The Best Way To Read 'The Dark Tower' Books
THE GUNSLINGER FOLLOWED
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​Welcome to Fan Service, a guide to engaging with gargantuan, lore-heavy franchises. In each volume, we'll recommend a watch/read order to approach the given series with and dissect our argument for it. Today: Stephen King's "The Dark Tower" series.​


Stephen King basically is pop-culture. Take a wild guess at how many times King's books have been adapted for film and TV and it'll probably be too low. He's an indisputable, super-influential icon — and if the leap to the silver screen (the movie is in theaters today) has you curious about King's "The Dark Tower," you should know that there's more to the series than books with those words in the title.

Today marks the release of the feature film adaptation of King's epic genre-blending and -bending fantasy series he's been working on since the seventies. A decade ago, "Tower junkies" and "constant readers" were told that an adaptation was taking shape under J.J. Abrams' care (this was before he got pulled into "Star Wars," of course). The project has morphed over time, now coming to us by way of director/screenwriter Nikolaj Arcel, who penned the Danish film script for "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo." Perhaps it's only appropriate that the film's production mirrored the long and convoluted history of the books.

The film version of "The Dark Tower" is an adaptation of the first book, "The Gunslinger." It also has elements from later books in it… it makes reference to King's other works… oh, and it's technically a sequel to the book series. For those in the know — people who know the difference between ka and ka-tet, who've unearthed the connections peppered throughout King's more popular works, who've been waiting on this movie for ages — this is how it should be. For everybody else, it might prove a little confusing.

So, this installment of "Fan Service" is intended to serve a dual-purpose: in addition to recommending a reading order for "The Dark Tower" series and King's related books, the rationalization of that order should (with as few spoilers as possible) help prep you for the movie even if you don't take the time to read everything before watching it.

The Order

There are books and related comics that take place before the events of the first "Dark Tower" novel, but this order tries to preserve the integrity of the series' opening volley — before getting into off-shoots, flashbacks and side stories, your introduction to gunslinger Roland Deschain and his quest for the multiverse-protecting Tower should be given room to breathe.

Then, starting with King's thousand-plus page epic "The Stand," things start to get complicated. Our suggested reading order prunes the branches of the narrative according to a simple ruleset: If a character or setting that appears in "The Dark Tower" series is prominently featured in another King story, it makes the list.

It's one of the big appeals of the series that's hard to get across in a jacket-blurb or simple summary: King goes absolutely hog-wild with multiverse stuff and the metafictional implications raised by it all. He routinely digs back ten, twenty years into his own output and pulls those ideas into "The Dark Tower," gesturing at larger ideas about fiction itself along the way.

Towards the end of the series, King wraps in a bunch of characters that appeared first in other books, so those stories take positions on the list before the corresponding "Tower" debuts of those characters. If the connection between a story and "The Dark Tower" is less explicit — if a passing reference could easily be looked past or understood through cultural osmosis — then the book doesn't make the list. Sorry about that, "It" fans (coulrophobics, you can thank me later):

• The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger (2003 Revised Edition)

• The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three (1987)

• The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands (1991)

The Stand: Complete and Uncut Edition (1990)

The Talisman (1984)

• The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass (1997)

• The Eyes of the Dragon (1987)

"Little Sisters of Eluria" from Everything's Eventual (2002)

• The Dark Tower: The Wind Through the Keyhole (2012)

Salem's Lot (1975)

• The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla (2003)

• The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah (2004)

Insomnia (1994)

"Low Men in Yellow Coats" from Hearts in Atlantis (1999)

  Black House (2001)

"Everything's Eventual" from Everything's Eventual (2002)

• The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower (2004)

It makes some sense to wedge related stories into longer gaps between the releases of numbered installments — during those times, readers likely would've picked up or re-read King's non-"Tower" novels to suss out connections anyway. Two prequel stories are placed after the fourth book's extended flashback to make for an extended break from Roland's present day.

