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It is downright wild to look at where fantasy is today.

What used to be a weird, fringe corner of culture for, let's be honest, not the most popular,

has been sanitized, standardized, and, you could argue, ground down into a corporate template.

There is an algorithmic checklist for what high fantasy is supposed to be.

I mean, look, if I asked you right now to picture fantasy,

I think I might just be a mind reader because I can see exactly what you are thinking.

Elves, dark lords, and glowing magic swords, yada yada yada.

Now, what your brain almost certainly did not picture was a cross-dimensional Arthurian gunslinger western mixing in heroin drug mule runs,

giant cyborg bears with parasites, and a very, very evil Charlie the Choo Choo Train, as well as frequent descriptions of urination,

all set to the tune of Hey Jude.

That is, of course, unless you're one of the brave few who made the journey to the Dark Tower.

Some call it Stephen King's magnum opus, others call it a mess, and both are probably right.

You would be hard-pressed to find a fantasy series more controversial

and just generally confusing with a reading order that is famously as convoluted as humanly possible.

So today I'm going to try to do my best, and the key word there is try, to explain what this series even is,

break down the stuttering decades-long publication history and its, shall we say, divisive adaptations, and finally where everything stands today.

So aim with your heart and let's remember the face of our fathers as we explore whatever happened to the Dark Tower.

Hi everyone, my name is Otto and welcome to Exit's Examined.

In this channel we'll be exploring series, franchises, and more after their prime time has seemingly come to an end.

If that sounds good to you, there's a like and subscribe button below

and I want to give an enormous shout out to my patrons who keep this channel alive.

Thank you.

So The Dark Tower is a book series by Stephen King starting in 1978 and it's one of the most disorienting,

fascinating, surreal, and very possibly insane series ever written.

And immediately you'll hit a wall just trying to define what this thing even is.

Is it fantasy?

Science fantasy?

Spaghetti western?

Neo western?

Horror?

The answer is yes.

All of the above turned up to 11 mashed together, overblown and blown up to a hundred bajillion.

Every genre, every trope and every character is pushed past the point of sanity with gruesome scenes

that are straight up nightmare fuel.

I mean to give you a quick taste of the sheer madness in here.

This is a series that features wolves armed with lightsabers,

psychic vampires, and one of the most disturbing birth scenes ever conceived in literature.

And, of course, my personal favorite, although probably not the main characters, Lobstrosities.

It's an epic quest with massive stakes, maybe the largest stakes possible,

set in this sprawling genre-bending fever dream told with equal parts Biblical weight and manic,

some might say cocaine-bender energy.

Now I know that is all very broad strokes, but if one thing should be apparent to you right off the bat,

it's that you best believe this is not a series that can be pinned down in a single sentence.

But if you were to try, I think the one that would most likely sum it up happens to be the most famous line in the series,

as well as the very first one.

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

Now, that sentence is a great little encapsulation of the series, because on a first read, the meaning seems so obvious.

The hero pursues the villain.

You have read that story a hundred times.

But the further you get into it, as with just about everything in this series, it spirals and spirals.

Because nothing in that sentence, the man in black, the desert, and least of all, the gunslinger, can be easily explained.

So take that word, gunslinger.

You're probably picturing some desperado, maybe a gritty Clint Eastwood type.

And to be fair, our gunslinger and hero, question mark, is gritty.

But it's clear from the moment we meet him that gunslinger in this world means something far larger.

More a title or honor, something more akin to a knight.

And his abilities go way beyond what could be considered normal.

He's got skills.

He is inhumanly fast with his guns and equally as impressive with diplomacy and knowledge of the world.

Rollins, as he's known with his striking bombardier blue eyes, is easily one of the most interesting characters in all of fantasy.

But he's also one of the most bizarre because he's so utterly and completely one-dimensional,

but at the same time almost bottomless in his complexity.

And look, I get that sentence probably makes no sense, so let me try to explain.

What I mean is that throughout the series, we're constantly seeing these cryptic glimpses into his extraordinarily lengthy,

tragic, and nightmarish past, Just with these little snippets, the fall of his home Gilead,

his father's death, and the fact that Roland killed his own mother.

