A Duo of Unfortunate Events (Upstaged!)

Twice now Stephen King has done it to me. Twice. In the same series.

In the early 90’s I wrote the first half of a series of spoofs called “Goldringer,” placing characters from Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” into a James Bond setting, one chapter for each of Ian Fleming’s titles.

“Agent 006 and a Half,” Frodo Baggins, on his majesty’s secret service.

Instead of the infamous baccarat scenes that pepper Bond’s adventures (at least in the books), my only real option was to insert a riddle game between Goldringer and Baggins.

The resolution was something I mulled for quite awhile, before deciding that Baggins finally would ask an absurd riddle rather than a "valid" one, offending Goldringer’s sensibilities, and thus win the match by default when Goldringer blew a gasket.

But of course I never published, and a few years later “Wizard and Glass,” Book #4 of the Dark Tower series, described the culmination of Blaine (the Train)’s riddle match with Roland’s ka-tet. The turning point of the match was when Eddie Dean “broke” the unspoken rules and began to ask senseless, stupid riddles, undignified riddles.

My riddle, the one that so confounded and discombobulated the tiny Goldringer, was “How did the punk rocker cross the road? Because he was stapled to the chicken.”

I do not think I need to tell you what King’s riddle was.

Somewhere in the universe, the dies rolled, the spinner spun, trillions of lottery balls pinged off the inside of a glass container, and the two numbers that spit out were – against all feasible odds, perhaps unimaginable odds – were one and the same.

Groan.

To add insult to incomparable injury, within the last six months, I added a scene in “A Single Broken Thread,” where Agusa teaches Jan how to tan and cure hides. I had never seen it really described in a book and thought it was a neat idea.

Now I’ve just finished reading the last book of the Dark Tower, and near the end, almost as if it was squeezed in under the gun, Roland teaches Susanna how to tan and cure hides using the methods that I had researched.

What the…?

His readership only totals hundreds of millions, so chances are any readers of my items would have also read his, or at least my apparent parroting would be pointed out on chat boards festooned with pimply faced teenagers (or perhaps schizoid tech geeks) who have little better to do with their time, except for perhaps playing World of Warcraft.

So absurd, so unbelievable. (The Riddle Incident, as I have come to call it, simply leaves me irritably — albeit a bit delightfully — astounded.) What were the odds? How many riddles exist in this universe, but he would pick the same one?

But I guess that’s just how ka goes, and the wheel continues to spin.