Beautiful Wor(l)ds: Stephen King and China Miéville

This isn’t much of a secret, but if you haven’t yet found yourself trapped in a conversation with me about it, I’m somewhat obsessed with The Dark Tower, Stephen King’s fantastical, sweeping seven-book saga (or eight-book, including the last addition; look it up) that spans a large part of his career as a writer and human, and which is, in my opinion, one of the greatest love notes to existence ever written. Plus, you know, a horror story with plenty of viscerally unpleasant moments that will pleasantly haunt you forever.

It’s coming out as a film next year in what isn’t merely an adaptation, but a sequel (don’t look this one up, read the books first), so naturally I’ve decided to reread the series instead of every other new book currently sitting on my coffee table. While flipping through my Writing File (which featured in last week's post as well, so I guess we can count it as as a recurring character), I found my list of favorite words from the first book, The Gunslinger. Stephen King isn’t necessarily the most elegant writer, but he’s a world-builder, and in keeping with that, is deft at establishing vernaculars,* and I really love the language in this novel.

Of course I just lent out my copy of The Gunslinger, so before I start in on it again, I’m finishing the latest book by my favorite contemporary author China Miéville, The Last Days of New Paris. It’s a fantasy book that reimagines WWII with literal demons from hell fighting alongside the Nazis, surrealist artists comprising the resistance, and physical manifestations of surrealist paintings (referred to simply and perfectly as “Manifs”) wandering through the streets of Paris, largely uncontrollable by either side. It’s bizarre and beautiful and requires absolute commitment to inhabiting that world (in addition to a lot of tangential Wikipedia searches about art history).

The thing that makes navigating that Paris easier, for me anyway, is that I’ve read nine of Miéville’s books already, and while his worlds differ, they all adhere to a certain rich and dreamlike space characterized by unlikely parts coming together to create wholly new things, while tethered by a persistent if tenuous thread to what is familiar for us readers. Have you figured out where I’m going with this yet? Miéville walks the line between the familiar and extraordinary in part through his vocabulary: it’s scientific but also sensational, breathtakingly unapproachable at times but, within context, evocative of something so innate that it often proves intelligible regardless of definition.

The distinctive nature of Miéville's lexicon isn’t something I actively thought about while reading (beyond unconsciously internalizing its contributions to the story), but after finding my list of words from The Gunslinger, I found an untitled list that I was able to identify within seconds as being from Perdido Street Station, arguably my favorite Miéville.** I don’t have an encyclopedic memory, Miéville’s words are just so carefully chosen for his environments and faithful to his overarching style as an author that his voice is easy to recognize, even so particularly, and it struck me how much my favorite work and my own life are defined by the vocabularies of the authors I have loved.

So, today is Friday, I’m finishing up a book by my favorite author before re-embarking on an epic adventure with one Roland Deschain of Gilead, and I figured I’d share some beautiful words from a couple beautiful worlds. I’m not going to define them because part of the joy of words is how they feel, but please do look up the ones you love, because many of them are remarkable in meaning as well.

Lastly, lovely platform though it is, Wix doesn't allow for multi-column posts yet, so rather than subject you to unilateral imbalance and endless scrolling, I've inserted the word collections as images...hopefully the format isn't too off-putting.

Enjoy.

*King is also guilty of some stereotypical, questionably racist lingual portrayals of which I’m not fond, but that and his penchant for kinky sexualization of, well, everything, is a different article altogether.

**If you're into it, I wrote a paper in college about the novel's interpretation of life as art through fluidity of transition, the paradox of the human mind, and the convergence of disparate parts during crisis.

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The Gunslinger

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Perdido Street Station

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Spoiler(ish) Bonus for Fans of The Dark Tower

Since I'm busy basking in nostalgia, one of my favorite passages of all time is from Book V of The Dark Tower, and I’ve included it here so that you can relive it if you like. It’s beautiful in its own right, but more impactful if you’ve been through the journey with our Ka-tet, so you might consider clicking only if you’ve already read, though I won’t tell you what to do (it's not terribly spoiler-y, if you lack self-control).

[Spoil me]