The plan is to reread all of Stephen King’s works in the order that they were published. Richard Chizmar of Cemetery Dance had the vision. I’m doing it because I am a writer and I want to improve my fiction. And I love Stephen King’s stories. I think there is something to be learned through this process.
You can also go back to the beginning and read Before Carrie or any of my other posts up through this one and beyond by checking out this link to the Master List of all my #StephenKingRevisited posts.
The Dark Man is the illustrated edition of the short 1969 poem of the same name by Stephen King published by Cemetery Dance in 2013. It features the distinctive and raw black and white line illustrations of Glenn Chadbourne. It’s dedicated in memory of Carroll F. Terrell, scholar and friend.
The book is a 6×9 with the spine along the short side. The inverse of many books horror readers are familiar with. This allows for wide landscape images.
This poem is the birth of the infamous Randal Flagg himself, whole and complete, The Dark Man in his jeans and denim jacket, hitching his way along the road at night with his boot heels clicking against the asphalt between rides.
King wrote this on the back of a paper placemat from a restaurant while he was in college.
The book opens with the T.S. Elliot quote “Let us go then, you and I…”
The illustrations are the star and character of the work, no offense to King’s dark poem. There are lots of landscapes with scratchy detail and a dark figure in the backgrounds. We see railyards, cemeteries, an amusement park or two with a ferris wheel, the back of a semi truck trailer out of proportion in the mid ground, an eyeless doll, lots of spiders on things which is a recuring theme along the way, other vermin scurrying through frame, and a serpent misproportioned in terrifying distortion.
We have a few full spread illustrations without words from the poem. Even when there are words, we only get a couple or a few per page.
The “Witch Fire” illustration was particularly striking among many powerful images.
Violent details punctuate in shadow to make the illustrations more disturbing.
There is a violation spoken quickly at the end of the poem and the end of the book, leaving us abruptly with the Dark Man walking on.
The illustrations that accompanied the bios at the end for the author and the artists were interesting too.
Good luck finding a copy of this book if it intrigues you enough to try to get your hands on one. I’m still not sure how I got one.
My next post in this series will be Before Doctor Sleep which will be linked on the Master List of all my Stephen King Revisited posts.
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