A great book. The best Dark Tower novel? Yes. The best Stephen King novel? Possibly. It has one of his best lines, anyway.

He thought: Very well. I am now a man with no food, with two less fingers and one less toe than I was born with; I am a gunslinger with shells which may not fire; I am sickening from a monster’s bite and have no medicine; I have a day’s water if I’m lucky; I may be able to walk perhaps a dozen miles if I press myself to the last extremity. I am, in short, a man on the edge of everything.

I don’t want to think or write about The Drawing of the Three: I want to re-read it. It’s coked-up and manic, bouncing off the walls like a kid in a small room. The plot moves unbelievably fast – only The Running Man is paced faster, and not by much. It’s ludicrously overstuffed with thrills: later Dark Towers can have a cosy, rambling feel; here the tension drawn so tight that each line seems ready to snap. You can almost cut your finger on the flat side of the page.

It picks up the tale from where The Gunslinger ended it: Roland (the last guardian in a dead or dying world modeled on our romantic image of the Wild West) has just damned his own soul in his quest for the mythic Dark Tower. Alone and friendless, he collapses from exhaustion on a beach, and is attacked (and mutilated) by a monster from the waves. Soon he’s becoming desperately and incurably sick – either his wound is infected, or the monster was venomous. He realizes that he might die before he ever finds the Tower, and attempts a series of “drawings” – rituals bringing other gunslingers (or equivalent gunslingers) from other universes into his world. He hopes they’ll either save his life or fulfill his quest for the Tower after he dies. All he knows about these supposed allies is a shred of biography. There’s a man in thrall of a demon (unknown to Roland) called “Heroin”, a woman who appears to have a split Jekyll-and-Hyde personality, and the personification of death itself.

Roland proves to be just as strong an anti-hero as he was in the book before. The drawings are little more than abductions. He will not take no for an answer, and he has no intention of allowing the proto-gunslingers (who, as chance would have it, all live in 20th century New York) to leave. He has good reasons for doing this – he believes the Tower will soon fall, spelling the end for the last pitiful dregs of creation, unless someone saves it. But it makes him as dark as the tower he’s chasing, and turns him into Clint Eastwood’s Angel Eyes, as menacing as he is heroic.

The Drawing of the Three isn’t perfect. The first third of the book spends a lot of time in Miami Vice territory, featuring cocaine smuggling and DEA agents and cartoonish gangster types: it’s fun but runs a little long. Eddie Dean’s backstory is also overdeveloped considering how uninteresting it turns out to be. The book also features a serial-killer yuppie character that seems ripped off from American Psycho (it’s not – The Drawing of the Three was published four years earlier): a great idea that King could have done more with. Detta Walker proves herself the book’s most inspired villain by the end, not Jack Mort.

But there are far more things that work. Huge swathes of the book are just “a guy walking alongside a beach”. Instead of dead zones in the plot, these become fraught with tension thanks to the ticking clock of Roland’s sickness (which also allow King to explore Roland’s backstory through fevered hallucinations of life before the world apocalyptically “moved on”). Roland was an almost unbelievably good gunfighter in the first book, effortlessly gunning down dozens of people, so King makes the few shootouts interesting by giving him unreliable ammunition (Roland unwisely allowed his shells to become wet by sleeping in wet sand, and many of the bullets he chambers in his revolvers misfire). This is great, effective storytelling, killing lots of birds with very few stones.

And there are hilarious moments too, particularly the parts where Roland (a man from another world who is as much an Arthurian knight as he is The Man With No Name): has to interact with foul-mouthed New Yorkers. This was a big part of what sunk the later books for me: it killed the atmosphere of King’s Lovecraftian Western “Mid-World” to have characters name-dropping Hollywood movies and baseball teams every few pages. But here, the lightness serves a purpose, cutting the dread to manageable levels, like the baby powder in Eddie’s heroin.

‘Well,’ Eddie said, ‘what was behind Door Number One wasn’t so hot, and what was behind Door Number Two was even worse, so now, instead of quitting like sane people, we’re going to go right on ahead and check out Door Number Three. The way things have been going, I think it’s likely to be something like Godzilla or Ghidra the Three-Headed Monster, but I’m an optimist. I’m still hoping for the stainless steel cookware.”