Between writing the fourth and fifth installments, King fretted over how he should go about completing the series. One particularly unpleasant experience — plus the rise of a certain boy wizard — spurred King to wrap up the series in a concentrated sprint. That started with the release of "Wolves of the Calla" (a backdoor sequel to "Salem's Lot") and a revised edition of "The Gunslinger." Finally, two novels and two short stories make the cut before the seventh book because it turns into an almost "Avengers"-esque team-up of characters during a certain battle.

If you just want to read "The Dark Tower" saga without inserting the other relevant novels, then reading in chronological order still makes good sense (more on the "4.5th" installment, 2012's "The Wind Through the Keyhole" later).

As for the comic book adaptations and prequels: while overseen and approved by King, those don't make the list simply because we're sticking to original, from-the-author source material here. As a suggestion, you should save the comics until after finishing the books, since they've been adapted with the greater arc of the saga in mind.

What's Up With All The Connections And References?

Cobbling together any kind of Stephen King reading list is difficult; he's too prolific and too fond of weaving together his stories. Other "Dark Tower" reading lists proposed by "Tower junkies" over the years proved invaluable in trying to sort out which novels and short stories are truly crucial and should make the cut here. Still, some completionist out there surely believes that you must read everything King's written to get the "proper" experience of "The Dark Tower."

Where "The Dark Tower" leans heavily on the idea of multiple worlds and crossing timelines, King's more mainstream works still dabble in connections and references to each other that don't rely on the "Tower" mythos — King's recurring trio of fictional Maine towns being the most obvious example. It's one thing to remember that one novel takes place in the same neck of the woods as another. Keeping track of characters and ideas across a thirty year span of King's output is considerably harder.

There's no way King expects or demands this level of vigilance from his readers: his official site tracks "Dark Tower" connections in a matter-of-fact manner that helps differentiate simple references from plot points, and he's always known that even some of his biggest fans will never bother making it through the "Tower" saga:

Sometimes, when I do readings, I'll ask those present to raise their hands if they've read one or more of my novels. Since they've bothered to come at all — sometimes going to the added inconvenience of hiring a babysitter and incurring the added expense of gassing up the old sedan — it comes as no surprise that most of them raise their hands. Then I'll ask them to keep their hands up if they've read one more Dark Tower stories. When I do that, at least half the hands in the hall invariably go down.

— Stephen King, Foreword to "The Gunslinger" (2003)

The relative obscurity of "The Dark Tower" explains why some of the marketing for the new film goes out of the way to emphasize the connections between it and King's other works:

 

Another trailer hypes up the idea, but the actual movie clips included tell a different story: the hotel from "The Shining" isn't a location in the film, but there is a framed picture of it. There's a dog that looks like Cujo… but it's just strolling down the street. Pennywise from "It" won't tie into a Stephen King cinematic universe this September — you'll just see his name on a sign in "The Dark Tower." These are easter eggs, plain and simple.

Just like how you don't need to have seen or read these stories by King to get the easter eggs, you don't need to read every last story that's connected to "The Dark Tower" to have a satisfying experience. It's the difference between picking up on what "shining" means versus knowing, for instance, the whole backstory to a man named "Dinky.

Why Read In Chronological Order And With Revisions?

As if writing a multi-part story connected to all his other stories wasn't taxing enough, King went out of his way to revise the first installment of "The Dark Tower" in 2003. As he tells it, the original version needed some cleaning up:

I was not surprised to find a high degree of pretension in Roland's debut appearance (not to mention what seemed like thousands of unnecessary adverbs). I removed as much of this hollow blather as I could, and do not regret a single cut made in that regard.

— Stephen King, Foreword to "The Gunslinger" (2003)

It wasn't just the language that irked King — he also revised the book to bring its story in line with developments that occur in the later novels. Since he worked on the revision in the lead-up to the last few installments in the series, there's an argument to be made that he simply took advantage of a rare opportunity to revise a chunk of his singular epic, as one would revise a chapter of a manuscript before publishing. The other opinion you can take is that he's pulling a George Lucas, making a "Special Edition" that unfairly messes with the original work. Of course, Lucas' proved he couldn't stop messing with his old films, while it seems like the revised "Gunslinger" is it, period. That still leaves the door open for King to revise other novels in the series, which he has publicly considered doing.

