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Sarah Fallon Angela Watercutter

Is The Dark Tower Any Good? Depends How Much You've Read

Filmmakers have been trying to adapt Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series for more than a decade. But with time-jumping metanarratives and compulsive genre-switching, the eight novels proved tough to wrangle into one film-able narrative. Director Nikolaj Arcel’s version of King’s events finally hits theaters today. Written by no fewer than four writers (not including King), the movie arrives with a lean 95-minute runtime and the kind of Rotten Tomatoes score (21% and barely climbing) that studios fear .

But is it possible the critics aren’t being fair? Is it possible Arcel made a movie so faithful to King’s work that just won’t connect with all audiences? Or, conversely, did he make one that attempted to please crowds but lost sight of the story? Did he shoot with his eye, not with his mind? WIRED editors Sarah Fallon and Angela Watercutter are here to sort it out. Fallon has read the books; Watercutter hasn’t. Neither has forgotten the face of her father. Come with us through the portal. (Warning: Spoilers follow.)

Angela Watercutter: First thing first, I didn’t love The Dark Tower . Sarah, as I mentioned yesterday, I can watch Idris Elba (Roland Deschain/The Gunslinger) watching paint dry, but despite his magics I couldn’t emotionally connect with this movie. Even Matthew McConaughey channeling his best time-is-a-flat-circle vibes couldn’t sell his Man in Black dialogue.

But that’s just me. I’ve read some King, and seen quite a few movies and TV shows based on his stories, and while watching The Dark Tower something dawned on me: the less fanatical an adaptation of King’s work, the better it fares. He’s a genius who conjures wonderful premises, but his more cerebral ideas are difficult to translate onto a screen. His horror ( The Shining , Carrie , It ) and drama ( Misery , Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption , The Body , which inspired Stand by Me ) can make the jump, but the more complex (or just plain weird) stuff— Maximum Overdrive , Sleepwalkers —rarely looks right onscreen.

Sarah Fallon: I was wondering how you would react to it, and I think viewers coming to it fresh will be perplexed— Wait, what? There’s some evil guy using some kind of kid-brain-amplifier to knock down some big tower that holds the world(s) together and a psychic kid who knows it’s happening and creatures wearing human skinsuits? It doesn’t roll off the tongue, and the movie doesn’t give you much time to get used to the notions before driving the action along. (And I agree with you on which writings make the jump and which don’t.) Still, those gun battles. You liked?

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Watercutter: The gun battles were my favorite part, especially in the scenes after the Gunslinger goes to New York and gets all the ammo he can handle. I will forever be awed by his ability to rapid-reload. There are names for those chamber-filling tricks he does, yes?

Fallon: Well, I call the first one he does, where he flicks the bullets into the chamber (the kid is named Jake Chambers, get it?) with his thumb The Lifesaver.

Watercutter: I’m no Stephen King, but I will co-sign that moniker. Sorry. Back to the movie. Overall, how did you feel about it as a reader/fan?

Fallon: I was afraid that the film would fail the superfans. I could see from IMDb that Susannah and Eddie weren’t there, and Oy didn’t seem to have a role. But I was completely delighted. Lots of gestures and references to the things we fans love—the filmmakers (so many filmmakers!) left some delicious breadcrumbs for us. Mystifying to people who haven’t read the series, but fun for fans looking for Easter eggs. Lots and lots of loops and references to other books in the King universe. The depiction of the Mid-World universe was pretty thin, but the depiction of the state of the universe as imagined by King himself was rich. Read Dr. Sleep if you want more background on the “shine” that Jake evinces. I mean, yes, The Shining too, but Dr. Sleep gives a horrifically chilling vision of what bad guys do with kids like that. And shades of From a Buick 8 , and The Mist , and Hearts in Atlantis , and (OK, now I’m kind of showing off), Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut . Just this notion that the world we live in is laced with low men and surrounded by sticky dino-creatures… What did you think of Tom Taylor as Jake Chambers?

Watercutter: I liked him a lot. I always have to tip my hat to kids who act in King adaptations because he often writes young people with the emotional maturity of adults. Kids who are aware. And, like the actors on Stranger Things , they always have to punch slightly above their weight. Honestly, though, I wish Taylor had more to do. In the beginning (a term that’s nebulous here, since I felt like this movie started in the second act), he really got to dig in and play a teenager burdened by knowing too much while also having everyone—including his family—think he’s troubled. After that, he kind of felt like an observer—at least until the final scenes.

Fallon: Oooh, ooh, I wanted to say, speaking of how the movie starts. You know, I walked into the theater wanting to see the Man in Black fleeing across the desert with the Gunslinger following, and the opening scene is so damn weird and not that. Oddly lit zombie kids wearing mind-control Fitbits being brain-zapped. My mind just went “Whelp, this is not The Dark Tower , but some other thing,” and then I could just go along for the ride. (Yes, I know this is a sequel to the books, but that’s not the way I would have expected the movie to start in any case.)

Watercutter: “Mind-control Fitbits” is perfect. And you’re right, that scene felt like a different movie compared to what came after. Once you were along for the ride, how did it make you feel? Did you connect with the characters the way you connected with them in the books?

Fallon: The thing I like best about Stephen King books is the relationships he sketches between people, and the relationship between Chambers and the non-Gunslinger adults in his life is nicely drawn and well-played, I thought. Completely absent from the books, but sets up some emotional drama well enough. And some of the best scenes in the books are when Roland comes into our world and interacts with the food and medicine and whatnot here. Those moments where Taylor gets to introduce him to what goes on here on Keystone Earth are very funny. But what Walter Padick (the Man in Black) is doing to the kids, honestly, it’s scary in this movie, but if you’ve read Dr. Sleep and if you have shine-y fresh kids of your own, it’s truly horrifying. So I really connected to Jake—maybe more than in the books.

Watercutter: Yeah, I found the moments of levity very necessary. (I can’t stop thinking about what I would say if I was on a bus in New York and Idris Elba told me I’d forgotten the face of my father.) And, speaking of Walter Padick (“His name is Walter ?” was another LOL-er), I feel like there were some things he said that were unintentionally funny.

Fallon: Ooh, like what?

Watercutter: Well, “Have a great apocalypse,” for one. (Though maybe he was playing that for laughs?) The other that got snickers in the screening I saw was “Looks like I got myself a stalker,” which Walter said when he saw all of Jake’s drawings of him and the Dark Tower. OK, maybe both of those were supposed to be funny, but I’m not sure—and I think it was those bits of tonal inconsistency that kept throwing me. Did you have that? Or were you maybe more prepared for the shifts?

Fallon: I’m going to regret this if Matthew McConaughey ever shows up at my house and wants me to make him a snack or something, but I didn’t like his laugh lines that much. There’s something sort of Die Hard -ish about “Have a great apocalypse,” that I didn’t think landed. (And I do think it was intended to be funny.) The scene where he’s in the kitchen cooking though, that was dark and great. The other thing that threw me was the way the portals were depicted. Too science fiction-y for this world. I wanted something a little more like the doors in Narnia in The Last Battle .

Watercutter: And see, I probably never would have picked up on that. I thought the portals were a little odd, but in a world where Matthew McConaughey goes to a stranger’s apartment and makes chicken, what’s the threshold for “odd”? Anyway, I think you’re right that the laugh lines didn’t always land. Moreover, though, I think a lot of this movie didn’t land. Watching it, I couldn’t get over the fact that it felt like a bunch of good ideas thrown in a salad spinner—a lot of cool things whirled around, but it ultimately wasn’t palatable.

Fallon: For me, it was a sort of Stephen King metanarrative pared down to its very basics, decorated with fancy bullet work. And it’s a metanarrative that does resonate: There are dark forces in the world, forces that you may intuit but not fully be able to recognize for what they are, that seek to harvest the spirit of the innocents. I mean, that’s melodramatic, of course. But if you tilt your head and look at the film out of the side of your eyes instead of staring straight at it, that’s what I see.

Angela Watercutter

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Every dark tower book ranked from worst to best.

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Stephen King is the master of literary horror and his  The Dark Tower   book series include some of his most popular stories to date, but how do they rank against each other? The series is composed of eight installments, each detailing the characters' adventures through parallel universes and various worlds as well as bizarre run-ins with the author himself. While they all feature fantastical tales of adventure, there are some books in the series that are certainly better than others.

The first installment in The Dark Tower  series released in 1982, following the success of King's earlier novels such as  Carrie , The Shining,  and  Cujo.  Its final story,  The Wind Through The Key Hole,  concluded the series in 2012. Much like his other novels, The Dark Tower  was adapted into a feature-length movie starring Idris Elba as the gunslinger, Roland Deschain, and Matthew McConaughey as Walter Padick. Despite the series' incredibly captivating storyline, the movie received poor reviews. At its core,  The Dark Tower  serves as a means of connecting the Stephen King multiverse and all of its fictional characters, towns, and monsters. It is intertwined with  Insomnia, 'Salem's Lot , IT,  and several other novels.

Related:  Why The Stand Series Could Be The Best Stephen King TV Adaptation So Far

With over 200 short stories and 61 full-length novels, with number 62 set to release in 2021,  The Dark Tower  series takes up a decent portion of the author's bibliography. It is also the only true series that he has in his repertoire. King created a complex storyline that connects his entire book universe , and while this was welcomed, some of the installments suffered as a result on making by this facet a focal point. Without further ado, here's each novel in  The Dark Tower  series ranked from worst to best.

8. The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger

While  The Gunslinger  was the first installment in the series, it's also the worst. The Gunslinger  introduces all of the major characters that will appear throughout its entirety, but lingers too long on the fact that it's an introduction. This is not entirely necessary and, as a result, offers a somewhat boring story about Roland Deschain and the Men in Black. If it had been a fluid introduction with far more adventure and moments of the fantastical, it is likely that it would be much better when compared to other installments.

7. The Dark Tower VI: Song Of Susannah

Most of  The Dark Tower  novels are lengthy, but  Song Of Susannah  is relatively short in comparison. While this is not necessarily a contributing factor to its ranking, it does impact how the story developed or, rather, attempted to develop. As it shifts from character to character, there is very little fluidity, which leads to a rather confusing storyline.  Song Of Susannah  could've been better had it not been written as if it were intended to bridge the fifth and seventh novels in the series.

6. The Wind Through The Keyhole

The Wind Through The Keyhole  is the eighth book in the series, but its events fall between the fourth and the fifth chronologically. It's unlike the other installments, as it is more similar to an anthology with a framing story about Roland and Ka-tet waiting out a storm. The gunslinger goes on to tell several tales of adventure and wonder to his travel companion. The short stories are impeccable, but it suffers from being an unnecessary addition to  The Dark Tower  series.

Related:  Stephen King: Every Movie Monster IT Turns Into In The Book

5. The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower

The final novel in  The Dark Tower  series chronology offers an underwhelming conclusion to an otherwise incredible story. It falls in the middle of this ranking due to how divisive it is. While some fans and critics found that it concluded the series eloquently, others consider its ending a bit unnecessary and disappointing. The end of  The Dark Tower  series features its characters having to save the life of their creator, Stephen King, who appears as himself throughout its entirety. While King is known for including characters who represent him in his stories ,  The Dark Tower  has him as an actual character, which is a bit bizarre, especially considering his importance to the ending.