But these gargantuan reveals are thrown out almost like byproducts and often left completely unexplained.

You get the feeling that Roland himself doesn't have the imagination or the desire to dwell on them.

And you get the sense that the only two things that really matter to him are one, the pursuit of his journey,

and two, simply, that he is a gunslinger, the last of his kind.

But if you're expecting a noble, moral knight, some chivalric protector of a fallen world, well, Roland is not that.

He's actually kind of a piece of shit precisely because he is so ruthlessly obsessed with his quest.

And in the first book alone, he commits some outright heinous, disgusting acts.

Actually, from the very first moment we meet him, Roland isn't portrayed as heroic or cool, but rather dizzy and disoriented.

He barely seems to know what he's doing or why he's even doing it.

But despite that, he pushes forward with this kind of mule-ish stubbornness.

And to really hammer that point home, his steed isn't some like grand warhorse.

It's literally a mule.

He's described as the kind of man who might straighten bad pictures in strange hotel rooms.

And while that drive is probably his greatest strength, to quote another character describing Roland, it goes beyond steel into madness.

There's this distinct feeling that he's going to keep going and keep going until time immemorial, which actually might just be the case.

But it's not just the gunslinger who feels worn and tired, but still slogging forward.

Because the world itself is described in much the same way.

Now, it isn't anything as dramatic or sexy as post-apocalyptic, just the simple and arguably far more devastating phrase,

the world had moved on.

Quote, The desert was the apotheosis of all deserts, huge, standing to the sky for what looked like eternity in all directions.

It was white and blinding and waterless and without features, save for the faint cloudy haze of the mountains which sketched themselves on the horizon.

And the devil grass which brought sweet dreams, nightmares, death.

An occasional tombstone sign pointed the way.

For once, the drifted track that cut its way through the thick crust of alkali had been a highway.

End quote.

And so, this is a grim world, and a grim series where characters will suffer and death is never far off.

The world feels like it's been coming apart at the seams for an eternity while inside of a fever dream.

So in that manner, everything feels completely out of time and place.

And so, what I mean by that is that there are these weird parallels to our own world, like our own modern earth.

Jesus is here, but known as Man Jesus.

And in a particularly strange twist, Hey Jude by the Beatles is heard playing in saloons of almost American old western towns.

And even the language used in this world reflects this strange analogous reality, and is also by far one of the most iconic parts of the series,

known as high speech.

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So you'll see these phrases thrown around constantly, and honestly they're just really fun and distinct.

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So let's run through high speech 101, shall we?

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So if you want to greet someone, you can say long days and pleasant nights with the traditional response being and may you have twice the number.

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If you want to say thanks, that would be thank you, sigh.

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And if you agree with someone, you could say say true.

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And conversations or negotiations are referred to as a palaver.

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Since one of the first things people like to learn in a foreign language is how to insult people,

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saying someone has forgotten the face of his father is the ultimate dishonor in this world.

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So if you really want to call out your ex or co-worker for messing up, now you know what to say.

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It kind of feels almost like ye olde English mixed with Western American

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and is probably best shown by Roland and the gunslinger's almost religious code.

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Quote, I do not aim with my hands.

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He who aims with his hands has forgotten the face of his father.

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I aim with my eye.

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I do not I shoot with my hands.

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He who shoots with his hand has forgotten the face of his father.

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I shoot with my mind.

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I do not kill with my gun.

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He who kills with his gun has forgotten the face of his father.

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I kill with my heart." Now,

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even though the language and setting have these distorted parallels to our own world that seem familiar enough to understand,

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the world building also has some things that are just straight up fantasy.

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But again, it's not like run of the mill what would typically come to your mind when you think of fantasy.

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Take the Man in Black, for instance.

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Remember him from the very first sentence of the book?

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He's introduced as a sorcerer.

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But his magic is deeply, deeply strange.

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There's this vignette early on where he wanders into an old western town, and the sequence is surreal.

