About... ...the fanlistings What is a fanlisting? A fanlisting is a place for all fans of a particular show, movie, actor, actress, singer, etc. (in this case for Eddie Dean from the Dark Tower series by Stephen KIng) that come together and so build a list with members from all over the world who are fans of the subject of the fanlist. If you want more information about what a fanlisting is, or if you want to see other fanlistings to join, visit the fanlistings.org, the first and biggest site which collects fanlistings. Joining si absolutely free and besides putting a link or code if you own a website, there's nothing else that it's required of you. ...the webmistress Hi, Janie here ^^ I'm seventeen and I'm from Italy. I've been a Stephen King reader since two years and I started reading the DT something like a month before "Wolves of the Calla" came out (yeah, it was in order not to wait too much ;). And fell in love with Eddie as soon as I got to page 107, book two [yeah, it was the bit of the "please feed me I'm a US government employer" shirt. That got me completely]. So here I am ^^ ...Eddie Dean (This description will contain major spoilers from the first four books of the DT series, so if you haven't still read some of them and you don't want to spoil yourself something, pay attention ^^) Eddie is a major character from the "Dark Tower" series, by Stephen King. The very first time that we "meet him" is in the first book, "The gunslinger", during Walter and Roland's palaver. Here, the latter is shown a some taroque cards, which stand for the people he has to draw to form a ka-tet and go in search for the Dark Tower. One of these cards, called "The Prisoner", stands for Eddie. Why he's a prisoner? Because "a demon has infested him and the demon's name is heroin." Eddie makes is first real appearence in the second book, "The drawing of the three", when Roland opens the first of the doors on the beach and enters his mind. In that moment, Eddie was on a plane, carrying some cocaine (in order to get heroin for him and his brother) for a quite powerful New York ganster, called Balazar. He was doing it only because he was asked by his older brother Henry (alias "the great sage and eminent junkie"). Henry, his senior by eight years, is a Vietnam reducee, that came back home with an heroin addiction, and it didn't take long before also his little brother turned into an addict. That is to say, they had a sister, too, but she died hit by a drunken driver. For this, their mother always tought that it was Henry's job to prevent that something like that could happen to Eddie. So, the latter has passed all his life in the shadow of his brother, who had "renounced" all the opportunities to be successful in life in order to do his job properly. Nothing of that was true, naturally, but it's in this state of things that Roland finds his "prisoner". He helps him escaping the controls at the airport, but the whole thing doesn't go as it should have gone and Balazar's men kill Henry cutting his head off before Eddie comes. When he discovers it, a big clash follows, with Eddie and Roland on one side and Balazar and his men on the other. The former party wins killing them all, and after that Eddie agrees on following Roland to Mid-World, on the quest for the Dark Tower. When Roland draws Odetta Holmes, "The lady of shadows" (and Detta Walker, her obscure personality, with her), they fall in love, and after he risks dying because of Detta, Roland makes the two women recognise each other and they finally form a third woman, Susannah, which takes the surname Dean, thus becoming his wife (also if they weren't never married in the strict sense of the word). In the third book, "The wastelands", we discover that he's got an innate ability for carving magic objects, and the job of carving the key that will bring Jake in the Middle-World it's his. If you want to go into more physical description, he's no more than 23 tears old, he's got long dark brown hair and hazel (with some green too) eyes. He's got quite a sense of humor, and also if Roland doesn't like it, it's thanks to it that they blow Blaine up in the fourth book. And don't worry, he can become very serious when it's needed. He's the one that changes the most during all the seven books (weel, the six he's in), going from a heroin-addict that "had been sitting in front of the TV in nothing but a pair of yellowing underpants, eating Cheetos, done up on heroin, and watching Yogi Bear (book five, "Wolves of the Calla")" into an armed gunslinger (and early in their relationship Roland compared him to a good gun sinking in quicksand), always improving with each book and each adventure. I won't say the destiny that it's in store for him in the last book, because if you already read it, you know, and if you didn't, it would be a major spoiler... but until the end of the series you won't be disappointed with him ^^. Why him? Why am I doing all this? Just because he's my favourite King character of all time, and in the list of the all-literature-favourites, he always has a special place. When I first read "The drawing of the three", it took me ten pages to find him nice, twenty to think that he was more than nice, and fifty to decide he was my favourite. There are the motivations, of course. And I know that what I'm going to say it' all publicity for Mr. King, because it was him writing, but anyway. So, why? Because I never found another character that could make me laugh until tears in one page, make me feel for him in the next, make me worry about him in the next... he's the most human of Roland's ka-tet, and never lets this humanity go, whatever happens. He was the protagonist (with Susannah, when she still was Odetta) of one of the most beautiful love scenes I ever read, and he's just real, because while all the others (maybe with the exception of Jake, but not as much) could exist only in a book, one like him you could meet everyday, with all the human problems, the human fears and the human love (for a brother, a girl, a friend..). Now I'll stop because you already understood that maybe I care too much for book characters, but anyways, welcome to Eddie's fanlisting. I called it Ka-mai because that word, which means "Ka's fool", is often used by Roland when he thinks about him, in the same way he did with his (now dead) friend Cuthbert. A Ka-Mai "implies a constant joker (the kind Roland is obiously drawn to and easily angered by), yet the addiction of ka adds another dimension to the term. [..] Sometimes jest is serious, or cuts to the heart of a matter which, otherwise, could not be addressed at all. Both Cuthbert and Eddie often have insights that Roland would never grasp, nor face, on his own. [..] The gift of ka-mai is a necessary one on the road to the tower. It is as necessary as the gift of the touch." (definition taken from "The Dark Tower: A concordance-vol.1" by Robin Furth, all rights reserved).