4. The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands

The Waste Lands  is one of the more bizarre books in The Dark Tower  series. It features several influences from other literary works and introduces the portals of the Dark Tower. It is an enthralling addition with fantastical elements, firm development of what the actual Dark Tower represents, and even a cyborg bear. There is very little wrong with the third novel, but it is still not the best one in the bunch.

3. The Dark Tower IV: Wizard And Glass

Every major book series' main character needs an origin story, and Roland finally gets his in the fourth installment.  Wizard And Glass  takes place in Topeka, Kansas, and features several elements familiar to the iconic story,  Wizard Of Oz .  The lore of  The Dark Tower was relatively mundane up until this book, where it fully embraces an entire mythos that assists in the future installment's character, location, and story building. It is one of the more exciting stories out of all eight books, which immediately sets it among the top three entries.

Related:  What Stephen King Thinks Of Every Adaptation (Movies & TV Shows)

2. The Dark Tower V: Wolves Of The Calla

As  The Dark Tower  reached its mid-point, the stories and adventures became the most bizarre.  Wolves Of The Calla  features wolves that are actually robots, and includes references to major movie franchises such as  Star Wars   and  Harry Potter.  It is also the book with the most memorable appearance of Stephen King.  Wolves Of The Calla  ranks as the second best novel in the series because of how the author chose to embrace the bizarre and utterly strange. The earlier installments have an air of King holding back, whereas the fifth novel showcases his creativity entirely unleashed to great effect.

1. The Dark Tower II: The Drawing Of The Three

Every way that the first book failed, the second installment took the time to remedy.  The Drawing Of The Three  proved that  The Dark Tower  series was worth reading through, as some readers abandoned it entirely after  The Gunslinger.  While the first installment focused on introducing Roland, the second takes the time to expand on his personality, goals, and drive. It gives the gunslinger a purpose by mixing in an exciting adventure through numerous doors that transport him across time and space.

Introductory novels traditionally provide readers with what they can expect from future installments, but  The Dark Tower's  failed to do so. Instead,  The Drawing Of The Three  gave the core elements of the series the introduction they deserved and needed in order to make the book series what it is today. Not only does it connect every Stephen King novel ,  The Dark Tower  series also showcases how not all first installments are the best and, sometimes, a sequel can do better than the original.

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THE DARK TOWER The Dark Tower VII. By Stephen King. Illustrated by Michael Whelan. 845 pp. Donald M. Grant in association with Scribner. $35.

IN 1970, when he was 22, Stephen King wrote a sentence he liked: "The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed." It's an innocent sentence -- pulpy and suggestive -- but it grew to become a monster. As the first line in the "Dark Tower" series, it begins a story King intended to be the longest popular novel in history. With the publication of "The Dark Tower VII," the series has topped the 4,000-page mark and, mercifully, reached its conclusion. If that fact alone does not send a shiver up your spine, you're probably not a King fan. He was almost killed in a 1999 roadside accident, and, as he has written, the reaction of a Michigan reader was typical: "I was with this good friend of mine when we heard you got popped. Man, we just started shaking our heads and saying, 'There goes the Tower, it's tilting, it's falling, ahhh . . . he'll never finish it now.' "

So now, with the "Dark Tower" books stacked before us, the question can be answered: would anyone read these things if they weren't by Stephen King? It's not an idle question. King has built the series into a monument to his ambition. He has folded in characters from his non-"Dark Tower" novels, turning this into an über-narrative that, he suggests, is the keystone to his other work. To emphasize this point, the back of each volume shows a picture of King as a young man (perched over a typewriter, naturally) juxtaposed with one of him now. The message: faithful fans must make the journey to the tower if they wish to comprehend the master.

Should you decide to do this, be prepared: it won't exactly be the year of reading Proust. The "Dark Tower" series is not the longest popular novel ever written, but it's easily the one with the highest body count. In the opening chapters of "The Gunslinger: The Dark Tower I," our hero, Roland Deschain, blows away an entire town. According to King, he was inspired to start writing this story after watching "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly," and he had the further notion to combine a western with a fantasy like J. R. R. Tolkien's. This is the sort of awkward idea most writers would not admit to having even considered. King plunged ahead, with the combustible mixture of confidence and naïveté that seems to propel his writing still. He filled the stories of "The Dark Tower I" with foreshadowing, laying the groundwork for a place called Mid-World.

The central figure throughout is Roland, who is essentially Clint Eastwood's spaghetti western antihero, except he's not afraid of the occasional hug. During the first four books, he acquires a "ka-tet" composed of three New Yorkers from different historical eras. There's Eddie, an ex-heroin addict from Brooklyn, who is meant to be the comic relief of the series, spouting a corny saying ("Roll me in sugar and call me a . . . jelly doughnut!") every three pages or so. Eddie is married to Susannah, an African-American woman who has two personalities and no legs. One of her personalities (the rude one) speaks in guttural ebonics that would be cruel to quote. Their adopted son is Jake, a boy with a gift for reading minds. He has a pet badger-like creature named Oy, who tends to save the day when you most expect it. Finally, Roland has trained all of these people to fire guns.

At this point, readers of the series will be howling at the simplification of their heroes, but the whole project eludes description -- it's a double-black-diamond ski run for fantasy nerds. There are the multiple worlds, the multiple names and characters who die and come back to life in different times and places. Even King can be overwhelmed. Here is his attempt to summarize events at the beginning of "The Dark Tower IV": "Roland rescues Jake, leaving the Tick-Tock man for dead . . . but Andrew Quick is not dead. Half blind, hideously wounded about the face, he is rescued by a man who calls himself Richard Fannin. Fannin, however, also identifies himself as the Ageless Stranger, a demon of whom Roland has been warned by Walter." It's easy to understand why these books have generally been among King's most neglected. At times, the series feels like a dumping ground for his wackier notions (a talking monorail that likes riddles) and for the further explication of ideas from his previous books (the superflu from "The Stand").

That's not to say there is nothing to enjoy about "The Dark Tower." For starters, there is the sheer absurdity of its existence. You're left astonished at the devotion of the readers who will follow King down his labyrinthine pathways of plot, through the thickets of ALL CAPS paragraphs, only to emerge from a story within a flashback. As a writer, King is willing to describe anything, no matter how hackneyed or strange the scenario. (The high point might be when Susannah, already plagued by two personalities, is invaded by a third personality, who somehow becomes pregnant.) More fascinating, perhaps, is King's inexhaustible supply of similes and metaphors, which he seems to write without a backward glance. Every so often, they are unpleasantly memorable, like this description of a beach: "It was the color of an undergarment which has gone a long time without washing."

With a little more preparation, "The Dark Tower" might have turned out better. The young King had the right idea: Tolkien's "Fellowship of the Ring" is the ideal of fantasy. Tolkien created a beautifully constructed interlocking world, and the purity of his design led to unusual developments: sophomores speaking to one another in Elvish, grown men naming their sons Gandalf, an entire country (New Zealand) rebranded as Middle Earth. The books have an internal logic: when you follow Frodo's adventures, you can be fairly certain he is not going to blow off someone's head with a magic wand. The world of "The Dark Tower" is insane and lawless. Roland and his friends find doors on the beach that transport them into our world; they grow new legs; they learn how to throw decapitating dinner plates; they also, alas, meet Stephen King.

The revelation of the penultimate book in this series, "Song of Susannah: Dark Tower VI," was that King had put himself into the book as a character. Roland shows up in Maine in 1977 and hypnotizes a young horror writer, telling him he must finish the "Dark Tower" story because the fate of the world depends upon it. By introducing an element of metafiction, King placed himself at the center of the series and instantly became its most believable element. He closed out the book with excerpts from a lightly fictionalized diary and a newspaper story about his death. At this point, you may feel as though you had wandered far from the Dark Tower and arrived on the outskirts of Derrida.

As for Roland and his ka-tet, they continue their reality-bending trip in this new book, but it's harder to care about them. You can see the puppet strings, and the suspense sinks to the level of a B horror film: which character is going to get killed first? The fictional King also returns, and we learn how this series was the one story he had no control over, the one he could write only when the voices in his head were speaking to him. In the end, King doesn't have the writerly finesse for these sorts of games, and the voices let him down. The ultimate battle borrows a device from the Harry Potter books, and at the foot of the Dark Tower the voices throw up their hands: "Some moments are beyond imagination." That's the sound of a writer shouting "mercy." King has talked about retiring after the publication of this book. But that seems unlikely: he's unburdened himself of his sprawling fantasy, and he's free to write something new. If we've learned anything about King by the close of this series, it's that he's terrified of endings.

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From 'Gunslinger' to 'Wizard and Glass': Stephen King's 'Dark Tower' Books, Ranked

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

In an alternate universe, perhaps one just next door to ours, Amazon gave the green light to former Walking Dead showrunner Glen Mazzara ’s adaptation of Stephen King ’s magnum opus, The Dark Tower . In our (perhaps lesser) reality, Amazon passed on the project, possibly because with its Wheel of Time series and the upcoming Lord of the Rings show, a third big-budget sci-fi/fantasy series is just not feasible.

Loosely based on the Robert Browning poem “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”, King’s epic series consists of seven main novels and two other longer narratives which are tangential to the main story. Very briefly, Roland Deschain’s world is one of magic, chivalry, demons, and lots of guns and doors. Roland is the last of the gunslingers, heirs of Arthur Eld, the figure we’d know as King Arthur of Camelot. We meet Roland as he crosses an impossibly huge desert, trailing the Man in Black. All we know is that he seeks The Dark Tower, which readers come to learn is sort of a linchpin of reality itself. Something is wrong at the Tower, and its effects ripple through time, space, and the multiple realities Roland finds himself traveling through.

He is eventually joined by others on his quest: a boy named Jake Chambers from our world of 1977, Eddie Dean, a tough and streetwise but deeply insecure heroin addict from 1986, and Odetta Holmes, a wealthy African-American heiress and activist from 1964. Odetta contains a much nastier personality named Detta Walker, and after Roland forces the two aspects of the same woman to face each other, they become a third woman: Susannah Dean, Eddie’s spiritual wife.

Anyone new to King’s Dark Tower universe should, of course, read them all in order. However, here we look at how well they work as individual volumes, relative to their place in the overarching narrative.

Here are Stephen King’s Dark Tower books, ranked.

RELATED: ‘Doctor Sleep’ Filmmaker Mike Flanagan Wants to Adapt ‘The Dark Tower’

9. Song of Susannah (Book 6)

Song of Susannah picks up seconds after the end of Book 5, Wolves of the Calla . Roland and his ka-tet have successfully defended the town of Calla Bryn Sturgis against cloaked, hooded, child-snatching creatures they call the Wolves. A nearby cave holds strong magic, and with the help of a black orb known as Black Thirteen (one of many multi-colored magic balls crafted millennia before by the great wizard Maerlyn), Roland and his band can get themselves closer to the Dark Tower. When Susannah, possessed by an entity called Mia, takes the black ball and goes through by herself, their plans are suddenly upended.

