Books Worth Reading

Cover of The Dark Tower (The Dark Tower, Book 7)

The Dark Tower Series Books 1-7 by Stephen King

If you didn’t read the Dark Tower books as they came out, entering the series now can seem daunting. While the first book in the series, The Gunslinger, is relatively slim, the books just keep getting thicker and thicker — and there are seven of them to get through. But I think the journey through King’s epic is well worth your time, especially if you enjoy novels that mix genres (science fiction, fantasy, western, horror), present a new spin on old tropes (the quest story, parallel worlds), and even experiment with metafiction. The Dark Tower is the pinnacle of King’s writing career, and I think the series incorporate the best of his ideas and themes (as well as some failures). Here is my guide to the series.

The Gunslinger was first published in 1982, but a revised and expanded edition was released in 2003 that restores a few cut scenes, adds some important foreshadowing and cleans up some inconsistencies with the later novels. The slimmest volume in the series, and the best written, The Gunslinger has one of the truly great opening lines:

The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.

In The Gunslinger, we meet Roland, King’s antihero, and enter his world, a “world that has moved on.” We also learn of his quest to reach the Dark Tower, Roland’s obsessive goal that drives the entire series. The book is haunting and spare, and if you were only going to read one Dark Tower book, this would be the one. Just try not to continue, though, when you reach the end.

For me, the strongest books in the series after The Gunslinger are The Drawing of the Three (Volume II) and The Wastelands (Volume III). In these books, Roland is putting together his ka-tet, the group of people who will travel with him on his quest, and he first crosses from his world into ours (or a world very much like ours). The suspense in these two books is ramped up high; I have reread both several times and still could not put them down. Many readers would also name Volume IV, Wizard and Glass, as their favorite because it tells Roland’s back story: how he first became a gunslinger, his first love and what happened to her, and how his kingdom of Gilead was brought down. I find Wizard and Glass to be a little long-winded but still highly enjoyable.

The fifth and sixth installments, Wolves of the Calla and Song of Susannah, are probably the weakest links. In Wolves of the Calla, King really crosses into metafictional territory, spicing it with cross-references — and even one major character — from his other works, as well as elements from Marvel comics, Star Wars and Harry Potter. There is a lot going on in these two novels, maybe a bit too much for some readers. But having journeyed this far, it seems a shame to stop now, and both are still great fun, especially Wolves, which features a spaghetti Western-style showdown at the end. I do have to say that these books introduce King’s most audacious twist of all, which I won’t spoil. Some readers see this as a shocking and arrogant bit of hubris, although I look at it not only as an interesting experiment with reality within fiction, but also a culmination of themes King has been writing about for a long time. It may not be completely successful, but it certainly is something new.

The last book, The Dark Tower, has deeply divided fans. It is the heftiest of all the volumes (with the possible exception of Wizard and Glass), but you can’t stop if you’ve made it this far. This novel is a mass of contradictions: absurd and moving, deeply satisfying and completely unsatisfying in its long-awaited conclusion to Roland’s quest, disappointing and ultimately redeeming. Of course, King kills off a bunch of major characters, which I am not spoiling because that was foreshadowed all along, but don’t forget Jake’s haunting line from Volume 1:

Go on, then; there are other worlds than these.

And there certainly are.

Several aspects of Volume VII border on the ridiculous. It does go on a little too long, and at some point, you’re ready for the Dungeons and Dragons escapades to stop and the serious story to resume. But the ending makes up for it, in my opinion. I won’t give it away, but I imagine I’m one of the few readers who didn’t howl in frustration and throw the book against the wall when we find out what happens to Roland. It takes quite a bit of musing to unravel the tangled web that King has spun of story upon story, world interconnected with world, and that’s good enough to satisfy me. I won’t say that The Dark Tower is my favorite in the series — the first three books are far better — but I will say that King wrote an ending I never saw coming, and that’s why I liked it so much.

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