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He brings a dead man back to life through this vulgar, almost slapdash display, I guess,

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spitting on him while the entire tavern gets caught in some collective manic trance and the barmaid starts touching herself.

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It all just feels profaned and wrong.

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And you get the sense

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that magic in the Dark Tower is more like a radioactive element of the universe

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that you just kind of have to coexist with.

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And you get some freakish stuff like succubus, seer demons that will tell you the future if you bang them hard enough.

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Now actually even Roland has his own kind of magic and he can put people into a trance with his bullets.

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And then of course, there is Ka, Roland's favorite word and mantra, and you can think of it as this all-encompassing force,

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sort of like fate, but crucially, it's cast as a turning wheel.

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Now, that might make you think of something sacred or religious, like, I don't know, the force from Star Wars, but the way it's used here is,

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shall we say, is not so chivalrous, and it's kind of hilarious how Roland uses it.

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People will die in horrific ways

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or he'll find himself forced into crazy situations like having to hook up with a barmaid for information

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and he'll just be like, well, that's Ka.

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Best get on with it.

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And the reason Roland is so down with Ka is because whatever Ka is, it's dragging Roland relentlessly toward his immovable,

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single-minded, burn the world goal, the Dark Tower.

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Now, like I said earlier, there are two ultimate defining characteristics of Roland.

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One half is the gunslinger, but the other half is an absolute grade A tower junkie.

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And so what you ask is the Dark Tower?

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Well, it's one of those concepts that might just go beyond human comprehension.

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It could take different forms depending on who or what is even looking at it,

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But maybe the best way you and I can understand it is that the Dark Tower is the center of all creation,

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kind of the nexus point of time, space, and every existing universe in reality.

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And that right there, my friend, is a huge chunk of why this series is so, so, so confusing.

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Because the Dark Tower series is fundamentally a multi-dimensional reality-spanning road trip.

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So, for example, the setting of the first book is known as Midworld.

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But there are countless other worlds and realities stacked alongside it,

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including our own worlds as well as infinite parallel variations.

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And in this way, all of these parallel worlds are constantly echoing through one another.

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It's why you'll hear Hey Jude playing in a mid-world saloon or stumble across strange, warped allusions to things from our very own pop culture,

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like the Rolling Stones' Painted Black and iconic stories like The Wizard of Oz

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or even children's books like Charlie the Choo Choo Train.

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Parts of them could appear in every reality and in some worlds they could even be reality.

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Although they might not be happy versions of it.

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And I'm looking at you Charlie the Choo Choo.

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And on top of that you have these reoccurring motifs and elements that pop up over and over again.

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It could be specific numbers like 19 or 99

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or the concept of twins because we have to remember

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that Ka is a wheel and everything becomes connected in this spider web of realities

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and you'll be like a quarter of a way through the series

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and suddenly looking like Charlie with his conspiracy boards trying to connect everything.

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And this is what I mean when I say the scope of the story is truly titanic,

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literally layering story upon story upon story stacked on top of each other, blended into one massive, unpredictable series.

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So, in one book, you could go from 20th century New York City to the tragic history of Roland's lost homeland,

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who themselves have parallels and connections to Arthurian legends, and all of these somehow loop back and correlate to one another.

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And I want to check, are you doing okay?

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Are you following?

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Do you need some water?

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Well, we might not have water, but we do have another liquid in abundance.

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Because, if all of this might sound a bit meta, crucially it never feels pretentious.

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Probably because Stephen King, if you aren't aware, is a relentlessly, uh, visceral author,

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you could say, who loves digging into the grimy mundanity of human existence and basic biological needs.

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Seriously, there is so much ejaculating and urination in these books characters are constantly peeing themselves.

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So, uh, that's there.

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Now look, if all that sounds like a fever dream, that's okay.

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It's okay to be confused.

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Or maybe I'm just saying that to reassure myself here.

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But the good news is that on a high level, the actual plot of The Dark Tower isn't actually that hard.

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Sort of.

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And on that note, heads up, there will be heavy spoilers here, and I cannot explain enough how best it is to read these books spoiler free.