None of the Dark Tower novels are “bad,” but Song of Susannah is so different from the other books that it sticks out like a sore thumb. This seems to have been King’s intention, but it comes at a crucial point in the overall narrative when adjusting the style halts the story’s momentum. King structures the book in “stanzas” which culminate in the most “meta” plot twist in the series when the author himself shows up as a character. Roland and Eddie encounter the 1977 version of Stephen King, a functioning alcoholic and family man with a newly-established career as a novelist. It’s a pivotal scene, expanding the metafictional nature of the series. It’s also very confusing, adding a tangled origin story to the entire mythology far too late to truly resonate. Song of Susannah is important for its focus on the story’s major female character, but upending the structure so late in the game is a narrative miscalculation. The story nearly stops cold right before the long-awaited final entry, which is why Book 6 remains on the bottom of this list.

8. The Wind Through the Keyhole (Book 4.5)

Set after the flashback events recounted in Wizard and Glass , and before we catch up to the gunslinger in the first book of the series, The Wind Through the Keyhole recounts how Roland’s father, Stephen Deschain, sends him and his friend, Jamie de Curry, to deal with a shapeshifter, who has been terrorizing some outer territories. There’s a story within a story, which follows a young boy named Tim, who lives with his mother on the edge of a great and dangerous forest. What follows is a fantasy fable peppered with characters like The Covenant Man (a parallel to the perennial king villain, Randall Flagg, or The Man in Black) and an intelligent white “tyger” revealed to be the legendary wizard Maerlyn, whom Tim eventually frees. The Wind Through the Keyhole is an enjoyable tangent, but not essential reading relative to the Dark Tower series as a whole. King might have benefited from either splitting this into two or three short stories or novellas. The Wind Through the Keyhole ultimately feels unnecessary, even though it reveals a piece of backstory about Roland’s mother. King could have found a way to get this into the main novels, and make it relevant in a way this book is not.

7. The Dark Tower (Book 7)

Split up throughout the duration of Book 6, Roland and his ka-tet reunite and discover the source of the decay in Roland’s world. Powerful psychics called Breakers have been working (semi-unconsciously) to erode the Beams, energy tethers which intersect at the Dark Tower and are responsible for holding all of reality together. Roland’s evil misbegotten son Mordred (it’s a long story) is after them as they try to stop the Breakers. We learn that the major villain has always been a creature known as the Crimson King. While he has breached the Dark Tower, he is now shut out on some kind of balcony. His magic and influence still makes him a powerful enemy even from afar.

For many fans, The Dark Tower ’s concluding volume feels somehow rushed, even at 845 pages. King began The Dark Tower in the late ‘70s as something close to a psychedelic, fantasy Western. It became much more over the decades, refracting and reflecting many of his most famous stories through a near-infinite prism of alternate realities. Diehard fans will find something close to fan service, with characters from several other King stories and novels in the final Dark Tower book. While Eddie, Susannah, and Jake are given satisfying endings, a surprising amount of story happens “off-screen,” recounted in a lot of clunky exposition. These side stories often come across as far more interesting than the main narrative, and they raise a lot of questions. A character we met briefly in Song of Susannah becomes a major player over several decades, but we only get to hear about it second-hand. King’s constant readers can hardly blame him for wanting to see his story through to the end as quickly as possible, but Book 7 really could have been split into at least two volumes.

6. Wolves of the Calla (Book 5)

The Dark Tower takes place in a world which has always seemed like a surreal, funhouse-mirror image of ours. King doubles down on the meta aspect of The Dark Tower in Wolves of the Calla . Roland and his ka-tet enter a classic Western plot as a town needs help defending themselves from what they describe as child-snatching werewolves in cloaks and hoods. The truth is much more complicated. The travelers encounter Father Callahan, the priest who failed to defeat the vampire Barlow in King’s second published novel, ‘Salem’s Lot , and his long, winding tale drops him into the Dark Tower saga as far back as the first book. While the Constant Reader has been aware that the Dark Tower series takes place somewhere within King’s other stories, Wolves of the Calla gives its characters their first inkling of the larger structure of their story. The book provides a much more detailed look at the ordinary citizens in the far flung lands of Roland’s “Mid-World.” We see how the grand, epic tale affects the people who are just living out their lives, unaware (and largely uninterested) that they are part of something bigger. Still, King opens the book with dense descriptions of this new corner of his universe, rendering it inaccessible in a way his previous novels were not.

5. The Waste Lands (Book 3)

Throughout the first two Dark Tower books, we don’t see much of Roland’s world beyond a desert and a dying town at its edge. The “present” state of Mid-World is a mystery until The Waste Lands . Drawing heavily on themes and imagery from T.S. Eliot ’s epic 1922 poem, The Wasteland , the third book in the Dark Tower saga builds on what we learn about the gunslinger from the first two books while adding much more nuance to his personality. Eddie and Susannah both face their tests as gunslingers, and acquit themselves honorably. The Waste Lands takes the Dark Tower narrative into more expansive territory than the first two novels. It contains a series of exciting sequences which would be at home in a big-screen blockbuster: the ka-tet pulls Jake from the maw of a monster borne from a crumbling house, they battle a bear the size of Godzilla, and must survive a mad dash through a bizarre city called Lud, which feels like a post-apocalyptic New York. The Waste Lands finds King’s imagination firing on all cylinders, conjuring a vibrant and detailed universe which rivals some of his best work.

4. The Little Sisters of Eluria (Book 0.5)

This excellent prequel novella takes place some years before the first book, when a younger (and slightly more optimistic) Roland finds himself in a seemingly abandoned town called Eluria. He finds a medallion on a dead body and is then attacked by slow mutants, creatures who are remnants of the unnamed catastrophe which King has referenced vaguely in other Dark Tower books. Roland wakes up in a hospital tended by the Sisters of Eluria, whom the gunslinger slowly realizes are actually vampires. One of the Sisters, a young woman named Jenna, tends to his wounds, and the two of them slowly fall in love. Sister Jenna is one of the two great loves of Roland’s life, adding a new dimension to the gunslinger’s past. While The Little Sisters of Eluria does not factor into the main Dark Tower narrative, King gives us a valuable look at both the narrative universe and Roland right before things begin to truly fall apart. We’ve seen glimpses of Roland’s origin story, such as his early test of manhood in The Gunslinger , but this is a mature Roland who is still vulnerable and even hopeful.

3. The Drawing of the Three (Book 2)

The end of The Gunslinger leaves Roland on a beach overlooking the great Western Sea. The Drawing of the Three picks up minutes later. Roland is attacked by giant lobster creatures and ends up with wet shells, a wet gun, two missing fingers on his right hand, and a serious fever. He picks a direction and walks up the beach, eventually encountering three free-standing doors. They bear inscriptions: “The Prisoner” (Eddie Dean), “The Lady of Shadows” (Odetta/Detta/Susannah), and “Death.” Each door leads straight into the minds of the people Roland must draw from their world into his own, whether they want to or not.

The Drawing of the Three is a remarkable novel, unlike any other by King in that same era. The metaphysical territories the author explores rank with the best of the genre, as King uses Roland, Eddie, and Odetta/Detta/Susannah’s innerscapes to explore aspects of each version of the world he visits through the doors. King shows us the New York of three different time periods through Roland’s eyes. This skewered perspective allows King to provide commentary on our society that is missing from the other books.

2. Wizard and Glass (Book 4)

The cliffhanger at the end of Book 3 resolves with Eddie Dean ingeniously out-riddling Blaine the mono. They then find themselves inside a version of King’s epic novel, The Stand . After flirting with the metafictional aspects of the story, King finally makes it explicit: The Dark Tower is part of a grander narrative universe. They have jumped dimensions, which compels Roland to tell a long story about his past. Roland falls in love for the first time, and this leads to the real beginning of his quest for the Dark Tower. Wizard and Glass is heartbreaking, with some of Stephen King’s finest prose.

As King states in Book 4’s introduction, Wizard & Glass is the work of a man who understands the mature love of a long marriage and middle age. He had to rediscover the intense teenage emotions that fuel Roland’s affair with Susan Delgado. This is King’s Romeo & Juliet , a tragic tale of two lovers whom fate will forever separate. This is also the origin of Roland’s obsession with the Tower, a metaphor for addiction. Roland will end up sacrificing nearly everything for his quest, and while Susan does not die by his hand, King strongly implies that Roland could have sacrificed her, as well. All these elements come together seamlessly in Wizard & Glass , making it one of King’s finest novels to date.

1. The Gunslinger (Book 1)

“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed . ” King has never bettered the opening to 1982’s The Gunslinger , which introduces us to Roland of Gilead, son of Stephen, the last gunslinger in a world that has “moved on.” The surreal Western was nothing like King’s previous books. The later installments would be more experimental or more sophisticated, but the first one set its own unique tone. The Gunslinger presents a stripped-down, deceptively simple premise, and King follows this down the rabbit hole. There are some bravura set pieces in this book: Roland’s chilling massacre of the town called Tull, the still-compelling flashbacks to his early test for his guns, he and Jake’s terrifying trip under the mountains on a handcart while surrounded by slow mutants. The cold and pitiless killer in this book gains back more of his humanity as the series goes on. Here, the challenge for the reader is to sympathize with such an enigmatic, ruthless character as Roland of Gilead. King has revised parts of The Gunslinger to make the series’ continuity more cohesive, but this has not diminished any of its power.

Nick Wisseman

Author and barn hand.

Latest Release: Colors and Ghosts

Drafting: Excavating Armageddon

• Mar 14, 2018

Book Review: The Dark Tower, by Stephen King

And so at last we come to The Dark Tower , the final book in Stephen King’s series of the same name (the long tale he’s said is his Lord of the Rings ).

The first act is fast-paced—more so than anything else in this saga of Roland the gunslinger and his “ka-tet” of misfit warriors. After the birth of Mordred, his horrifying son by a demon mother, Roland and his companions are reunited and set about trying to save the remaining Beams that support the multiverse. Doing so involves defeating the Breakers (psychics who are destroying the Beams) and preventing King (yes, the author himself) from being killed in an automobile accident. The cost is high: several characters die, both major and minor. But Roland and the survivors succeed.

Then the pace falters. The second act becomes a drawn-out trek to the Dark Tower, the lynchpin of the multiverse and Roland’s ultimate goal. He eventually reaches it, but not before King takes us on some unnecessary tangents, including an extended session on how to make hide clothing. “I’m not ready to be there yet,” Roland says at one point about the Dark Tower (perhaps speaking for King; I got the sense he didn’t want to end the story before he absolutely had to). “Not quite ready … I need a little more time to prepare my mind and my heart. Mayhap even my soul.”

Things pick up in the last act, which features Roland defeating Mordred and the Crimson King—as close as the series has to a big baddie—and finally entering the Dark Tower. I won’t spoil what he finds inside, but I think it serves as a fitting ending, even if it wasn’t as satisfying as I’d hoped.

So what do we make of all this?

