Stephen King first wrote about the Dark Man in college after he envisioned a faceless man in cowboy boots and jeans and a denim jacket forever walking the roads. Later this dark man would come to be known around the world as one of King's greatest villains, Randall Flagg, but at the time King only had simple questions on his mind: where was this man going? What had he seen and done? What terrible things...?
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 nighttime 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). --Booklist
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