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So basically, you could sum up the whole story as a night cowboy adopts a recovering heroin addict, a woman in a wheelchair with split personalities, a kid who really hates people,

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and a dog raccoon, and they go on a long-winded multi-dimensional road trip to fix the universe's Wi-Fi.

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Okay, fine, fine, it is a bit more nuanced than that.

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Now, as we've already established, the world is completely messed up.

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And the reason everything is unraveling is because the dark tower is anchored

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and held upright by six massive beams that stretch across existence, with a saying in mid-worlds that all things serve the beam.

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But those beams are slowly becoming undone, and if the beams snap, the tower falls.

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And if the dark tower falls, well, God only knows what will happen.

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But you can bet it would probably be bad news bears for reality itself.

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But why is this happening?

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Well, because of the Crimson King, based on, why not, the real world song.

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Now, the Crimson King wants to destroy the beams, trigger the collapse of the Dark Tower, and plunge all of reality into a state of primal chaos known as Discordia.

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He believes that not only that he can survive the death of the multiverse, but that he can rule over it.

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You know, basically just classic bad guy stuff. And

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so, the bulk of the Dark Tower series is the journey

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of Roland going on a multiversal trip to get to the Dark Tower and hopefully along the way, fix the beams and save all of reality.

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So yeah, pretty high stakes.

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But fortunately, not just for the universe, but also Roland himself, he is not alone.

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Roland has a crew known as the Contet of 1999, which come on, that is a sick squad day.

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In high speech, a Contet essentially means one made for me, a group brought together by the irresistible pull of fate.

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And this is effectively the Dark Towers version of the Fellowship of the Ring, except it's pound for pound probably the most peculiar,

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mismatched bunch of misfits to form any fantasy squad, and that is not a bad thing.

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So here's who we got.

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Eddie, a 23-year-old wisecracking heroin addict from our own 1980s New York City.

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Susanna, a civil rights activist from the 1960s who uses a wheelchair after losing her legs

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and also happens to suffer from severe, violently conflicting split personalities.

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Jake, an 11-year-old kid from 1970s Manhattan who possesses powerful psychic abilities.

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And finally, Oi, a Billy Bumbler, which is essentially a cross between a raccoon, woodchuck, and dash hound.

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He's the best.

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Now, the way this group interacts and evolves across the books is really the core of the series.

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Roland, who himself is traumatized, takes these other traumatized people from our world and trains them until,

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with the exception and a boy who needs no training to be great, they all become formidable gunslingers in their own right.

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And this katet is the most important element of Roland's arc.

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For a man who started his journey cold, detached, and willing to sacrifice anyone to reach his goal, it's not just him teaching his katet,

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but the other way around.

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And the katet really becomes his heart.

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Now, you're probably wondering how on earth did a gunslinger in a desert end up building a squad out of an addict, an activist in a wheelchair,

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and a kid from three different decades of New York?

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Well, that is a good question.

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And to answer that, we have to run through the pretty convoluted story of the Dark Tower series.

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So buckle up and try to stay with me, because things are about to move very fast with a lot of different names and concepts.

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So let's plaver you and I.

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Now, we already talked a bit about the first book, which is this bleak, surreal, dark fantasy Western.

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Roland is relentlessly pursuing the Man in Black across the desert

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and along the way he massacres an entire town that's been corrupted by the Man in Black

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and eventually stumbles upon Jake who dropped in from 1970s New York

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and somehow woke up in mid-world after being run over by a car in his own universe.

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Now Roland eventually grows to love the boy but during a grueling trek through a mutant infested underground mountain pass, which is very Fallout vibes,

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Roland is faced with a choice.

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Save Jake or let him fall to his death so Roland can catch the man in black.

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And Roland, true to his single-minded tower junkie addiction, lets the boy ball.

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With Jake's final words, go then, there are other worlds than this, haunting Roland for the rest of his life.

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And when Roland finally corners the man in black, instead of this grand, heroic duel,

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they sit down for this almost hallucinogenic cosmic conversation about the nature of reality and the dark tower.