My biggest takeaway was that, as much I appreciate how creative King is, I wish he’d followed a more traditional story structure. For Book 7, he could have clustered the big events—saving the universe and reaching the Dark Tower—for greater emotional impact. For the series as a whole, King could have given Roland a clearer goal and a more-involved antagonist. Getting to the Dark Tower isn’t that compelling; we never know what he’s supposed to do there. And the fight with the Crimson King isn’t as meaningful as it could be, because this is the first time we’re seeing the mad ruler. (Roland also defeats him with a cheap trick. I wish he’d used something he’d learned along the way, rather than resorting to an option King only introduced in the final hundred pages or so.)

I’m also still mixed about King injecting himself into the story. He does this in several ways: by creating a multiverse within his own works, by making himself a character in this one, and by commenting on the narrative as it goes along.

I’ve already talked a lot about the multiverse concept in my reviews of earlier entries in the series. In his afterword, King clarifies that, “My idea was to use the Dark Tower stories as a kind of summation, a way of unifying as many of my previous stories as possible beneath the arch of some über-tale. I never meant that to be pretentious (and I hope it isn’t), but only as a way of showing how life influences art (and vice versa).” It’s a neat idea. But for it to really sing, I would have liked the events in non- Dark Tower books to have more impact on Roland’s larger story (beyond running back favorite characters).

In my Book 6 review , I also pondered the perils of writing yourself into your story. On balance, I think it worked here, and it was fun when the characters ragged on their creator. (Roland and co. call King various forms of “lazy” and “cowardly,” and at one point an old villain dismisses him as a “shoddy quick-sketch artist.”) But having a Stephen King character in a Stephen King book makes certain scenes a bit absurd.

I haven’t said much about how King frequently breaks out his author voice, though. He mostly does this to foreshadow coming events. For example, before a major character dies, King writes, “He slipped the .40 into his docker’s clutch almost without thinking, moving us a step closer to what you will not want to hear and I will not want to tell.” Most authors couldn’t get away with this, but King knows how to set your expectations in a way that builds tension rather than sapping it. (The asides also reinforce the conceit that King-the-character met his protagonists; if the fictional King sees them as real people he created, it would certainly pain him to kill them.)

Final verdict: for all the criticisms I made above, I’m still glad I read the Dark Tower books. They’re inventive, surprising, and original, and I won’t forget them.

But The Lord of the Rings remains my standard for epic tales.

For more reviews like this one, sign up for Nick’s monthly newsletter .

Millions of visitors. Thousands of exhibits. One fiendish killer.

Neva’s goals at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago are simple. Enjoy the spectacle—perhaps the greatest the United States has ever put on. (The world’s fair to end all world’s fairs!) Perform in the exposition’s Algerian Theatre to the best of her abilities. And don’t be found out as a witch.

Easy enough … until the morning she looks up in the Theatre and sees strangely marked insects swarming a severed hand in the rafters.

"... a wild ride sure to please lovers of supernatural historical mysteries." – Publishers Weekly

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Book Review

The gunslinger — “dark tower” series.

• Stephen King
• Paranormal , Supernatural Realism , Western

Readability Age Range

• Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Inc.

Year Published

The Gunslinger by Stephen King has been reviewed by Focus on the Family’s marriage and parenting magazine . It is the first book in the “Dark Tower” series.

Plot Summary

Roland Deschain, also known as the Gunslinger, lives in an Old West setting. He exists in an alternate timeframe, or perhaps a parallel universe, in a novel where time does not operate the usual way. Roland has spent many years chasing the man in black across the desert but has failed to catch him. Roland is searching for a tower where he hopes to find answers about the meaning of life and death.

He stops at the home of a farmer named Brown who has a talking bird, Zoltan. In a flashback, he tells Brown about his recent experiences in a town called Tull. During his time in Tull, Roland and a bartender named Allie became lovers. One of Allie’s other lovers tried to kill Roland. Allie told Roland the man in black had come through Tull and raised a man named Nort from the dead.

The town preacher, a large, boisterous woman named Sylvia, admitted to having had an affair with the man in black. She said she was carrying his baby. Roland put a gun between her legs and presumably aborted the child. Sylvia cried out that that he’d killed the child of the Crimson King. Sylvia turned the town against Roland. He had to shoot everyone, including Allie, in order to escape.

While Roland is with Brown, his mule dies. He continues his journey on foot. At a way station, he finds a boy named Jake Chambers who apparently died in his own time or universe. Jake doesn’t remember much, so Roland hypnotizes him to find out what he can about the boy.

Jake was the son of a TV executive who was brutally killed when a car rolled over him. They encounter a demon that warns Roland that the man in black controls his soul now that he’s with Jake.

Roland and Jake travel together, and Roland realizes that his growing love and concern for the boy have made him vulnerable. Roland flashes back to his childhood, when he studied under a hard man named Cort. Roland and his friend Cuthbert overheard a kitchen worker plotting against the kingdom and reported him. The man was hanged.

Roland’s father died, and a man named Martin was sleeping with his mother. When Roland discovered this, he was angry and wanted revenge. Before he could avenge his father, he had to fight Cort so his manhood would be official. He was only 14, but he used his trained bird to attack and defeat Cort.

Roland has a strange, drug-fueled sexual encounter with an oracle spirit in order to get information about the man in black. He learns that three is the number of his fate. He is told he will encounter the man in black soon, but Jake will not survive if Roland continues on his quest for the Dark Tower. Roland and Jake travel on, twisting through mountain tunnels for many days on train tracks using a handcar. They encounter creatures called Slow Mutants, which they must fight in order to pass through.

When the man in black appears, Jake falls and dangles from the tracks above a deep pit. Roland must choose whether to save the boy or pursue the man in black. Jake knows Roland will choose his quest over him. Jake lets go and falls.

Roland speaks with the man in black, who reads the Gunslinger’s fortune with something like Tarot cards. The man reveals that he was the one who destroyed Roland’s family and was sleeping with Roland’s mother. He imparts many cryptic pieces of information, like telling Roland he (the man in black) is only a minion of the powerful, omnipotent red king who controls the Dark Tower.

He shows Roland a vision of the vastness of the universe, trying to convince him to give up his quest. The Gunslinger refuses. The man in black finally causes Roland to sleep. Roland wakes up 10 years later with a skeleton next to him, presumably that of the man in black. He keeps the skeleton’s jawbone, speaks aloud of his love for Jake and ponders his next move toward finding the Dark Tower.

Christian Beliefs

A number of biblical references appear in the text. The narrator sometimes likens a situation to a story in the Bible. For example, he talks about the zombie-like creatures in a cave looking for Jesus to heal them and raise them from the darkness, like Lazarus. He refers to Roland’s meeting place with the man in black as Golgotha, the place of the skull. The man in black says Roland must meet and slay an Ageless Stranger whose name is Legion.

The Gunslinger attends the church in Tull. They sing hymns. The preacher, Sylvia, mentions a number of Bible stories before warning of an Interloper who came to Eve in the form of a serpent. Congregants cry out to the Lord in response to her message.

Other Belief Systems

Roland says he is not a holy man, like a Manni or the Man Jesus. He sometimes looks for ka, which is an Egyptian word for a spiritual entity living within an individual. He has encountered people who believe that devils live in fire.

Roland has the power to hypnotize people and control what they remember. He talks about God as well as gods in the plural form. Brown says he once tried to teach his bird the Lord’s Prayer, but that this wasn’t really Lord’s Prayer country. When Roland asks Brown if he believes in the afterlife, Brown says he thinks this is it.

The man in black brings a man named Nort back from the dead. Nort believes God has touched him and that he won’t ever die again. A man in Tull named Kennerly says his daughter has a devil. He rambles on about the end times when there are plagues and children don’t obey their parents. The man in black tells the Gunslinger’s future using Tarot-like cards. He tells Roland to allow this pointless ritual to calm him, like church might.

The man in black stands with Roland in a void universe. The man in black calls light, water, plants, dinosaurs and other creatures into being. He continues to command that there be light, until the light is so strong that it overwhelms the Gunslinger. The man in black later ponders the nature of God, if one exists, and wonders if there could be a stairway leading to a tower in which He exists. If so, he says, would one dare climb it? The Gunslinger suggests maybe God himself has climbed these stairs to a room above reality.

Authority Roles

The Gunslinger serves as an authority role for Jake. He protects him for a time but still allows him to die so he can continue his search for the tower. Jake recalls his parents. He says his mother sometimes goes to bed with sick friends, and his father, a network executive, sometimes uses drugs.

Profanity & Violence

The Lord’s name is used in vain. H— , d–n , s— , a– , b–ch , whore , balls , cojones , p— , b–tard , c–t , and the f-word are used.

Jake remembers a car running over him, mushing his guts and squashing his genitals. Blood spurts from every opening in his body. In a bloody scene, Roland’s bird violently tears Cort’s face apart. Blood and brains fly as the Gunslinger kills a group of townspeople. Roland violently forces his gun between Sylvia’s legs to remove the man in black’s child from her body.

Sexual Content

Kennerly fondles his own daughter’s breast. The same girl walks by Roland and pinches her nipple to get his attention. Roland initially sleeps with Allie to get information. He ends up staying with her for a while and continuing their sexual relationship. Many in her bar sing ragtime Methodist hymns while drunk and sexually aroused. Kennerly makes a lewd sexual gesture when he realizes Roland is sleeping with Allie. Although Sylvia is over 300 pounds, many men lust after her.

When Roland first sees her, his lust makes him shaky. He goes to her house to get information about the man in black. He learns she slept with the man in black and that the man told her he was an angel of God. She says the man in black told her Roland was the Antichrist and that he would want to sleep with her. Roland asks her if she ever met a man who didn’t want to sleep with her. She reveals that she is pregnant with the man in black’s child. Roland pries her legs apart and puts the barrel of his gun between them. The vague description that follows indicates he aborts the child.

In various moments of pleasure and pain throughout the story, the author describes how Roland’s genitals feel or react. Roland confronts an oracle for information on how to find the man in black. They have a strange sexual encounter in which Roland allows the oracle to take him sexually once he’s received the direction he needs. One scene suggests Roland is going to the roof to masturbate. The preacher in Tull warns against sexual sin, including masturbation. Roland vows to forget Jake by sleeping with many women and killing people.

Discussion Topics

Additional comments.

Drugs/Alcohol: Many characters smoke marijuana to get high. People at the bar where Alice works are often drunk or high. Roland takes a pill before he faces a demon, and Jake likens it to LSD. The oracle warns Roland of a demon named Heroin.

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“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.” With that great opening line, an obsession began for millions of readers of Stephen King ’s series of books that would eventually be known as The Dark Tower . The first book was actually called The Gunslinger , and it was a relatively small volume of brilliant sci-fi/fantasy that used iconic imagery to begin the crafting of a world that would become as rich as those created by George R. R. Martin or J.R.R Tolkien. Over the next few books— The Drawing of the Three , The Wastelands , and Wizard and Glass —King did some of his best writing (the series would actually stretch to seven books and a series of comics, but it’s the initial quartet that holds a special place in my heart). I only mention all of this to place the failure of the long-delayed “The Dark Tower” in the right perspective: this isn’t just a mediocre movie—although it is most definitely that—it is a wasted opportunity to fulfill the promise of that opening line from 35 years ago.

