The Dark Man
Stephen King, Glenn Chadbourne (Artist)
I first met Randall Flagg in the same place as everyone else: the post-apocalyptic ruins of America in Stephen King’s “The Stand”. Flagg’s a great villain because he’s both utterly banal and transcendently evil. He wears old jeans and cowboy boots, likes to crack jokes, and crucifies his enemies. He’s killable, but not for long. His origins are obscure, his reason for existence murky, and his influence corrupting. Whatever name he wears in any of King’s worlds, Flagg’s goal is never anything but the illimitable dominion of darkness and decay — but with an amused smile.
“The Dark Man” evokes all that and more through the haunted words of a young Stephen King and the uneasy art of Glenn Chadbourne. As a college student, King jotted down a poem of fewer than 250 words, describing a dark man striding down railroad tracks, past sealed houses and cars of people pretending that order reigns supreme, toward a moment of savagery that gives the lie to their illusion. Chadbourne visualizes that poem across nearly 80 pages of black-and-white line art that pulses with the relentless menace of The Walkin’ Dude.
If you’re a fan of Stephen King, or even just a fan of horror-themed art, I recommend “The Dark Man” without reservation. Chadbourne’s style is perfect for the subject. His images seem clear and strong if you skim through; but if you slow down and study the pages, they grow detailed, busy, even bewildering. The stations of the dark man’s unholy journey are constructed from chaos, but a chaos so intense that the artist can weave in subtle images here and there — unless, of course, your brain is just desperate for rational patterns in a world where rationality is a bad joke.
The best way I can describe “The Dark Man” is that it feels like King’s “The Dark Tower” series. The decaying world that the dark man drifts through is an America that’s moved on: rotting structures, neglected homesteads, abandoned circuses, empty churches, blasted and leafless trees. People live here, but not many, and not well. This is a land for crows, serpents, spiders, and the dark man. Most unsettling for me is his pause in a putrefying swamp that feels like his natural habitat as it responds with increasing grotesqueness to whatever passes for his soul.
“The Dark Man” is a pitch-perfect vision of Randall Flagg if you interpret him, as I do, as a personification of everything nasty about human nature. Within each of us rages a war between order and chaos, aspiration and cynicism, life and death. Flagg has chosen his side, or perhaps simply is the side he’s chosen. He doesn’t care if civilization stumbles on, so long as it stumbles. He doesn’t care if humans exist, so long as they exist in degradation. The only thing he can’t stand is a point of light that might undo his darkness — and this is humanity at its worst. When we give up on goodness, we give in to a need to drag everyone down with us lest we be unmasked for what we’ve become. Like Flagg, we’re satisfied to pass through a falling world and to hunt the few who might be pure enough to save it.
Authors: Stephen King, Glenn Chadbourne (Artist)
Genres: Fiction, Poetry, Horror
Tags: Illustrated Works