"Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came."


"The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed." Thus begins Stephen King's magnum opus, The Dark Tower series, which tells of Roland Deschain, Gunslinger of Gilead, and his quest for the Dark Tower, which spans many years and many worlds (and seven books), incorporating elements of fantasy, science fiction, western, and horror all into one.

Inspired by Robert Browning's poem "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came", T.S. Eliot's poem "The Waste Lands", and of course, Tolkien, King wanted to write an epic fantasy on the same scale as The Lord of the Rings, but in a different setting, and begins his tale in a world something like that of Sergio Leone's The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, with his gunslinger character seemingly (at first) not too different than that of Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name.

Roland of Gilead is the last of the knightly order of Gunslingers in a "world that has moved on", and is more or less falling apart, with things such as time, distance, and direction increasingly having little-to-no meaning. He finds doorways to other worlds, where he meets his twentieth-century companions Eddie, Susannah, and Jake, who learn the way of the Gunslinger as they journey toward the Dark Tower, encountering nuclear mutants, vampires, demons, beast-men, robots, and suicidal bullet trains along the way. But who is the Man in Black, and why is Roland chasing him? Will Roland ever reach the top room of the Dark Tower and discover what secrets it holds? Well, I'm not telling.

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