Plagued by reshoots and dogged by rumors of poor test screenings, “The Dark Tower” once looked like it would be one of the more notable failures of 2017. Honestly, I kind of wish it was. As is, it’s more forgettable than loathsome, the kind of movie that occasionally rubs salt in your wounds by reminding you what could have been, but mostly just dissipates from memory as it's playing. The two leads here— Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey —work just fine in these iconic roles, and you just want to pick them up and put them in a better movie, one that doesn’t seem stuck in the valley between trying to satisfy hardcore fans of the series and the moviegoers who have never heard of Roland and Walter. By trying to do both, the movie ends up doing neither.

The problems start immediately. Someone probably thought that making Roland, the title character of the first book, the lead of the first film wouldn’t satisfy a wide enough demographic. And Hollywood is obsessed with stories of teenagers who discover their bad dreams or hidden secrets are actually the keys to the salvation of the universe. So, instead of the origin story of Roland (which will apparently now be told in a television series, also starring Elba), our protagonist here is really Jake Chambers ( Tom Taylor ), an essential character in the books reimagined here as a troubled New York teen without much of a real personality. As with almost everyone in this film, he’s a device, a way to push the exposition forward to meet a contractually-mandated running time.

Here’s what we learn about the movie version of Jake, who is basically like the kid reading "The Neverending Story" in that he constantly tries to explain to the audience what's going on. Jake has prophetic visions of both the Gunslinger Roland (Elba) and the Man in Black Walter ( McConaughey ). He also has visions of a massive tower, which we learn is basically keeping the order of the universe. Walter wants to destroy this tower, and he knows that there’s a child out there with the power to help him do so. Of course, that child is Jake, who it turns out has the same power as the young man at the center of “ The Shining .” He can read minds and other such things that Walter will harness to blow up the tower. “The Dark Tower” is filled with references for King nuts, including, among others, a moment where Roland glances behind a pin-up poster while looking for an exit (“ The Shawshank Redemption ”) and the numbers “1408” above a portal. Did I mention the portals? I got distracted. It’s easy to do so with this movie.

Roland, Walter, and eventually Jake cross between worlds through portals. It’s not long before Jake and Roland team up, but Jake questions whether or not his new gun-toting pal is going to help him save the tower or if he just wants vengeance against the man in black. A few other characters flit around the fringe of this thin piece of storytelling, but it’s essentially a three-character piece.

And two of those characters are actually pretty well defined. Elba brings a nice gravity to Roland that fits the character well, a combination of a man haunted by the ghosts of his past and driven to do what’s right to avenge them. And McConaughey dances on the edge of hamming it up in the villain role, reining it in just enough that one can see how well he could have been utilized with a better script and vision for the project.

Because that’s where this tower crumbles. “The Dark Tower” is hollow. It is soulless. It is a film that never quite figured out what it wanted to be, and so elected to be nothing much at all. Worst of all, it’s clearly been chopped up by those reported reshoots and test screening edits. There’s a scene with a demon in a house that just ends and much of the final act material features a Jake who looks a lot closer to puberty than when the movie began. Weird humorous bits feel like they have been spliced in, trying to find as big an audience as possible. And while some may criticize Stephen King’s more populist works, that’s a charge that could never be lobbied at The Dark Tower . These books had vision. They created worlds. They used iconic imagery to explore timeless themes. “The Dark Tower” plays it so safe and takes so few risks that its greatest sin is in being the one thing those formative books never were for so many people: forgettable. 

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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THE DARK TOWER

Vol. iv, wizard and glass.

by Stephen King ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 4, 1997

After a five-year lapse, King's gargantuan cowboy romance about Roland of Gilead (the Gunslinger) hits volume four, with three more planned. King's behemoth was begun in 1970 and published serially as The Gunslinger (1988), followed by The Drawing of the Three (1989) and The Waste Lands (1992). Volume one was portentously sophomoric, volume two prime King, volume three slack. Though this latest begins where The Waste Lands leaves off, with Roland and his four companions, Jake, Eddie, Susannah, and Oy, a half human/half animal with limited speaking ability, in a verbal gunfight to the death with Blaine, the homicidal supercomputer that lives on riddles, the story doubles back on Roland's youth and his grand love for Susan Delgado. The roundabout narrative leads us to Wizard of Oz territory—more particularly to a horribly transformed Topeka, Kansas—which the quintet must pass through as they seek the Dark Tower, the hub of creation, where Roland will discover some knowledge that will halt the quickening destruction of his post- technological Mid-World. In 1986, Topeka and the nation are huge graveyards struck by the superflu from The Stand. Roland retells the story of his youthful adventures in Gilead and of his teacher Cort, of star-crossed Susan, and of his companions Alain and Cuthbert, while reading portents in the wizard Maerlyn's glass ball . . . . Will the Path of the Beam from the Dark Tower be from the lighthouse in King's Castle Rock film logo? In Roland's quest tale, which King calls "my Jupiter" among the solar system of his published works, the bleak cosmology of self-assurance versus wrongness is as compelling as ever. But seven rambling volumes of bemusedly wry storytelling? This will be The Ring Cycle on top of The Lord of the Rings.

Pub Date: Nov. 4, 1997

ISBN: 0-452-27917-8

Page Count: 720

Publisher: Plume

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1997

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A LITTLE LIFE

by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.

Yanagihara ( The People in the Trees , 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.  

Pub Date: March 10, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015

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by Hanya Yanagihara

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FIREFLY LANE

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 2008

Dated sermonizing on career versus motherhood, and conflict driven by characters’ willed helplessness, sap this tale of...

Lifelong, conflicted friendship of two women is the premise of Hannah’s maudlin latest ( Magic Hour , 2006, etc.), again set in Washington State.

Tallulah “Tully” Hart, father unknown, is the daughter of a hippie, Cloud, who makes only intermittent appearances in her life. Tully takes refuge with the family of her “best friend forever,” Kate Mularkey, who compares herself unfavorably with Tully, in regards to looks and charisma. In college, “TullyandKate” pledge the same sorority and major in communications. Tully has a life goal for them both: They will become network TV anchorwomen. Tully lands an internship at KCPO-TV in Seattle and finagles a producing job for Kate. Kate no longer wishes to follow Tully into broadcasting and is more drawn to fiction writing, but she hesitates to tell her overbearing friend. Meanwhile a love triangle blooms at KCPO: Hard-bitten, irresistibly handsome, former war correspondent Johnny is clearly smitten with Tully. Expecting rejection, Kate keeps her infatuation with Johnny secret. When Tully lands a reporting job with a Today -like show, her career shifts into hyperdrive. Johnny and Kate had started an affair once Tully moved to Manhattan, and when Kate gets pregnant with daughter Marah, they marry. Kate is content as a stay-at-home mom, but frets about being Johnny’s second choice and about her unrealized writing ambitions. Tully becomes Seattle’s answer to Oprah. She hires Johnny, which spells riches for him and Kate. But Kate’s buttons are fully depressed by pitched battles over slutwear and curfews with teenaged Marah, who idolizes her godmother Tully. In an improbable twist, Tully invites Kate and Marah to resolve their differences on her show, only to blindside Kate by accusing her, on live TV, of overprotecting Marah. The BFFs are sundered. Tully’s latest attempt to salvage Cloud fails: The incorrigible, now geriatric hippie absconds once more. Just as Kate develops a spine, she’s given some devastating news. Will the friends reconcile before it’s too late?

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008

ISBN: 978-0-312-36408-3

Page Count: 496

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2007

GENERAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

More by Kristin Hannah

by Kristin Hannah

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REVIEW: The Gunslinger by Stephen King

• Book Reviews
• May 5, 2021
• 3,423 views
• By Eugene Vassilev

The Gunslinger, originally written by Stephen King from 1978 to 1982 then revised and re-released in 2003, is the first book in the ambitious Dark Tower series, King’s self described ‘magnum opus’. Having read the novel’s initial version nearly two decades ago, my memories of it have blurred over time and thus this review is meant specifically for the modern release.

As a devotee of the series who read on to completion, I found the revision to be an excellent piece of fan-service, weaving in references to later plot threads, adding to the world-building, creating better consistency of characterization, and of course, fixing some continuity issues. Nevertheless, it did occur to me that most of the changes did little to move the needle on the plot or structure of the actual book and that, most likely, an uninitiated reader might find the added references confusing or irrelevant which would surely detract (if only mildly) from the pacing.

I, however, loved every page of it.

The Gunslinger follows the implacable Roland Deschain on his mysterious quest to kill the sorcerous Man in Black. Inspired unabashedly by Milton’s Paradise Lost as well as the western films of Sergio Leone, and of course, The Lord of the Rings, King’s dark fantasy take on The Man With No Name leads us on an relentless quest through a post-apocalyptic hellscape as Roland pursues his quarry at any cost. As the gunslinger draws inexorably closer to his prey, he must navigate the devious traps left behind by the Man in Black, putting his determination, morality and even his sanity to dire test.

Mixing in pieces of Arthurian legend along with bits of modern day nostalgia, King manages to craft a decaying world that feels just familiar enough to be unsettling. In Roland, we find a tragically flawed protagonist seemingly reminiscent of Melville’s Ahab in his obsessive pursuit, though his motives are painted less clearly than the Captain’s more straightforward thirst for revenge. While on the surface, the plot may seem to meander somewhat in its execution, it is in fact carefully constructed to dictate exactly which pieces of Roland’s characterization King wishes to reveal at each stage of the novel, leaving the reader to revisit their assumptions as the story progresses.

Readers of the prolific author’s other works may be surprised at the prose here; while King did revise much of what he felt was ‘pretension’ and ‘hollow blather’ attributed to the immature writing philosophy he employed at the time of its original publication, the voice still reads shockingly differently in comparison to his modern works. This factor actually serves the novel quite well though, as the relatively grandiose (at least for King) verbiage lends a sense of gravity to the events of the novel that his later, more self-assured, writing voice might not have achieved; as King describes it in the foreword, “…for all its faults, it has its own special charms…”

All told, it was a joy to revisit The Gunslinger, which is, to me at least, one of the key progenitors of the modern grimdark genre. While fans of the series tend to overlook this first book in favour of the more stylistically-familiar later series entries, this one always stood out in my memory as one of the strongest due to its tight pacing, darker atmosphere and a couple of truly show-stopping scenes. If you haven’t read this now-classic piece of fantasy yet have found yourself on a grimdark website reading reviews of it, you may wish to strongly consider rectifying the issue by going out and grabbing yourself a copy, posthaste.

Read The Gunslinger by Stephen King

Eugene Vassilev

Eugene lives in Vancouver, Canada. As a lifelong fan of science fiction, fantasy and horror, he enjoys all the usual mediums in which one can imbibe those genres.

