The Eyes of the Dragon
My buddy Jay has edited the Stephen King Library Desk Calendar for the past couple of years. It is essentially a weekly planner, but each year’s edition has a theme, original cover, and 52 essays from fans—often publishing pros themselves—discussing how King’s work has influenced them over the years.
I have fallen off in the last decade or so, but I was an avid King reader through most of my formative years. A quick glance at my shelf shows 18 King books, nine paperback and nine hardcover. Pretty sure most if not all are first editions. King’s work meant a lot to me as I struggled to find my own writer’s voice.
So when Jay asked me back in 2009 to start contributing, I took it as an honor. I’ve had entries in the last two calendars, and am working today on my third, for the 2012 edition. The theme will be The Dark Tower, and I am writing a short piece on Roland’s coming of age in The Gunslinger. If you have never read it, you should. Even if you don’t go on to finish the series (I myself dropped out around book 6).
This got me thinking about my first piece for the 2010 Calendar, that one about a favorite of mine, The Eyes of the Dragon. Since it’s over a year out of date, I thought I’d post it here:
The Eyes of the Dragon
Peter V. Brett
When I was growing up, there were only two kinds of books I liked to read: horror and fantasy. I think the result is pretty apparent in my own work, which is in many ways a blend of the two. For fantasy, I had authors like Tolkien and Brooks to guide my way, and for horror, I had King.
I remember reading The Cycle of the Werewolf on a hot summer night not unlike the one on which Marty throws his Fourth of July firecrackers at the wolf, an image I will never forget, beautifully illustrated by Berni Wrightson. I stayed up all night on a ski trip, despite having to get up early, just to finish Thinner. Every creak in that old chalet had me jumping until dawn came. And Pet Cemetery… let’s just say that at night I stayed far away from the small plot in our backyard where I buried the various small animals our cat killed on a regular basis.
So when Stephen King wrote a fantasy novel, I thought that was jut about the coolest thing in the world, and when I saw that the protagonist was named Peter, just like me, well.
The Eyes of the Dragon isn’t the book that comes to most folks’ minds when they think of Stephen King, but it is for me. Told in that straight, simple prose that King makes seem so effortless, he weaves a fairy tale that is in may ways more tale than fairy, with magic playing a very small part, and the characters taking center stage over the setting, as they should.
And one can’t talk about TEotD without mentioning the terrifying court magician, Randall Flagg. Long before he was torturing Roland Deschain in the Dark Tower books, Flagg was murdering Roland, King of Delain, and having Prince Peter framed for it and imprisoned in the tiny cell atop the Needle for long years.
But though Peter was the main protagonist and my namesake, it was really the story of his younger brother Thomas that I was drawn to, and sympathized with. I too had an older brother that left me cast in his shadow as he lit up whatever room he was in for better or for worse. I know what it’s like to be young and the second son, and to be lonely and sad sometimes because of it.
And so my heart went out to Thomas, even when he was weak and did bad things. Thomas was often a confused boy, often a sadly unlucky boy, but he was never a bad boy, not really. No matter how many times I’ve read it over the last twenty years, I still get chills when he takes up his father’s bow and let’s fly the arrow Foe Hammer (a nod to The Lord of the Rings if ever I saw one, for this was the nickname of Gandalf’s sword Glamdring).
I think there’s something of Peter and Thomas in each of us, the paragon we long to be, and the flawed person we truly are. Sometimes that paragon becomes too hard to look at, and we imprison it away out of sight, but like the greatness within each of us, it is never truly gone, and is always seeking a way to come back to the fore and forgive our failings even as it spurs us to better ourselves.
Always glad to have you aboard, my partner in crime. And this is a great piece too, from back in ’09.
….and oddly uplifting t’boot! Perhaps I am simply susceptible to advertising, as I now want both book and calendar….hrmmm.
Some King novels I would defend with shield and spear, but others often seem to lack…./something/. Presently struggling through “Under The Dome”, but keep getting distracted by, well, shiny objects, interesting mould, the ability to train oneself to raise a single eyebrow, etc, etc. Or to put it more accurately, more enthralling reads; ‘Lord of the Flies’, ‘Sum’ & ‘Everything is Illuminated.’
Do you have any more recommendations for good King books, past TEotD? When he’s good he’s GREAT, but when he’s not, I tend to remember to eat and drink – s’just no fun!
I absolutely LOVE this book. I read it the summer after my freshman year in high school, while taking a vacation up to Maine. I’ve always wished it got more recognition than it did. When Stephen King is at top form, he’s near impossible to beat, and there are frequent times when I wish he would write more fantasy (not that TEotD and The Dark Tower are anything to scoff at).