad she had done it.
Some things hadn’t changed since Susan had set out for the Cöos; she had still been able to feel her aunt’s eyes brushing across her face and down her body, like little whisk-brooms with sharp bristles.
Barkie himself, the naked mound of his scarred stomach rising above the waistband of his corduroy pants like a clot of bread dough, lay under the bench, snoring.
She was younger than her political brother, not so thin, and good-looking in a large-eyed, weasel-headed way.
Sheriff Avery appeared on the stoop, his belly preceding him as a baliff may precede My Lord Judge into court.
“You know who ye are and where ye hail from, and I know the same,” Sheriff Avery said, sitting down in his own chair (it uttered a feeble groan beneath his bulk but held steady).
He had the smooth, sadly sincere voice of a politician or an undertaker.
The skinny sister-in-law, Coral, had disappeared, but Olive Thorin was still there, looking up at the newcomers with her hands decorously clasped before that area of her body which might once have been her waist.
The texture he felt as he stepped into the Mayor’s House reception room was the sort of thing, Roland reflected, that you didn’t entirely miss when it was gone, because it slipped away quietly and painlessly. Like blood from a vein cut in a tub filled with hot water.
On a raised stand to the right of the doors leading into the dining area, four grinning guitarists in tati jackets and sombreros were playing something that sounded like a waltz with pepper on it.
He was shorter than his Chancellor but just as thin, and his build was peculiar: a short and narrow-shouldered upper body over impossibly long and skinny legs. He looked, Roland thought, like the sort of bird you should glimpse in a marsh at dawn, bobbing for its breakfast.
Thorin urged her forward, bobbing his head and grinning, one of his knuckle-choked hands pressed against the small of her back, and Roland felt an instant of poisonous jealousy. Ridiculous, given this man's age and his plump, pleasant wife, but it was there, all right, and it was sharp. Sharp as a bee’s ass, Cort would have said.
But the birth-rates were way down, so they were; the stallions had as much ram as ever in their ramrods, it seemed, but not as much powder and ball.
For that matter, how could such as Mr. Will Dearborn of Hemphill understand that she hadn’t really made those choices at all? That she had been carried to them the way a mother cat carries a wayward kitten back to the nesting-box, by the scruff of the neck?
The following day, when the marketing took her to town, she had gone by the Travellers’ Rest, which, at eleven in the morning, had all the charm of something which has died badly at the side of the road.
But Will Dearborn had changed things; had gotten into her head and now lodged there, a tenant who defied eviction.
Susan felt a bitter disappointment fill her. She could almost taste it in her mouth, like wet tea leaves.
But his eyes never left hers, and in them she saw some of Roland’s truth: the deep romance of his nature, buried like a fabulous streak of alien metal in the granite of his practicality.
As he stood so, looking at the serapes and a hanging rack of dolina blankets with his hands clasped behind his back like a patron in an art gallery (and blinking back tears all the while), there came a light tap on his shoulder.
When Susan came in twenty minutes later, there was no sign of her aunt’s strain and rage; Cordelia had put them away as one might store a dangerous weapon—a gun, say—on a high closet shelf.
A little shocked at her own boldness, she reached below his waist. “Here’s a warrant ye can set on me, if ye would,” she said.
He would. Could. And did.
Ka:
They helped each other with their clothes; they lay naked in each other’s arms on summer moss as soft as the finest goosedown. They lay with their foreheads touching, as in her daydream, and when he found his way into her, she felt pain melt into sweetness like some wild and exotic herb that may only be tasted once in each lifetime. She held that taste as long as she could, until at last the sweetness overcame it and she gave in to that, moaning deep in her throat and rubbing her forearms against the sides of his neck. They made love in the willow grove, questions of honor put aside, promises broken without so much as a look back, and at the end of it Susan discovered there was more than sweetness; there was a kind of delirious clinching of the nerves that began in the part of her that had opened before him like a flower; it began there and then filled her entire body. She cried out again and again, thinking there could not be so much pleasure in the mortal world; she would die of it. Roland added his voice to hers, and the sound of water rushing over stones wrapped around both. As she pulled him closer to her, locking her ankles together behind his knees and covering his face with fierce kisses, his going out rushed after hers as if trying to catch up. So were lovers joined in the Barony of Mejis, near the end of the last great age, and the green moss beneath the place where her thighs joined turned a pretty red as her virginity passed; so were they joined and so were they doomed.
“Is the thinny stretching time?” And now that he had mentioned it, Eddie could hear it in all its creepy glory—a sound like vibrating metal, or maybe the world’s biggest mosquito.
... they had made personal enemies of three hard men who had probably killed enough folks to populate a fair-sized graveyard.
Jonas had praised him for the work he had done in Ritzy, and Depape had rolled in it the way a male dog rolls in the scent of a bitch.
“All Fair-Days are pleasant, but Reaping turns us all into children again, don’t you find?” Cordelia asked.
“Yes, indeed,” said Jonas, who hadn’t felt like a child even when he had been one.
Cordelia had stopped by the white picket fence that divided her garden-plot from the road, an expression of sublime relief coming over her face. Jonas thought she looked like a mule having its back scratched with a stiff brush.
He would be pouring drinks under The Romp long after Pettie was rotting (instead of Trotting) in a pauper’s grave.