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Stephen King's Magnum Opus - "The Dark Tower" Series review

• from Gabriel Howard
• Stroudsburg Area High School
• 11413 views
• 2244 days ago

(WARNING: MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS FOR THE DARK TOWER. THERE WILL BE A NO SPOILER LINE FOR PEOPLE WHO HAVE NOT FINISHED READING THE STORY SERIES. ENJOY THE SPOILER-FREE REVIEW FOR NOW.)

There comes a time in everyone's life where they should sit down and read a really good book, whether something new or old. There is no other feeling in the world much like diving head first into an unknown world of excitement, thrills, drama, suspense, et cetera. What I think the crowning example of this has to be Stephen King's most known book series of all time: The Dark Tower novels.

On June 19th, 1978 - November 1981, Mr. King released five intertwining short stories as part of the "gunslinger collection" and unknowingly kicked off The Dark Tower series. He intended to make a stories based off 1800s poem writer Robert Browning, and more accurately his poem, "Childe Roland To The Dark Tower Came". "The Gunslinger" was met with mixed reception with it's slow pace and experimental writing, but the book that really kicked the series off was with the second installment, "The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three". Even more praise was given as the third and fourth entries, "The Waste Lands" and "Wizard and Glass". All four of his stories were written with a couple years apart from each other, and after Wizard and Glass, many people were anticipating the next installment.

Disaster struck, however. On June 19th, 1999 - the anniversary of when "The Gunslinger" was published - King was struck by a driver in Lovell, Maine and was critically injured. While recovering, he came to the realization that he has to finish the story. So by determination and his fanbase, he wrote the next three books - "Wolves of the Calla, Song of Susannah, The Dark Tower" - all back-to-back. Finally, in September of 2004, King had finally published the last volume of what many consider the series to be his magnum opus.

But that is the history of the books and author. What about the ACTUAL story?

The story concerns us with our main protagonist Roland Deschain, the last gunslinger of a land called "Mid-World" and his hunt for the Dark Tower. The Dark Tower is said to be the nexus of everything in existence and is also said to keep the very fabric of time and space together. The problem is that the Tower's strength is failing by dark forces, and gunslinger is seeking to make sure the Tower continues to stand. With many destiny-bound friends he meets along the way, Roland will stop at nothing to travel for the Dark Tower, fix up whatever problem there is, and see what awaits for him once - and if - he enters the Tower itself.

On its own, "The Dark Tower" series sounds like a very run-of-the-mill adventure series inspired by the likes of Lord of the Rings. While it is true that the origins of inspiration are LOTR, Mr. King has brought forth some of the most creative storytelling I haven't seen in a book series to date. Dare I say it's even better than the likes of such popular 7-part story series like Harry Potter.

I think the biggest thing that separates "The Dark Tower" series from other novel series are its characters. It's no secret Stephen King is a very talented writer when it comes to making up likable and memorable characters, and "The Dark Tower" has easily some of the most interesting characters in any of his works to date. From the main protagonist Roland to his other destiny-bound friends he finds along his search for the Tower, I found myself connecting with those characters very early on and the strength of that bond continued to grow. When I learn more about the characters in this series, it actually matters since they all A.) have a common goal: to get to the Tower and B.) they have very interesting backstories and great personalities. There were rarely any moments where I did not want to learn about the protagonists I saw go about their journey, and it also helps that, with the exception of Roland and Mid-World, most people you meet in the Dark Tower are from our world or somewhat connected to it.

Another major contributing factor to “The Dark Tower” is that, while it was inspired by Lord of the Rings, also has a lot of different inspirations drawn from various sources. The biggest inspiration of King from this was Sergio Leone’s 1960s Western film “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly”. The books also lend themselves to Arthurian tales, with elements such as King Arthur as well as his knights and men at the Round Table (however they are not seen, only referenced), medieval castles and general atmosphere. The Arthurian element is not introduced until several books in, with most of the Western inspirations drawing first and continuing throughout.

This marks the ending of the no-spoiler zone. Overall, I wholeheartedly recommend “The Dark Tower” as a fantastic read and one of Stephen King’s biggest accomplishments in the literature scene.

If you have not read the story and plan on it, or are reading through it now, BELOW WILL CONTAIN SPOILERS FOR “THE DARK TOWER” BOOKS 1-7.

Now onto the things that I personally found appealing while reading the series, and I’ll start from book 1-7. For the first one, I have no big opinion on, as I was not very invested with the story to begin with. Even with Roland met Jake Chambers and is chasing the Man In Black, I was not hanging on the edge of my seat compared to other books in the series.

“The Drawing Of The Three”, on the other hand, kept me engaged throughout the entire book. I thought Eddie Dean and Odetta/Detta/Susannah was a lovely addition to the story, the action in the story was plentiful (I especially loved Roland’s and Eddie’s fight inside Balazar’s office), and it made me even more excited to move onto “The Waste Lands”.

And oh my goodness was “The Waste Lands” the definition of a good sequel. TONS of stellar action sequences, every single moment felt like an energetic thrill ride, and some moments where I was hanging on the edge of my seat. Jake returning from the dead as a paradox between him and Roland was a very nice touch as well as Eddie yanking him through the doorway from his world into Mid-World, and I was especially nervous when Jake got stolen from the group by Gasher and the Tick-Tock Man. I didn’t really get too much interest with David Quick and the Tick-Tock Man, but the final moments when the Ka-Tet got inside Blaine the Mono before Lud went under felt good. Oh, and the cliffhanger? I HATED the cliffhanger, but I was glad they resolved it in “Wizard And Glass”.

The pacing then shifted from fast and exciting to a slow crawl when I got to “Wizard And Glass” for the first time. Out of all the “Dark Tower” novels, this one has to be my least favorite out of them all. I didn’t mind a story involving a young Roland and his love Susan Delgado, but some parts of the story like the Big Coffin Hunters, the sub-plot involving the mayor of Mejis basically wanting to impregnate Susan and such just dragged on. One of the characters that I really loved, though, would have to be Sheemie Ruiz. As much as he meant to be a disabled clumsy bartender, I really loved his personality and character, and I’m thankful and both saddened at his appearance in the final volume. And the ending with the Ka-Tet going through Kansas and re-enacting the entire last sequences from the “Wizard Of Oz” was intriguing but ultimately unneeded.

So yeah, “Wizard And Glass” was definitely a “low point” in the series. But did things kick into high gear when “Wolves of The Calla” came along. Okay, it wasn’t SUPER engaging in my eyes - “Song Of Susannah” filled that void, and I’ll get to that in a second - but after “Wizard And Glass”, I needed some thrills and a good time, and this book delivered on that. With the exception of Donald Callahan’s backstory involving how he came from Jerusalem’s Lot from “Salem’s Lot” (another working by Stephen King), which wasn’t too too engaging in my eyes, the rest of the story made me bury my head in the book. Whether it was to learn more about the Dogan, about Andy The Messenger Robot and the rest of the people in Bryan Calla Sturgis, this book was a joy to read. When the Wolves came, though, that segment made my heart pound. That was the first time a chapter from a book made my heart pound as well as made me sweat.

What really sealed the deal with getting back to engagement of the story was the next book, “Song Of Susannah”. I was shocked when I learned that the book was not as long as the other stories, but make no mistake. What the book lacks in length more than makes up for it with the build-up to the birth of Susannah/Mia’s baby Mordred. I found out from my father while reading that segment that Mordred is actually the name of King Arthur’s son, who murdered his father while he was in his sleep. I almost had a heart attack since Roland is revealed to be the father of Mordred after his sperm was transferred from the Oracle of the first book to Susannah in the third book (wrap your head around that one!), but I pressed on. Oh, and Stephen King being an integral person in the story of “The Dark Tower”? I LOVED that choice as well and was giddy seeing him helping Roland and the Ka-Tet out. “Song Of Susannah” as well as “The Waste Lands” will always be my high points in the storyline for me. Those are books I found so much enjoyment from, and it even made me nervous for what was to come in the final installment.

The last book in “The Dark Tower” storyline was appropriately called “The Dark Tower”, and at the point of reading the book, I had spent over half a year reading every single installment. I had even dabbled into some of the exclusive comic books made for “The Dark Tower”, which was in collaboration with Marvel and Mr. King. I had no idea what to expect when I read the story for the first time, and I will say for the very beginning, it was an energetic thrill ride. Callahan and Jake fending off the taheen while Susannah/Mia gave birth to Mordred, Roland and Eddie leaving King for now to try and find the Ka-Tet that split… it was such an opening to the book. My mind did begin to wander off when Jake became ensnared in the Mind Trap, though, and I think the story slowed back to that “Wizard and Glass” crawl when the location of Algul Siento of Mid-World was introduced.

When Sheemie and other newer characters were introduced, however, that’s when the story started to pick back up substantially. One of those characters, Ted Brautigan, became to be one of my favorite, as he had a very interesting backstory and just wanted to fight to keep the Tower standing. Fun fact: after reading “The Dark Tower”, I started up another of King’s works, “Hearts In Atlantis”, and the first half of the story was DIRECTLY linked to Brautigan and “The Dark Tower”! I thought that was so cool of King to do that, and it turns out even more of his stories connect to this series in one form or another!

Ahem, right, back on track with the final story. Well, if we’re getting into the nitty gritty of spoilers, I would have to say that the biggest one is all the deaths suffered in this novel. Eddie’s death came out of nowhere and left me infuriated as well as saddened as I was attached to the character, but I felt Jake’s death came too soon afterwards. It happened almost a day or two after Eddie’s death, and it just happened way too quickly for me. Oy the Billy Bumbler’s death was sad, yes, but that was by the end of the book. I felt saddened as well but also glad inside that he helped Roland out before Mordred killed him.

Oh, and before I get into the finale of the book, how about Mordred? If there’s one thing I will knock off the entirety of this book for, it’s Mordred Deschain’s anticlimactic buildup. From “Wolves of The Calla” onwards, there was an evil power resonating in Susannah’s and Mia’s belly that would be the Crimson King’s rightful son of the Dark Tower. Yet, since Mordred’s birth, all we have seen him done is hunt Roland down and be on his tale for the ENTIRE last back. There’s no special interaction with him and Roland, and there are even some moments where King wants us to feel sorry for the demon baby for who he is and how he’s alone in his quest while his real father is residing at the Dark Tower. I’m sorry, but I don’t feel any remorse for a baby that is going to bring the downfall of the entire universe alongside the Crimson King. It is cool how he is a spider-human hybrid, but I don’t feel any emotion for Mordred… other than him getting his head blown off by Roland near the end.

What’s possibly the most controversial and the BIGGEST “Dark Tower” spoiler of all, though, has to be when Roland enters the Tower for the “first time”. Everyone who has read it knows what I’m talking about: what the room at the top of the Tower resides inside for Roland. After reading that ending, I felt a large pang hit very deep in my heart, because now I know that Roland’s journey is NEVER over. He will always trek through the desert, he will always go through the exact same adventure over and over for hundreds, if not thousands of years! And the more I thought about it, the more I came to an awful realization: Eddie, Susannah, Jake, the Crimson King, Mordred, Callahan, and every single major character in this Dark Tower series? They all technically have to go through the same thing as Roland for however many times he has to go through it as well! Every single accomplishment, every single downfall, all the gruesome sacrifices and risks they all took for Roland to get to the Tower - it doesn’t mean anything because it all loops! His curiosity will always make him go the top of the Tower, only to realize upon opening the door what lies at the top - a portal to the desert where he was chasing the Man In Black in the first book - and the Tower sucks him into the portal and he has to start his journey all over again.

