The ABC’s Of Stephen King : Ted Brautigen

Ted Brautigen is one of King’s characters who bear the distinction of appearing in multiple books and he has deep ties with the mythos of the Dark Tower series. He originally appeared as one of the central characters in one of King’s less talked about books, Hearts In Atlantis. It’s interesting because I recently was looking over a bibliography for King and realized that Hearts is classified as a short story collection and I think that it is a tribute to King and his abilities that I have never really thought of the book in this way. It’s true that the multiple stories in the books aren’t necessarily connected in the traditional sense and most of them could stand on their own. Still, at the same time I felt like it was all a part of the same tapestry, and they were more powerful when presented as a whole.

Ted is one of those characters that I think I would enjoy spending time with, if he were a real person. King does a great job making his dialogue sound warm and engaging. Whenever I read Hearts In Atlantis, I always come out of it excited about books and in particular, I want to immediately go out and find a copy of Lord Of The Flies. I think that regardless of how you feel about Stephen King, he is clearly a lover of literature and I think that this aspect of his personality comes through clearly in Ted Brautigen.

In the final book of the Dark Tower series, Ted returns for an appearance, along with several other King characters, to come to the aid of the fabled heroes of the Tet of nineteen. I don’t think that I’m necessarily spoiling anything here, simply by acknowledging his presence in the story, but one aspect of it that I did really appreciate is that in the process of relating his story to the gunslingers, he succeeds in filling in some holes regarding his background, as well as his perspective on events detailed in Hearts In Atlantis. There are a huge number of books in King’s catalogue that people argue have connections to the Dark Tower but Hearts In Atlantis is one of the few books with clear, overt references to the universe. I highly recommend Hearts In Atlantis as a nice supplement to the Dark Tower series.

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