The Dark Tower, at its core, was King’s merging a Lord of the Rings-type epic fantasy quest with genre conceits of a Leone/Sturges/Peckinpah Western. The concept went off the rails for various reasons worth explaining at length, but it’s interesting that the best book in the series had the least time for leather-slapping cowboy cliches. The Drawing of the Three has no cattle rustlers, no dusty red canyons, no bars with batwing doors, one Mexican standoff, certainly no war-whooping Injuns or sniggering bandidos. Instead it’s a fantasy-horror story of a man and his magic, going to other worlds.

King often does his best work with very sparse plots. I’ve heard it said that videogames work not by letting you do things but by not letting you do things (Super Mario Bros would be no fun if Mario could fly, for example), and King has a similar property: he gains strength under restrictions. You can tell the story of Misery, Gerald’s Game, The Shining, in a single, reasonably short sentence. But just as very good sketches can suggest more detail than a photorealistic drawing, King’s threadbare stories never fail to gain largeness and life.

This Taschen artbook explores the work of Hans-Ruedi Giger, who died not long ago. It’s fairly large (23cm*30cm), the print quality is fine, the binding in my copy was falling apart, and Timothy Leary’s foreword is scarier than the actual book. “[Giger] has obviously activated circuits of his brain that govern the unicellular politics within our bodies, our botanical technologies, our aminoacid machines” etc. Yikes.

Why Giger? He was special. Like Hieronymous Bosch, William Blake, and Junji Ito, he saw worlds that nobody else could see. He worked in a lot of mediums but is most famous for his airbrushed “biomechanicals”: totemic, terrifying creatures with dripping teeth, corrugated hides, and electrophosphorescent eyes. They’re an impossible mixture of life and not-life, future and past, sterility and dirt; ancient Egyptian gods built on a Soviet assembly line. There’s little else like them: no artist has ever copied Giger’s signature style with much fidelity. You might say that biomechanicals are more commonly found in reality than in art.

Despite some avant-garde leanings, he was a commercial artist through and through – even after “Giger-mania” took hold in the 70s he wasn’t above decorating heavy metal sleeves, or PC game box art, or guitars, or mic stands, or lager bars. His art showed you unexpected things, and could also be found in unexpected places.

Metal was one of Giger’s favorite subjects. So was flesh, and the ways one can be enhanced or diminished by the other. In the typical Giger image pipes coil and mutate, becoming snakes and phalluses, and glistening shafts and struts pierce necrotic blue-black skin.  Giger didn’t predict the future. He grew up in an age of titanium hips, electrical pacemakers, and so on: men have altered their bodies through mechanical means for a long time. Giger’s insight was to tease out the aesthetic power of this union. His creepy-crawly arc-welds of the biologic to the anodic are overwhelming and hit the eye like a bomb. They’re almost too ugly to look at. Or too beautiful. His greatest works actually manage to be both at the same time.

But there’s no sense of gore or mutilation to Giger’s art. He weaves metal through soft tissue and keratin and bone in a way that looks natural, as though evolution rather than surgery produced his creatures. There’s also no motion: Giger’s art has a stillness that’s striking: the “biomechanics” don’t even seem capable of movement. The creature he designed for Ridley Scott’s Alien became a horror movie monster that scampers and leaps around, but there’s none of that in his original artwork, no impression that it might be ready to impale a blood funnel into your chest. It looks petrified in place, a stone god of a stone universe. An advantage of fantasy is that you can create a world that plays to your strengths as an artist, and though Giger never had much talent for evoking movement, he could imagine a place were movement doesn’t happen. His creations are like heavy machines in a factory: bolted into the floor and never moved again. They look perfectly at ease within the environments he creates for them.

The autobiographical text – written by Giger – proves less interesting than the pictures. He doesn’t want to talk about himself, which I submit is a disadvantage when writing an autobiography. He grew up in 1940s Graubünden, lived a childhood so uneventful it’s a miracle he didn’t perish from boredom, worked in advertising, and so on. His father wanted him to become a pharmacist, but he had a dream, maaan. Giger focuses on the dullest details possible, and we never really understand what formed him as an artist. This continues in later passages, where he relates his rise to fame (which reached its peak in 1979, when Alien won him an Oscar for Best Achievement in Visual Effects). Occasionally there are oblique suggestions of personal trouble. “…after the PR commotion and stress”…what stress? “My inner despondency…”  What despondency? Giger’s biography fails a basic test: it’s less vivid and informative than reading his own Wikipedia article.