Rimer didn’t care for such as Susan Delgado, but he loved the trappings of power; that was what took the curve out of his noodle and made it straight.
Roland didn’t lose consciousness, but he did lose control over his arms and legs. They were there, but seemingly in another country, flailing like the limbs of a rag doll.
His face—dour, frowning—was that of a man who hasn’t seen anything good in years.
“I didn’t risk coming into this godforsaken shitsplat of a town in order to discuss my arrangements with you, Jonas.”
All the humor had washed out of the latter young man’s face, leaving a ruthless and calculating bedrock his own mother might not have recognized... or might not have wanted to.
Now he took out a shell, and it began to dance across the back of his hand once more. Her eyes went to it at once, like steel drawn to a magnet.
The temperature wasn’t all that low, but after coming in over the water, the wind cut like a razor.
On the whole, he was glad he couldn’t see himself; he probably looked like a fucking farmer.
Barkie shrugged. It might have been assent.
She had only to glimpse the Mayor’s wife from the corner of her eye to remember what Roland had said that day on the Drop: For a moment I thought she was my mother. But that was the problem, wasn’t it? Olive Thorin was nobody’s mother. That was what had opened the door to this horrible situation in the first place.
The door of the hut swung open. Depape and Reynolds drew their guns as the old crone stepped out, blinking against the sunlight like something that’s spent its whole life in a cave.
Scraggle-headed and tremble-mouthed, she looked like a diseased coyote driven into its final arroyo.
Twenty minutes later, as the bloated orange moon struggled above the buildings of the town like a pregnant woman climbing a steep hill, a lone vaquero led a mule along Hill Street in the direction of the Sheriff’s office.
The ironwork tore free of its anchoring concrete pillars like a tooth pulled from a decayed gum.
Now the oilpatch flared like a birthday cake, and the heat baking toward them was enormous.
She sat in Rimer’s high-ceilinged, book-lined study—behind Rimer’s ironwood desk, in Rimer’s upholstered chair, looking as out of place as a whore’s bloomers on a church altar.
Two minutes later he was striding, naked, toward Thorin’s little lick of a balcony, his half-erect penis wagging from side to side ahead of him like some halfwit’s idea of a magic wand.
“... Tell that old fuck Miguel that if the pony he chooses dies in the traces between here and Hanging Rock, he’ll be using his wrinkled old balls for earplugs.”
She had it. One woman in a thousand was Coral Thorin—sharp as Lord Satan, and able to fuck like Satan’s favorite harlot.
The wind was lifting great sheets of sand across the stony desert floor; the moonlight turned these into footracing phantoms.
His flush crept closer and closer to his brow, like a tide approaching a seawall.
Rhea was cackling, rocking from side to side and making a sound like fingernails on a piece of slate.
“Give it another minute,” Jonas said. “Mayhap there’s going to be a spot of killing right here. Who knows? But it’s the unanswered questions that makes it worthwhile getting up in the morning, even when a man’s leg aches like a tooth with a hole in it. Wouldn’t you say so?”
His voice carried well—he had meant that it should—and Rhea’s cackles cut off suddenly, as if severed out of her throat with a hooking-knife.
Her eyes shifted from side to side in their deep sockets, looking for a way out that wasn’t there.
He was sick of aye and ye and so it is, sick to his bones.
“KILL THEM!” The shout so loud that it sent rooks rising up into the morning sun, cawing their displeasure as they commenced the hunt for more peaceful surroundings.
The corneas of her eyes had gone a filthy gray-yellow, and she panted like a cracked bellows as she moved.
For the riders to pass close was one thing, but if they were, through foul luck, to come right upon them, the three boys would likely die like a nest of moles uncovered by the blade of a passing plow.
Demon Moon stared down from it like the filmed eye of a corpse.
“I’ll smash it!” he shrieked at the cold-eyed boy bearing down on him like death’s sleekest engine. “Before all the gods, I’ll—”
Behind the vaqs, skulking along like a sullen ghost which lacks the necessary psychic energy to fully materialize itself, came the late Chancellor’s older brother, Laslo.
So he lay where he was, lifting his head to look at the tracks left by Susan-sai and the bad Coffin Hunter, and he was just about ready to try his feet when Caprichoso bit him. Not a nip, mind you, but a good healthy chomp. Capi had had a difficult twenty-four hours, and he hadn’t much liked to see the author of all his misery lying on the grass, apparently taking a nap.
Miguel Torres was festooned with reap-charms and was very drunk. He approached the center of the courtyard in rolling side-to-side loops, the tugstring of his sombrero twisted against his scrawny throat, his long white hair flying. The front of his chibosa was wet, as if he had tried to take a leak without remembering that you had to unlimber your dingus first. He had a small ceramic jug in one hand. His eyes were fierce and bewildered.
As gingerly as a surgeon slipping a scalpel into the body of a patient, he slipped his right hand between the curve of the ball and Roland’s bent, studious face.
Alain looked at the glass with a species of disgusted, frightened awe; looked at it as one might look at a vicious animal that now sleeps... but will wake again, and bite when it does.
It cracked Jake up, as Eddie had known it would; sometimes a word or an image got into your funnybone like a virus and just lived there awhile.
Closer yet, and they could hear the pennants snapping in the breeze and see their own ripply reflections, like drowned folk who somehow walk at the bottoms of watery tropical graves.
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