At 26, I walk through the streets of New York and wonder if there's a chance the next corner I turn might hurl me into Mid-World. Rowling's world felt so tangible and compelling to me that I expected my Hogwarts letter to arrive any day. Part weird west, part Lord of the Rings, part meta science fiction, The Dark Tower drew me into its world as it follows the story of Roland and his fellowship, or 'ka-tet.' The only series I've ever felt a comparable amount of personal investment in is Harry Potter (a story begun almost three decades after Roland's, but one that had a clear influence on the final three Dark Tower books). At age nine, J.K. But even if you've never read a single Stephen King book before, The Dark Tower is still totally fascinating and rewarding. That interconnection makes it a particularly rewarding read for people who already consider themselves King fans, in the same way that the Easter Eggs in a Marvel movie are most likely to tickle comic readers. a place of strange atmosphere, crazy landscape, and savage gravitational pull … I am coming to understand that Roland's world (or worlds) actually contains all the others of my making.”Įssentially, The Dark Tower is the maypole that holds up the Stephen King Expanded Universe.

In an afterword to The Dark Tower book Wizard and Glass, King himself described the series as his literary Jupiter, 'a planet that dwarfs all the others. Idris Elba (left) as Roland Deschain and Tom Taylor as Jake Chambers in the upcoming movie adaptation of The Dark Tower. RELATED: 50 of the Best Fantasy Books Ever Written In fact, it’s hard to find a Stephen King story that doesn’t overlap with The Dark Tower in some way, and most of the Dark Tower books also incorporate characters or themes from his other works. Not only does the epic stand alone as a fantasy saga, but the seven(ish) Dark Tower titles are actually explicitly intertwined with his horror books. When I received the books as a gift several years ago, I realized I was totally wrong. The series seemed inaccessible and boring-a sprawling, multimedia slog that I worried wouldn’t be sufficiently compelling as a fantasy story to keep me engaged if it lacked the thrills of King's horror novels.

I've loved Stephen King since I found Misery in my own school library at 13, but I avoided The Dark Tower for over a decade. Nearly half a century later, the story of Roland Deschain is still rolling forward. In 1970, a 22-year-old University of Maine sophomore named Stephen King decided to use a ream of green paper he found in his college library to write the story of a determined gunslinger and his quest for a dark tower.

The dark tower books in order