The Dark Man: An Illustrated Poem Author: Visit Amazon's Stephen King Page | Language: English | ISBN:
1587674211 | Format: EPUB
The Dark Man: An Illustrated Poem Description
From Publishers Weekly
King first conceived of his most famous villain, Randall Flagg, as a college student in the poem featured here. Faceless and ominous, this man is brought to life by illustrator Glenn Chadbourne in this edition of the poem. While Chadbourne's illustrations take center stage—eerie pencil drawings evoke a decrepit world of spiders, gravestones, and abandoned buildings—what is most remarkable about this book is King's poem itself. While famous for his prose, King demonstrates his talent as a writer here in his incredible use of language. Especially considering the young age at which the poem was written, the originality of description, rhythm, and word choice are impressive. The poem, even without the illustrations, is sure to send shivers up your spine, and serves as a wonderfully creepy edition to King's oeuvre. (Aug.)
From Booklist
Purportedly scrawled by a college-age King on the back of a restaurant place mat, this glowering poem introduced a wandering character of ultimate evil, who would later mature into Randall Flagg of The Stand, The Eyes of the Dragon, and the Dark Tower series. Therefore, even though this is a curiosity, it’s a significant one in the King mythos, and Chadbourne’s black-and-white interpretation gives the spare text just the rotten juice it craves. The poem itself is the sort of metaphysical, apocalyptic piece you might expect from the late 1960s, but is nonetheless evocative. It begins, “i have stridden the fuming way / of sun-hammered tracks and / smashed cinders,” as we follow the slow nighttide progress of a smudgy man traversing a moonlit America of busted merry-go-rounds, dilapidated trains, and agonized cemeteries. Wordless pages fill out the five-stanza poem, with Chadbourne’s flat, snarled pencilwork hiding snakes, spiders, rats, and faces in every twisted tableau. It’s all suitably ominous, and bewitched fans will be able to draw a direct line between this and The Gunslinger (1982). --Daniel Kraus
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- Hardcover: 88 pages
- Publisher: Cemetery Dance Pubns; World's First Edition Hardcover edition (July 30, 2013)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1587674211
- ISBN-13: 978-1587674211
- Product Dimensions: 5.9 x 8.7 x 0.5 inches
- Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
For nearly fifteen years, Stephen King has been mining his past to bring the world new stuff. In 2001, he gifted us with a continuation of his stalled 1980s project, The Plant. Blaze, a lost novel King wrote around the time of 'Salem's Lot, was finally published in 2007 as a Richard Bachman novel. Years after swearing that no new short story collection would include old works, King included a lost story from the 1970s, "The Cat From Hell," in his 2008 collection, Just After Sunset. Novel ideas King attempted and discarded in decades past emerged as 11/22/63, Joyland, and Under the Dome - the latter accompanied by an unprecedented online release of an early draft from the 80s. Recently, uncollected prose versions of two Creepshow stories - "The Crate" and "Weeds" (otherwise known as "The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill") - have made their way into Shivers collections, published by Cemetery Dance.
Cemetery Dance is at it again, not with a story, but with a poem: "The Dark Man," one of the most important of King's career. Between 1969 and 1971, King published seven poems, on par with his short story output at the time ... then stopped. Almost none of those early poems have been included in King's official collections, which is especially mystifying, since work like "The Hardcase Speaks" and "The Dark Man" are direct thematic antecedents to later prose. "The Dark Man" is vital, as it serves as an introduction to one of King's most enduring villains: Randall Flagg.
In a 2004 interview with Borders Books, King explained:
"Flagg came to me when I wrote a poem called 'The Dark Man' when I was a junior or senior in college.
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