The gunslinger of Gilead will never die, and the Tower will never fall because of Roland’s journey. That’s a terrifying way to end the story, isn’t it? I would much rather NOT knowing what happens to Roland inside the Tower and let the ending of Eddie, Susannah, and Jake together be the true canon ending. But because of that curiosity in OUR minds - on what happens behind the Tower door and what Roland experiences - we had to continue reading, and what’s worse is that King acknowledges to stop where we are. To let Roland and his Ka-Tet be and to let that be the canon ending. But we wanted more, and he was willing to provide us with the ending we now know.

...So hey! If you’re still here after reading all that, thanks for tuning into what I have to say about “The Dark Tower” series. I deeply appreciate every single one of you for reading my long and descriptive thoughts about the story, characters, and my personal thoughts, and I hope you enjoyed my review. Have a great day, everyone!

Greetings and salutations! My name is Gabriel Howard, and I am a senior in Stroudsburg High School. I’m probably the most extravagant and outgoing person you will ever meet, and I am SUPER excited to be apart Fusfoo! I am a writer at heart, so I hope to bring in stories that could really entertain or inform you! :)

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The Dark Tower by Stephen King (The Dark Tower series: Book 7)

When it gets to the last book in a series there is very little left unsaid. I hold the Dark Tower series in the very highest regard. Yes, I have slight reservations but when taken as a whole it is the magnum opus that its author, Stephen King, hoped it would be. Over thirty years in the writing, it is a vast, sprawling tale of one man's quest, some may say obsession, and the story is excellent, the characters that populate it amongst that special type that remain with the reader forever.

So when I reach the final review I like to look at what others say, what the majority have loved or detested about the seven books. My thoughts can be read in the preceding six reviews but I will try to recap my reading experience in one paragraph:

The first three Dark Tower books are amongst the best I have read in the genre. I found books four and five tough going on first read but wonderfully enjoyable on re-read. I did not particularly like book six, for many reasons, and although I have warmed to it during re-reads it still remains, in my opinion, a weakness, but luckily book seven, this book, provides the series with the fitting denouement it deserves.

Here is the seventh book's synopsis:

Roland's band of pilgrims remains united, though scattered. Susannah-Mia has been carried off to New York to give birth, Terrified of what may happen, Jake, Father Callahan and Oy follow.

Roland and Eddie are in Maine, looking for the site which will lead them to Susannah. As he finally closes in on the tower, Roland's every step is shadowed by a terrible and sinister creation. And finally, he realises, he may have to walk the last dark strait alone...

First, let’s take a look at the positive reviews:

"It's one of those series of books that are quite hard to *like*, because they are full of such pain and darkness and sadness, but they are absorbing in a way that very few series can hope to achieve. Perhaps the most fitting evidence that King succeeded with me is that, despite working my way through all seven books, I am still eager to read more about Roland and his background." Dr. Michael Heron

"Bravo Mr King. It's a series destined to go down as one of the greats of modern fantasy. Let's hope the rumoured TV serialisation and movies turn out half so good, if they turn up at all!" Hippy Sal

And now for the negative:

"Am I the only person to feel cheated and let down by this book, the final chapter of the Dark Tower series which I have been following for over 30 years? My overall impression was that in some ways these books were almost 'writing themselves' and evolving a deep and meaningful story with a life of its own. However it seems that, in the end, King could not find a fitting way to wrap things up and took an easy way out. Given that people followed these works for years (I remember reading of a letter sent to King by a woman diagnosed with terminal cancer asking to be told the end of the story because she would not live to read it herself) it's a crying shame that he couldn't come up with anything more convincing than what he has done. In my opinion it's dreadful. I feel I have been taken advantage of by Mr King and wasted all those years." Nivek

"When you strip away all the excess fat in the DT series (King's allusions to his other novels, the copious number of various minor coincidences scattered throughout the series explained away as "ka", characters which shouldn't even be in the series in the first place, basically everything that is "19") what's left after all is said and done is an extremely weak, unfinished and poorly written story. I completely fell in love with The Gunslinger when I first read it and subsequently picked up the next 3 volumes. Wizard and Glass is by far my favourite installment to the series because of the absolute quality with which Roland's sojourn to Mejis with his friends was written. This was probably King at his pinnacle. You can actually see the duality of the quality of the story in this novel, the sheer scope and quality of Roland's no bull**** recounted tale in Mejis versus the bland and ludicrous weirdness of the story of the Ka-tet of the Nineteen and Ninety and Nine. The contrast between what the story had become at this point and what it should have been (Mejis and "The Gunslinger" will forever be captured in my imagination) is all too evident at this point in the series and with the following volume, Wolves of the Calla, it was all but blatant that King had lost the plot. And by that I mean, yes, he is telling a story... its just no longer the one we were reading." Jason

"I couldn't believe it when I got to the end of this book. I'd been following this series for years as they were coming out and I was loving every page. It was such a clever idea, to weave this story into the other seemingly unrelated stories to create one greater picture that doesn't become apparent if you just read the odd king novel here or there. But to have all that work culminate with just the most last minute, scrapped together, half arsed, hack, first year creative writing class ending sequence is tantamount to a direct insult towards me." M

And finally on to the mixed opinions, which most closely mirror my own thoughts:

"I enjoyed the first 4 books, and thought the 5th was okay. Unfortunately it all went south after that - I kept on going in the hope that it would be redeemed at the end. Sadly not. Stephen King spoils this completely by inserting himself into the story - way too narcissistic and just annoyed me. If you can draw the line after the 4th book - you will be doing the right thing." Flash

"I couldn't help feeling that at the end Stephen King was literally just making it up as he went along. It was a shame because if you get to this last book, you've spent a lot of time getting there. At times the whole Dark Tower saga had me gripped, but at other times it was so disjointed and so made up on the fly that for me it lost its coherence. What a shame." SimonSpear

"Let's begin at the end. I thought the ending was superb. It won't please everyone I know, but for me it was inspired and just, so I have no problem with that. My problem with the saga as a whole is that it wasn't consistent, and the last 3 books especially felt very very laboured, in particular the Wolves of Calla which was clearly twice as long as it needed to be. Song of Susannah was ok, and I thought the final book ramped it up a bit. Of the first four novels, The Wasteland was dire (I know I'm in a minority here) and dragged and dragged.... the first two novels were fine, but the real gem is Wizard and Glass, a story within a story, which was superbly written and plotted, and of all things it was a love story, and I'm not in the habit of reading love stories I can assure you!" Andy C

"I just finished the final book in the magnificent series - it was truly an awesome ending, and with hindsight the only possible one, although I certainly didn't see it coming until the final page! I spent most of the book wondering how it could possibly end, and there was really only this way (don't want to spoil it for you!) I nearly gave up when Stephen King introduced himself as a character. it seemed ludicrous at the time, but luckily he didn't appear very much, and it was a stroke of genius making King's real-life accident a crucial point of the saga. The later books lacked the haunting other-worldly quality of the early works, but I was happy to see that the story ended in Roland's own world, and not in the real New York, as I had feared it might. A great ending to King's towering vision, and one of those books that you're truly sorry you've finished. I'll really miss Roland and his ka-tet!" Frostycat

As always the best way to see if a series is for you is to read the first book in it, in this case The Gunslinger. If it grips you like it did me then you have found a brilliant but occasionally flawed series that stands up to repeat reading better than any other series I have read. If the first book doesn’t work for you then it’s probably best to move on to something else.

A special mention should be made of the Dark Tower audio books, which are read masterfully by George Guidall and the late, great, Frank Muller. They are up there with the best fantasy books available.

9/10 The final volume sees the gunslinger on a roller-coaster mix of exhilarating triumph and aching loss

• Buy on Amazon

Review by Floresiensis

1 positive reader review(s) for The Dark Tower

16 positive reader review(s) in total for the The Dark Tower series series

Stephen King biography

Makkarii from U.S.

This entire series is unlike anything I have ever read before. It was simply amazing and had me yearning for more once I finished this last book. Luckily though, King graced us with one last follow up, "The Wind through the Key Hole" and gave me one last piece to satiate me. You can read the rest of my review here: http://wordymadness.blogspot.com/2014/01/by-stephen-king-genre-fantasy-horror.html

9.4 /10 from 2 reviews

All Stephen King Reviews

• Joyland (Hard Case Crime Series)
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• The Waste Lands (The Dark Tower series: Book 3)
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• The Wind Through The Keyhole (The Dark Tower series: Book 4.5)
• Wolves of the Calla (The Dark Tower series: Book 5)
• Song of Susannah (The Dark Tower series: Book 6)
• The Dark Tower (The Dark Tower series: Book 7)

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The Dark Tower

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Review: dark tower film barely uses books’ lore—but works anyway, books’ scope greatly reduced to only three characters—but, gosh, are they sold well..

Sam Machkovech - Aug 4, 2017 11:00 am UTC

Stephen King's seven-book series The Dark Tower has finally received a screen adaptation, and fans should brace themselves: it slaps a giant reset button on the series' lore. (Which, a longtime series fan may explain to you, is somewhat appropriate.)

This long-in-production film lands with a clear emphasis on running lean. It's a hair over 90 minutes long; its variety in scenery and locations is far from epic; and the story focuses on only three familiar characters. The result feels more like a Stephen King version of an '80s misunderstood-teen film than you might expect, and, as such, its framework feels a little disposable—as if the names "Man In Black," "Gunslinger," and "Jake Chambers" could have been swapped if a license fell through at the last minute.

The great Dark Tower film we've wanted for years, this ain't. But as an isolated, "inspired by Stephen King" piece of summer cinema, this first (and hopefully not last) Dark Tower film succeeds at finding a new angle to the series' origin story, which is sold by a taut script, solid acting, and a compelling angle on what revenge looks like for both a boy and a man.

One in the Chambers

• Roland (Idris Elba) and Jake (Tom Taylor) in Columbia Pictures' The Dark Tower .
• Roland, seen here slinging a gun.
• "We have to equip ourselves for a great battle. But first... fidget spinners!!!!"
• Church is now in session.
• The Man in Black surveys the wreckage that Jake Chambers left behind.
• Roland works out feelings about his dad.
• The Crimson King, you say? We're going to have to hope for a sequel if we want to see anyone hail him.

For starters, Jake Chambers' origin story serves as a much larger anchor here than in any of the Gunslinger-heavy books—and he gets wrapped up with the Tower in a very different way. Jake, a brilliant-but-troubled pre-teen in modern-day New York City, is pulled into other worlds not by a murder but by his own visions and dreams.

The opening battle of the film, then, is with Jake trying to convince anyone about his visions of a giant tower, of enslaved children, and of the Man in Black and the Gunslinger. A school psychiatrist, a bully, a harried mom, an obnoxious stepdad, even a best friend: nobody buys Jake's stories, even though they're so vivid that Jake draws them out as elaborate sketches. Adults assume Jake is just having "darkness and fire" dreams because his dad died a year ago. (In this Dark Tower version, papa Chambers was a loving, supportive firefighter who passed too soon.)