I know someone who attended a Pink Floyd exhibit in Milan – one clearly curated by Roger Waters or someone, because it whitewashed away any controversy, reimagining Pink Floyd as a band of great mates who got on a treat and made awesome music together. The problem (aside from dishonesty) is that the Pink Floyd story is incomprehensible if you don’t talk about the bad stuff – Syd’s mental collapse, Waters’ disillusionment, the destructive infighting. A naif would be left standing underneath a huge sign saying “PINK FLOYD IS BACK!” and wondering “where did they go? And why are there now three people in the band photo instead of four?” Giger’s account of his own life was is a little like that. Things were clearly being left unsaid, which is a shame. I suppose the pictures are the important thing, but they needn’t be the only thing.

The Giger style lives on after him, even though he’s the only one who could really do it. Otherwordly or alien is a common adjective used to describe it, but it’s a specific cold-blooded alien aesthetic. I used to read popular astronomy books which would talk about how moons such as Europa and Enceladus might have liquid oceans, and there would always be the suggestion that we might find fish living there. This is unlikely: life requires a source of free energy, and there’s almost none in such systems. If anything did live, it would be very slow, very conservative of motion. It might communicate and reproduce through radio photons. It would shift fractions of an inch per millenia. If it could think, it would regard motion the way we regard time travel – as an absurd theoretical conceit.

In other words, they might look like HR Giger’s half-frozen monsters. Very cold. Very old. Shunning movement. Giger was the god of the formaldehyde-filled vein, the unbeating stone heart, the liquid nitrogen-cooled brain, and this book cryo-preserves a lot of his unique genius.

Paintings are dead. The oleaginous purples of baroque: dead. The petal-like brushstrokes of impressionism: dead. The apotheotic ecstasies of romanticism: dead beyond dead. Even when they evoke or suggest life they aren’t life, and if you try to breathe the unending skyful of air in Caspar David Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea you will suffocate and also become dead.

Airless Spaces (from 1998) is about that kind of dying: trying to sustain yourself on artifice and illusion. It’s short – about a hundred and fifty pages – and very readable, containing fifty vignettes drawn from the author’s experiences in mental hospitals.

Shulamith bath Shmuel ben Ari Feuerstein was an early radical feminist. Her 1970 book The Dialectic of Sex launched her to fame, and it seemed like she was set for the same sort of life Greer, Friedan, and Steinem had – forty or fifty years of teaching, consciousness-raising, fighting the patriarchy a little, fighting other feminists a lot, and the occasional bra-burning publicity stunt to remain in the public eye.

Incredibly, the book marked the end of Shulie’s career. She disappeared from public view in 1971 – to pursue a career as a painter, she said. In actuality, a shadow had fallen on her, and her struggles with schizophrenia (worsened by the death of her father and the apparent suicide of her brother) caused her to be repeatedly institutionalized. Although I don’t think her name even appears in the book, Airless Space is her account of those 28 missing years.

It describes places that aren’t real places, relationships that aren’t real relationships, and words that have no meaning. Like paintings, these artifices vary in their details. Some are crude and clumsy. Others are painted with a maestro’s touch, and cleverly deceive you into thinking they’re real. But they’re all pitiful facsimiles of the real thing, and none of them are of much use at sustaining life. Like eating an apple made of wax.

There’s no theory or politicizing, instead there’s endless and fascinating detail about daily life in the land of the mad. Time is absent from the book (most stories could take place anywhere from 1971 to 1998, with only a few being dated by details like VCR and email), yet also omnipresent. The hours crawl like a broken-backed cockroach. Eventually you stop even feeling bored: you just stare slackmouthed at the clock as it sweeps from breakfast time to lunch time to dinner time to bed time.

Society doesn’t deal with insanity that well in 1998 or any other year. In most of the stories Shulie could be at a prison; she encounters rigid and unbending bureaucracy, orderlies who apparently moonlight as nightclub bouncers, and institution-fostered drug dependencies. The chapter titles alone are grim. The Forced Shower.  The Prayer Contest. Bedtime is the Best Time of the Day. Bloodwork. The Sleep Room. Incontinence. The Jump Suit. Hating the Hospital. Suicides I Have Known.

