"When Gwendy Peterson was
twelve, a mysterious stranger named Richard Farris gave her a mysterious box
for safekeeping. It offered treats and vintage coins, but it was dangerous.
Pushing any of its seven colored buttons promised death and destruction. Years
later, the button box entered Gwendy’s life again. A successful novelist and a
rising political star, she was once again forced to deal with the temptation
that box represented. Now, evil forces seek to possess the button box and it is
up to Senator Gwendy Peterson to keep it from them. At all costs. But where can
you hide something from such powerful entities"
Towards the end of this novel, I got the sense that the original tale, Gwendy’s
Button Box, started out as a simple novella, a Twilight Zone style story with it’s
morality tale and twist ending, with no need for a real explanation, that ballooned
into something more with Gwendy’s Magic Feather and now Gwendy’s Final Task.
That the only way it can, could, end is with a deus ex machina style
explanation. The fact that King and Chizmar make note of this, is telling.
Also, by tying a lot of the story to King’s Dark Tower universe will either
make nerdy fans happy or piss them off for doing this.
Gwendy’s Button Box was tight little novella that left you wondering,
but not really demanding an explanation. Was Richard Farris the legendary Man
in Black? What was the button box to begin with, who made it, where did come
from and why did Farris trust Gwendy the most to keep it safe? These were elements
of the first tale, but again, did we really need these answered?
With Gwendy’s Magic Feather, the tale leaped into the future and
started to take leaps and bounds with logic, and while the idea Gwendy is a
politician, it took the simple premise that lead us away from Castle Rock into
space (which often reminded me of Moonraker, the James Bond film that took 007 to space, if
only because a little film named Star Wars demanded it). And since 90 year-old
William Shatner went into orbit via Blue Origin, the idea of a 64 year-old
sitting Senator traveling to an orbiting space station is not that farfetched,
but…the ending of the button box is set in space?
There are many worlds than these, as Dark Tower fans know, and I’m also
curious which one of the twelve this one is set in. The second book, set in
1999, featured a fictitious president, but in the last book Trump gets several
mentions as well as COVID-19 (the book is set in 2026, and the coronavirus is
still present). As anyone would know, King is not a fan of Trump, but it’s
still startling to see him part of this tale, when the rest seemed to be set in
different world than ours.
Of course, we are left with a few mysteries, such as who is Bobby and
why he called Richard Farris a “meddler.” Perhaps this Bobby is just another of
the Low Men in Yellow Coats working with someone else, something else, to bring
down the beams and the Tower still, as the button box is the “only one thing
can destroy it, now that the Crimson King is dead.”
In the end, I enjoyed these two novellas and novel about Gwendy Peterson. As with many King characters, she’s three dimensional, smart, intelligent, but flawed. She represents the best of humanity when confronted with the ability to save or destroy a world.
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