The Road to The Dark Tower

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First published by New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
First Electronic edition, November 2004
Copyright © Bev Vincent, 2004
All rights reserved
(See
ref-1
for author permissions.)

MSR ISBN 0 7865 5233 6
AEB ISBN 0 7865 5234 4

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KEY TO REFERENCED WORKS

DT1:
The Gunslinger

DT2:
The Drawing of the Three

DT3:
The Waste Lands

DT4:
Wizard and Glass

DT5:
Wolves of the Calla

DT6:
Song of Susannah

DT7:
The Dark Tower

SL:
’Salem’s Lot

TS:
The Stand

DS:
Different Seasons

TT:
The Talisman

ED:
The Eyes of the Dragon

TK:
The Tommyknockers

INS:
Insomnia

RM:
Rose Madder

LS: “The Little Sisters of Eluria”

HA:
Hearts in Atlantis

OW:
On Writing

BH:
Black House

EE:
Everything’s Eventual

FB8:
From a Buick 8

INTRODUCTION
MORE WORLDS THAN THESE

There are quests and roads that lead ever onward, and all of them end in the same place—upon the killing ground. Except, perhaps, the road to the Tower.

[DT1]

“Everything in the world is either coming to rest or falling to pieces,” he said flatly. “At the same time, the forces which interlock and give the world its coherence—in time and size as well as in space—are weakening. . . .
The Beams are breaking down.”

[DT3]

“When one quests for the Dark Tower, time is a matter of no concern at all.”

[DT1, foreword]

 A gunslinger rides into town, sitting tall in his saddle. He wears two sinister guns low on his hips. He grieves the memory of his one true love, long dead. A honky-tonk piano plays inside the saloon near where he puts up his horse. Someone approaches him stealthily from behind and he turns in a blur, guns drawn, ready for a fight, only to find either the town drunk or the village idiot.

Though this description resembles the scene in
The Gunslinger
where Roland enters Tull and meets Nort the Weedeater, recently raised from the dead, it actually comes from the opening page of “Slade,” a Western political satire
¹
that Stephen King serialized in
The Maine Campus
between June and August 1970.

Elements from this story are mirrored in
Wizard and Glass
, written a quarter of a century later. The love of Slade’s life—Miss Polly Peachtree of Paduka (sic), Illinois—is dead. Sam Columbine killed Sandra Dawson’s rancher father and is trying to take over her land. It’s a short hop from Sandra Dawson to Susan Delgado, whose father was murdered and whose land and possessions have fallen to Hart Thorin. Sandra Dawson’s top man is also named Hart.

Columbine hired a bunch of hardcases—Big Coffin Hunters, in other words—and “Pinky” Lee rides about with Regulators. A sinister character with a deadly pet snake evolved into the witch Rhea. Slade utters Clint
Eastwood–like epithets.
²
A character loses the index and middle fingers from one hand, though it isn’t Slade. The story even directly mentions its author, Steve King. Of course, Slade is slightly more cavalier about killing people than Roland is,
³
and the story ends with the gunslinger wrapping his arm altogether too fondly around his horse’s neck as they wander off into a romantic sunset.

While Jack Slade and his “sinister .45s” stalked the streets of Dead Steer Springs, his creator, Stephen King, was beginning a more serious endeavor, one that would occupy him off and on for the next thirty-five years.

In his introduction to “The Little Sisters of Eluria,” King writes, “If there’s a magnum opus in my life, it’s probably the yet unfinished seven-volume series about Roland Deschain
⁴
of Gilead and his search for the Dark Tower which serves as the hub of existence.” [EE] Using “unfinished” and “magnum opus” in the same sentence may seem presumptuous, but by the time
Everything’s Eventual
appeared in early 2002, King was well on his way to completing the series.

Shortly after King finished the last three books and publication dates were established, a joint press release from Viking, Scribner and Donald M. Grant quoted the author: “The Dark Tower has been a major part of my life and writing career. I wanted to finish it both for the readers, who have been so devoted, and for myself. . . . For me, it’s like a finale and a reunion, all at once. I’ve put everything I’ve got into these three books.”
⁵

As you should already know, the
Dark Tower
series chronicles the adventures of the last gunslinger in a strange world that is somehow related to our own. (If you haven’t read all seven books, stop now, for herein there are spoilers aplenty.) Roland’s world has moved on. Time speeds up and slows down unpredictably. A night might last ten years, or nightfall might begin early in the afternoon. Compass directions shift.

Everything is slowly falling apart and at the center of the world’s ills, literally and symbolically, is the Dark Tower, which “stands at the root of time.”
⁶
It is the nexus of all possible universes, and was originally supported by Beams powered by an unending supply of magic. Lacking faith in the persistence of magic, men replaced it with rational—but mortal—technology.

When he is barely more than a boy—but already a gunslinger who has killed many times—Roland receives a vision of the Tower and realizes
that it is failing. If it does, his world—and every other reality, including many only subtly different from our own—will be destroyed, leaving behind only chaos. In one version of America, there is a car model called the Takuro Spirit, and in another Lincoln’s picture appears on the one-dollar bill. In some dimensions, Ronald Reagan was never president, and in others a superflu decimated the population. Between these infinite universes lie dark places containing unimaginable creatures.

The Crimson King, who intends to rule the chaos after the Tower’s fall, has amassed hostage workers known as Breakers to speed up the destruction of the Beams supporting the Tower. Reaching the Tower and somehow fixing what has gone wrong is the quest Roland has chosen, or that fate chose for him.

Getting Roland and his followers, his ka-tet, to the Tower has been Stephen King’s lifelong work.

This book is the first to examine the series in its entirety. Chapter 1 follows its long and harrowing road to publication, from the time King wrote its famous first line in 1970 until the publication of
The Dark Tower
in late 2004.

Each book—including both the original and the revised versions of
The Gunslinger
—is examined individually in the following seven chapters, and the nonseries novels and stories with strong ties to the
Dark Tower
mythos are discussed in chapter 9. Chapter 10 explores the series’ major characters.