The Dark Tower by Stephen King

 I’ve written here before about my longstanding love of the books of Stephen King. I started reading them in the late eighties triggered by my love of Anthrax and film. I was already well into Isaac Asimov and I had read a lot of Philip K Dick and King was a natural progression.  The first books I read included The Dark Half and The Shining and I saw many of the film adaptations.

I used to pick up his books in the local library and some I remember stating to read but for some reason they didn’t really click. These included The Eyes of the Dragon and The Drawing of the Three. I think I also tried that eras iteration of The Gunslinger but I couldn’t get into them.

Roughly 36 years later I’m finally enjoying these stories as part of the complete Dark Tower series. It did take some effort as the introduction to The Drawing of the Three is hard going but it does get better. I have vague memories of struggling with the first 100 pages as a teenager but memory is often unreliable. As the character of Eddie solidifies King’s writing warms up and the story starts to flow.

This is a fantasy series but with post apocalyptic magical cowboy elements too. It beats Lord of the Rings hands down. King is a much better writer and his ferocious output highlights that compare to the unreadable intellectual fundament gazing that makes up the majority of Tolkien’s work. King has written a hell of a lot of  popular bestsellers that people like to read beyond the Dark Tower series. And many of his greatest hits are are tangentially linked to the central cycle. You do not need to read The Dark Tower to enjoy ‘Salem’s Lot or Insomnia but The Dark Tower adds to these books retrospectively.

The seven central books are a long read or listen. There are laugh out loud funny bits and almost crying sad bits.  If you buy in enough to read the whole thing you will probably come to care about some of the characters and be moved when bad things happen to them. King also takes pot shots at book collectors who never read their books and himself. 

I still have some of the tangential tie in books to read.  There is a King Universe that links up and I will work through them all. F Paul Wilson does something similar with his Repairman Jack/Adversary cycle and is also worth checking out.

King has written a lot of books and I have read a lot of them. I am thankful that I have not yet read them all. I am currently working on The Talisman, another book that I failed to get into as a teenager as well as Bag of Bones. After that I’m aiming for The Black House and then Other Worlds Than These.  I am thankful that King is prodigious. I am also thankful that Joe Hill is almost as good.