One vision leads Jake to an abandoned house in Brooklyn, at which point we learn about the film universe's version of portals. The film's doors connect people to different worlds within the same universe, so long as they know a four-digit code. (The first one, if you're wondering, is "19-19," but this doesn't appear to connect to any of the books' "Ka-tet" brotherhoods.) Jake enters the code seen in his dreams, and he lands in a desert where he eventually stumbles upon a confused and pessimistic man named Roland Deschain (played by Idris Elba).

Roland has abandoned his duties as the world's last remaining "gunslinger" after a fight years ago in which an evil Man in Black (Matthew McConaughey) killed Roland's father. The Man In Black cannot directly kill Roland (and we don't learn why), so he has spent years killing everyone Roland has been connected to. MIB, by the way, also happens to run a very official "destroy the dark tower" operation, which Roland explains to Jake: so long as the tower stands, legions of demons on the outskirts of the universe can't come in and kill all of humanity.

Oh, and those visions about tortured kids that Jake had? MIB is trying to find a child with enough "Shine," a magical force that can be converted into tower-destroying lasers (sure, that makes sense). MIB has been sending disguised demons to Earth to round up kids and boil up their brains to convert into weapons. (MIB sent some to pick up Jake in the guise of "counselors," whom he dodged before finding that abandoned house portal and bailing on modern-day Earth.)

Not a galaxy defender

Plenty of details about the film's  Dark Tower universe are left unclear. Beyond some of the vague plot bits mentioned above, we never learn whether Jake's world and Roland's are mirror images, or alternate dimensions, or what. At one point, Jake outright asks how demons can exist "outside of the universe," to which Roland grunts and changes the subject.

It's tempting to describe the story structure in this film as a hodgepodge of the first three Dark Tower novels, but that ignores the utter lack of primary book characters Eddie and Susannah. Additionally, we're left with very little of Roland's backstory beyond seeing his father die—no killing of an infant, no wiping out an entire town, etc. Instead, the only reason we have to care about the film version of Roland is an utterly badass performance courtesy of Idris Elba. And that's fine. Less is absolutely more in Elba's case, and Roland's debut as a film character may have won out by having so many bristling, non-verbal cues handled by a serious actor instead of him being overwritten to fulfill so much lore and canon.

McConaughey, meanwhile, plays the MIB with a serious helping of cheese. A weird sound filter is applied to McConaughey's voice so that his voice sounds like it was dubbed on top of the current action, and he tends to deliver brief, monotonal commands to anybody that peeves him. People die, keel over, stop breathing, and start fighting each other at his whim, all while he fakes like a sadistic camp counselor as he preys on insecurities in every conversation he has. I laughed at some of McConaughey's lines at first, but by the end, I had fallen for his take on true evil.

Between those is Tom Taylor, the child actor who carries much of The Dark Tower 's weight as Jake Chambers. Taylor carries the '80s child-as-hero torch with great confidence, and the film allows ample breathing room for Jake to grow into an unsure, can-I-really-do-this type of protagonist. During a touching scene in which Roland teaches Jake the Gunslinger's Code—"I do not kill with my gun; he who kills with his gun has forgotten the face of his father. I kill with my heart."—the moment is sold by both actors accepting a world-saving fate that neither seems quite prepared to undertake. They each aim guns, sigh in their speech delivery, and visibly mourn the fathers they both lost.

This is neither a masterwork of green-screen CGI nor epic battles, but we do get a few Elba-powered gunfights worthy of the term "Gunslinger," along with a few child-against-the-odds chase sequences that are just damned  good for a kid that age. One particular favorite moment comes during a ho-hum devils-versus-a-village scene in which we know Roland will succeed, but the filmmakers slow the whole scene down, anyway, so we can watch Elba stop, breathe, and focus on shooting his final bullet to save the day.

Further Reading

But I wanted that decision to come with an obvious hook for a sequel, destined to open the series up to more of the lore (and characters ) that made King's originals so beloved for decades. I'll hold out hope that these filmmakers will take series-worthy chances at some point—but those certainly didn't come in film 1.

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The dark tower, common sense media reviewers.

Awful, violent, revenge-filled Stephen King adaptation.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

The movie's focus is on revenge and violence witho

The gunslinger is nominally the "good guy," and he

Heavy fantasy violence. Guns and shooting. Killing

Brief flirting (character comments on a woman's "p

Uses of "s--t," "hell," "Christ."

Characters drink a Coca-Cola but keep the label co

Character takes a fistful of painkillers. A boy re

Parents need to know that The Dark Tower is a sci-fi/fantasy adventure based on a series of epic novels by Stephen King. The main issue is the movie's strong, frequent violence. Expect to see guns and shooting, killing, knives and stabbing, some blood/bloody wounds (including glass going through someone's…

Positive Messages

The movie's focus is on revenge and violence without consequences. The main theme seems to be "I told you so," given that adults aren't inclined to believe a child's warnings.

Positive Role Models

The gunslinger is nominally the "good guy," and he helps the boy, but he's focused mainly on revenge and on killing without consequence. Jake doesn't really seem to learn much throughout the course of the story.

Violence & Scariness

Heavy fantasy violence. Guns and shooting. Killing. A boy learns to shoot. Some blood. Children in pain/peril. Fighting, hitting with heavy objects. Knives/stabbing. A chunk of glass goes through a character's hand, with blood. Explosions/earthquakes. Scary drawings, some scary images. Boys fight at school.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Brief flirting (character comments on a woman's "pretty face").

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Characters drink a Coca-Cola but keep the label covered; brand isn't mentioned.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Character takes a fistful of painkillers. A boy refers to them as "the good stuff."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that The Dark Tower is a sci-fi/fantasy adventure based on a series of epic novels by Stephen King . The main issue is the movie's strong, frequent violence. Expect to see guns and shooting, killing, knives and stabbing, some blood/bloody wounds (including glass going through someone's hand), explosions, and scary images. Boys fight at school, a boy learns to shoot a gun, and there are children in peril/pain. Language is sparse but includes uses of "s--t" and "hell." An adult takes a fistful of pain pills, and a boy comments that they're "the good stuff." While the content isn't inappropriate for younger teens, for teens and up, it's a big disappointment creatively. Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey co-star. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Community Reviews

• Parents say (15)
• Kids say (21)

Based on 15 parent reviews

Great Movie

What's the story.

In THE DARK TOWER, Jake Chambers ( Tom Taylor ) has vivid dreams about a man in black using kids to try to destroy the world -- and a gunslinger attempting to stop him. Following a clue, Jake discovers a secret portal and learns that these things are real. He meets the gunslinger, Roland ( Idris Elba ), and together they set out for the place that Jake saw in his dreams. He learns of the Dark Tower, which protects the universe from monsters, and how the man in black, aka Walter ( Matthew McConaughey ), hopes to destroy it and bring about Armageddon. Jake also learns that he has "the shine," a great power that Walter hopes to harness. Roland wants revenge against Walter, while Jake hopes to save the universe. Unfortunately, Roland is wounded by a monster attack, and Jake is captured. Will Walter's evil plan succeed, or can Jake's willpower and Roland's guns save the day?

Is It Any Good?

Based on Stephen King 's novels, this sludgy science fiction/fantasy dud reduces King's epic vision to a series of mindless clichés, surrounded by lazy dialogue and half-baked visual effects. Noisy, junky, and without any kind of mood or rhythm, The Dark Tower connects somewhat to King's Shining universe, but this is as far from Kubrick as a movie can get; it's closer to sci-fi/Western disaster Jonah Hex . Akiva Goldsman is one of the credited screenwriters, and his usual penchant for over-explaining everything is here. But he and his fellow writers still can't make sense of the truncated plot or find reasons for any of this stuff.

Director Nikolaj Arcel tries to cover up his shaky footage, sloppy editing, and cheap-looking monsters with plenty of darkness, but the ruse is all too obvious. Oscar-winner McConaughey is flat-out awful as the man in black, coming across more as smarmy and annoying than menacing or threatening. On the other hand, as Roland the gunslinger, Elba is the only cool thing in the movie. So it's a crying shame that he couldn't have been involved in something more imaginative (or even something totally different, like a new James Bond movie).

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about The Dark Tower 's violence . Does it feel real? Is it thrilling or gruesome? How does the movie achieve this effect? What's the impact of media violence on kids?

Is the movie scary ? What's the appeal of scary movies?

Does the gunslinger's preoccupation with revenge make him less of a good guy? Why or why not? Do you consider any of the characters to be role models ?

If you've read the books the film is based on, how does the movie compare? Which do you usually prefer: the book or the movie?

Teens: Have you ever felt like your parents don't listen to you? What have you done about it?

Movie Details

• In theaters : August 4, 2017
• On DVD or streaming : October 31, 2017
• Cast : Idris Elba , Matthew McConaughey , Tom Taylor
• Director : Nikolaj Arcel
• Inclusion Information : Black actors
• Studio : Columbia Pictures
• Genre : Fantasy
• Topics : Magic and Fantasy , Book Characters
• Run time : 95 minutes
• MPAA rating : PG-13
• MPAA explanation : thematic material including sequences of gun violence and action
• Last updated : May 23, 2024

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

Suggest an Update

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Sin and Betrayal

A dark mafia romance.

• 4.7 • 13 Ratings

Publisher Description

Princess in a Tower Captive in a Cage. There is no Power. Only Rage. They promised me love and devotion, And left me with shattered dreams. They’re back expecting forgiveness. But my price is steep. Betrayal is a risky business, Now that I’m the Queen, they wish to keep.

Customer Reviews

Story: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Trope: MMF, mafia Angst: 😱😱😱😱 Smexy: 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 What a ride! The book opens with a bang and just doesn't stop. It has a great storyline that's fast paced, emotional, and super smexy. This is a second chance MMF story with so much devastation and hurt that needs to be worked through all backdropped by a mafia world turned upside down by misdeeds and betrayal. If you're a fan of Sienna Snow, you know you're getting a strong, independent heroine and a story that will have you by the lady balls. Absolutely loving Nerine and her willingness to fight for herself, her family, and her men. Theo and Xander are definitely fodder for any fantasy. Can't wait for the next book!

Theia Nerine

Heat🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 Action ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ All I can say is WOW!!!! Rarely do an author leaves me speechless after reading a book but Sienna definitely did. Thought this would be your run of the mill mafia romance but boy was I wrong. The ending…..phew I can’t wait for the next book to drop. The story started off with a bang and keeps you hooked until the end. Nerine Angelos has been through a lot in 5 years to claim her legacy and men but that will be difficult in a male dominated Syndicate good thing she has Theo and Xander. Worth the read!!! I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

This is the first book in the Sin & Lies duet, it’s a mafia MMF romance. I could not put this book down. Between Nernie/theo//xander story and the back story of the mafia. Sienna Snow is becoming one of my go to authors. I cannot wait for the next book in this duet.

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