There’s a section simply titled losers. The term sounds sophomorically cruel, like what a bully would say as he gives you a bogwashing, but it’s an accurate description. The people Shulie writes about have lost. There’s no other way to put it. You feel pity reading about some of them.

• Ana, a vain woman who has managed to sneak in a stylish white jogging suit. She wears it along with a face of stolen makeup, lording over the other patients “like a queen in haute couture”. Inside, she’s unimaginably glamorous. When she’s released, she looks exactly like what she is: a person sprung from a mental ward.
• Jane, a “small and ugly” punk rocker who spends her entire day on the phone, trying to get out. One morning at breakfast, each patient receives a banana, and Shulie is missed. She sees Jane not eating hers, asks if she can have it. Jane has an explosive psychotic episode, spitting in Shulie’s face while screaming an “incomprehensible torrent of abuse”. She spents the rest of her stay trying to have Shulie arrested.
• Ellin, an intelligent, cheerful, and apparently sane woman committed for hypochondria. None of the doctors believe her to be sick. Her brother suing for ownership of her property, on the basis that she’s crazy (as proven by the fact she’s in an institution). She’s spending all of her savings on lawyers to fight him and will soon be penniless. Later, Shulie learns that the brother won, and Ellin was evicted from her own apartment. She never learns what happened to her after that.
• An anonymous woman (who might be Shulie herself) hears about someone dying one day, and wishes she could trade bodies with that person. They would get a healthy body with many more years of life. She would get a dead one with no more years. This seems optimal for both of them.
• Stanley, an old friend of Shulie. He’s perennially broke ex-academic who has spent nearly every spare moment of the past eight years working on a thousand-page long magnum opus on philosophy. He submits it to a press owned by a “prominent former radical”. It’s rejected, on the basis that it’s unreadable and also they don’t do philosophy. He has no idea what else to do with it.

And so on. Along the way, Shulie gives advice on how to get out of a psych ward. Behave. Attend all activities religiously. But don’t allow yourself to become invisible, or you’ll be forgotten. Rock the boat in small ways. Stand out. Wear an interesting item of clothing if allowed. Put effort into your appearance. Pace the halls, so people can’t escape the fact that you’re there. Learn the names of all the doctors and orderlies and have interactions with them – even if it’s just saying “hello” in the hallway, and even if you’re ignored. The basic idea is to be present. There’s a world of difference between a person in an institution (who doesn’t belong), and an institutionalized person (who belongs very well), and your job is clearly be the former, so you can hopefully get out.

But out is in misspelled for a lot of people. Another sad aspect of Airless Space is that many of these people will live awful lives no matter where they are: they’re poor, crippled, will never be “better” in any meaningful sense, and their insanity is a response to circumstance (“Just because you’re paranoid, does not mean they’re not out to get you”). I’m struck by the story of Mrs Brophy, who views her prolongued hospital stays as a vacation from the nerve-shredding job of caring for her large household with many children. Another repeat in-and-outer adapts to the point of being nonfunctional in the real world. “Every time she went in, especially after the first, she felt submerged, as if someone were holding her under water for months. When she came out she was fat, helpless, unable to make the smallest decision, speechless, and thoroughly programmed by the rigid hospital routine, so that even her stomach grumbled on time, at precisely 5 p.m.”

There are some humorous touches. There’s a plane trip where Shulie complains about the in-flight movie “Melanie“, which she calls a “pre-adolescent fantasty with a decidedly lesbian tinge”. Shulie should have been a film critic. There’s also an interesting meeting where she meets none other than Valerie Solanas, whose later life makes Shulie’s look like a success story. Solanas has read The Dialectic of Sex and hates it, and starts arguing with Shulie about it. The low comedy of two destitute madwomen debating the theory of a world that rejected them decades ago isn’t lost on her.

In short, very interesting, very sad, very effective. This ain’t it, chief became Twitter’s favorite put-down for a while, and that’s what this book is: this ain’t it fifty times in a row. I don’t know that I’ll ever re-read Airless Spaces, but it made an impression. The book opens on one of its most memorable image: you’re aboard a sinking ship…but that ship is inside the Bemuda Triangle. If you’re dying in a place that’s false and unreal, are you really dying? Whatever the answer, you’re clearly not living.