King's 1990 revision of "The Stand" added hundreds of pages he chopped out of his manuscript back into the novel. If King were to go back and change any other "Tower" novels, it's possible he could use as heavy a hand as he did then. There's always good reason to discuss the merits of originals and revised versions, but at the end of the day there's the matter of practicality too: the original versions of both "The Gunslinger" and "The Stand" have been out of print for years. You can either pay a premium for the old versions or just accept that King treats his novels like malleable, editable stories.

Likewise, King's already proven that he's fine with going back and adding to his story between installments. "The Wind Through the Keyhole," released nearly eight years after the "final" novel, slots itself into the gap between books four and five. According to one review the book proves itself necessary as a transition from the earlier "Tower" novels to the last three, which were quite notably influenced by the then-new "Harry Potter" books (King goes as far to include flying balls called "sneetches" bearing the letters "HPJKR" in their serial number).

King has at least shown a commitment to making his changes and additions to the series canonically airtight. "The Dark Tower" series was followed by "A Complete Concordance," an encyclopedic reference book initially assembled by King's assistant Robin Furth to help him complete the novels. The guide was later revised and published separately as an aid for anyone looking for a canonical guide to series.

Furth now works for Marvel on the "Tower" comic adaptations, and the Concordance itself was updated and revised upon the release of "Wind Through the Keyhole." It's just revisions, re-releases and adaptations all the way down.

The Accident That Changed King — And Helped Finish The Tower

Normally, a reading order should be more concerned about canon, character development and cultural impact than with biographical details about the author. Of course, in this case you can kinda throw that out the window after the first time King connects back to his past work. "The Dark Tower" goes even further than self-referencing though. Without spoiling too much, Stephen King appears in the series himself.

Explicit self-inserts are a common enough trope. They can be amusing, surreal, vaguely upper-crust literary and post-modern — and of course, the idea easily slots right into a multiverse scenario. There's the world you're reading, and the over in our universe next door there's the author writing it. Fun, right?

King's self-insert comes from a dark place. On June 19th, 1999, he was hit by a minivan while out for a walk near his beach house. It was a serious collision: this New York Times profile of King goes into squirm-inducing detail about the accident and his recovery. The man who hit King, Bryan Edwin Smith, died a little over a year later of a fentanyl overdose, after a public legal battle that ended only with a short suspended prison sentence and revocation of Smith's license for a year. In an eerie coincidence, Smith passed away on King's birthday. They shared a middle name.

It's fair to say that the accident is the sole reason why King wasted little time in putting a capper on the series, and without saying much more, the way he writes himself into the books absolutely supports that idea. In the introduction to the revised edition of "The Gunslinger," King reflects on the accident and how it almost put an end to "The Dark Tower" — comparing the thought of the series cut-short to the Chaucer's unfinished "Canterbury Tales." That analogy might be a little too self-indulgent and precious, but it's nonetheless revealing: though he received letters for years begging him to wrap-up the series, what finally spurred King on was realizing he'd be personally disappointed in leaving Roland without some kind of ending.

The Future

Now there's a new iteration of "The Dark Tower" that might leave audiences without an ending. The development deal that brought forth the new movie also pinned a prospective TV series to the package — an adaptation of the flashback story in "Wizard and Glass" with cameo appearances by Idris Elba reprising his role as grown-up Roland in the movie. On top of franchise aspirations, there have been hints that the movie is more than an adaptation of the original novels. Though King isn't super-closely involved with the new film, he tweeted out an image from the set that suggests how film could be seen in relation to the canon of the books (seriously, only click this if you're fine with having the ending of the books completely spoiled).

Unfortunately, "Tower junkies" and newcomers alike might end up disappointed with the new movie, and if that translates to a box-office bust then the TV adaptation is probably going to an early grave. Then again, occasional TV and movie duds have done nothing to dull Stephen King's influence over the years. If 2017's "Dark Tower" movie goes down in flames, there's a pretty good chance at a reboot further on down the line. The man in black will flee across the desert again, and the gunslinger will follow.

<p>Mathew Olson is an Associate Editor at Digg.</p>

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