I Heard a Sound

Christian A. Dumais
May 14, 2025

OPENING MONOLOGUE

POP CULTURE MUST DIE

These posters tie the room together.

I picked up two Andrzej Krajewski movie prints for my office. The posters are for Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Big Lebowski. Personally, I think they tie the room together.

If you know me, you know that I adore Polish movie posters. Especially pre-1990 movie posters where the artist often had to create a poster knowing next to nothing about the movie. Sometimes they’re way off the mark, and sometimes they create images that transcend the movie. I’ll post some of my favorites below.

Unless one of my computers gives up the ghost or my standing desk comes crashing down, this is probably it for my 2025 office budget. We got big plans this summer.

Pop Culture Must Die is the official newsletter for Christian A. Dumais, an American writer and freelance editor living in Poland. His books include Smashed, Killing It, and Go West.

NPR said, "People get paid a LOT of money to write comedy who are not one-tenth as funny as [Christian]."

Your mileage may vary.

DO NOT GIVE THEM ONE INCH.

AT THE DESK

Polish movie posters

Jaws 2 by Edward Lutczyn.

The Big Lebowski by Andrzej Krajewski.

Working Girl by Andrzej Pagowski.

Alien by Jakub Erol.

It took almost 13 years as a parent but I finally got to play the "I'm not mad, just disappointed" card. I feel like I'm going to faint with excitement.
— Christian A. Dumais (@cadumais.com)2025-05-06T15:31:45.310Z

TRUST YOURSELF MORE.

READING PILE

Road to the Dark Tower IV

Here’s a fun fact: Wizard and Glass was the first Dark Tower book I ever read. You’d think that I’d be out of my element jumping into a long running series four books in, but in a lot of ways, this book is great jumping on point. Also, it might be the best book in the series.

⁣I had known about the Dark Tower books growing up, but they were always out of reach because of limited print runs. Wizard and Glass was the first book in the series that had a wide release, so I picked up my paperback copy in 1997 and never looked back.

Wizard and Glass picks up right where we left off in The Waste Lands and resolves the cliffhanger readers at the time had waited six years for. But what they didn’t expect was to get a new 800+ page book with ~600 of the pages devoted to a flashback. Because that’s what Wizard and Glass is all about — Roland finally telling the tragic story of Susan (a thread that was originally hinted at in the first book) and his time in Mejis.

It’s Spaghetti Western Romeo and Juliet with wizards, ladies and gentlemen, and it’s fucking glorious.

This is my second time reading this book and I spent a lot of it just marveling at the book’s craft. It’s just one banger scene after another, but all in service of world-building, raising the stakes, and establishing the characters. On a purely craft level, if someone wanted to argue that Wizard and Glass is the best thing King ever wrote, I wouldn’t do much but listen, because it might be true.

One of the real standout scenes is the Mexican standoff. We’ve heard bits and pieces about Roland’s childhood friends and fellow gunslingers, Cuthbert Allgood and Alain Johns, throughout the first three books in the series, and Wizard and Glass is where they’re finally in the spotlight. And King doesn’t disappoint.

After some introductions, the standoff scene is where our heroes truly come face to face with one of the book’s big threats — the Big Coffin Hunters. This group of mercenaries is led by Eldred Jonas, a failed and exiled gunslinger. The standoff basically introduces the Big Coffin Hunters and Roland’s ka-tet one by one, and by the time everyone is trapped in a no-win situation, you know everything you need to know about all of the characters.

The scene plays out at a bar in Mejis when Sheemie, a developmentally disabled boy, becomes the target of one of the Big Coffin Hunters’ bullying and cruelty. Cuthbert steps in to stop Depape with a slingshot, and things escalate from there:

Cuthbert, meanwhile, had already reloaded the cup of his slingshot and drawn the elastic back again. “Now,” he said, “if I have your attention, good sir—”

“I can’t speak for his,” Reynolds said from behind him, “but you got mine, partner. I don’t know if you’re good with that thing or just shitass lucky, but either way, you’re done with it now. Relax the draw on it and put it down. That table in front of you’s the place I want to see it.”

“I’ve been blindsided,” Cuthbert said sadly. “Betrayed once more by my own callow youth.”

“I don’t know nothing about your callow youth, brother, but you’ve been blindsided, all right,” Reynolds agreed. He stood behind and slightly to the left of Cuthbert, and now he moved his gun forward until the boy could feel the muzzle against the back of his head. Reynolds thumbed the hammer. In the pool of silence which the Travellers’ Rest had become, the sound was very loud. “Now put that twanger down.”

“I think, good sir, that I must offer my regrets and decline.”

“What?”

So we know that Cuthbert is not only funny but he’s as incapable of shutting up as he is walking past an injustice.

Eventually, Alain appears and puts a knife to Reynold’s throat. After some maneuvering, Jonas steps in with a gun trained at Alain. This is when we learn just how stubborn these young gunslingers can be:

“Sonny, unless you’re a barber, I think you’d better put that pigsticker down. You don’t get a second warning.”

“No,” Alain said.

Jonas, who had expected nothing but compliance and had been prepared for nothing else, was thunderstruck. “What?”

“You heard me,” Alain said. “I said no.”

The incredulity of the older Big Coffin Hunters is what helps sell the whole scene. It’s three men with guns against two boys, one with a knife and the other a slingshot, and we haven’t gotten to the point where Roland steps in yet.

Wizard and Glass is also where King nails down the vernacular of this universe. We’ve had tastes of it throughout the series (especially in how Roland speaks), but how people talk in Mejis sets the table for how folksy and charming the rest of the series becomes.

I feel like I already gave too much away with the standoff scene, but Wizard and Glass is a deep treasure chest full of gems. It’s really got everything. A lovely meet-cute. Tragedy. Romance. Giant action scenes. Amazing characters. A rich setting. Direct connections to other King books. And lots of answers to questions we’ve had since the first book. It’s a remarkable experience.

It’s the apex of the rollercoaster ride that is the Dark Tower, and we’re about to freefall into the last three books.