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And Roland falls asleep.

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And when he wakes up, the man in black is a decayed skeleton and Roland has inexplicably aged 10 years overnight.

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So yeah, a fever dream of a ride.

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And then the next book takes that entire vibe, throws it out the window, sets it on fire.

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Roland wakes up on a beach, gets ambushed by giant carnivorous lobstrocities that bite off two of his fingers and a toe,

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and he ends up on death's door with blood poisoning.

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To survive, he steps through this multi-dimensional door that leads into 20th century New York City,

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where he recruits Eddie, who just so happens to be in the middle of a high-stakes drug smuggling run,

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as well as Susanna, a wealthy activist dealing with violent split personality.

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And all of a sudden, the story transforms into more of this gritty urban crime thriller,

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with tons of pop culture references and the majority of it taking place in New York City, and it feels like we're just reading an entirely different series.

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Then, book three jumps back around yet again into more of a classic fantasy journey.

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The Kotet crosses Midworld, fights a giant cybernetic bear with a parasitic computer brain.

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Roland starts going insane because of parallel timeline shenanigans created by Jake's death.

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It gets confusing, but to make a long story short,

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this all culminates with the current group pulling Jake back into Midworld along with Oi the Billy Bumbler.

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And this is the formation of the Kotet.

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And in celebration, the group quickly gets captured by Blaine the Mono,

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a hyper-intelligent AI train with parallels to our own world story of Charlie the Choo Choo Train,

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which is an insane sentence when I say it out loud.

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I mean, I mean, this series is so crazy.

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Okay, so Blaine kidnaps the Kottet and threatens to kill them unless they can defeat him in a game of riddles.

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And how do they beat a godlike trained supercomputer?

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Well, Eddie defeats Blaine by bombarding him with nonsensical,

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dumb, wisecracking, trash talk jokes until Blaine literally short-circuits from the stupidity of it all.

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With my favorite being, why did the dead baby cross the road?

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Because it was stapled to the chicken.

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Did I mention that this series is insane?

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Now, book four pivots again, which big shocker, right? with the majority of the book being this extended flashback to Roland's youth in the fallen kingdom of Gilead.

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We meet Roland's original childhood quartet, the tragic story of his first love, and the origins of his quest.

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Now, we'll talk about why this happens later, but after book four, things take a steep turn and things ramp up very quickly toward an ending.

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With book five functioning kind of like fantasy version of the Magnificent Seven, or to the more cultured among you Seven Samurai,

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where the Kothent defends a small village from a reoccurring horde of wolves, who turn out to be robots dressed like Doctor Doom,

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armed with lightsabers and exploding grenades styled after the golden snitch from Harry Potter.

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Did I mention that this series is insane?

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And from there, you can believe that things get even more completely off the rails somehow.

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Susan is possessed by a demon, leading to one of the most disturbing sequences in fantasy,

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the birth of Mordred, a shape-shifting human-spider hybrid who is technically the biological child of Roland and Susanna, despite the two never having sex.

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Now, Mordred is delivered in a room full of demon worshippers and enters the world with a raging erection.

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Did I mention that this series is insane?

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Now, raise yourself, my content, and remember the face of your father,

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because we haven't even gotten to the most heart-wrenching and polarizing part of the entire saga.

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The ending of the Dark Tower is a titanic can of worms.

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And look, I know I mentioned spoilers, but I really want to stress again huge spoilers here

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because things truly come to a head and the emotional toll is brutal.

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First, Eddie dies during the battle against the Beam Breakers.

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Then comes Jake's, with Jake actually dying,

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saving none other than Stephen King himself Because why not let's throw fourth wall breaks in the series too.

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With Jake throwing himself in front of a minivan to push King out of the way.

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Now this wall break is something people still argue about and is pretty controversial.

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But either way Jake's death is an absolute punch to the gut.

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Now I get that Ka is a wheel

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but why did King have to kill this poor kid so many times in a series.

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And if that's not enough for you then oy dies.

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Like come on how much can one reader take.

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But despite all of this unimaginable loss, their sacrifices aren't in vain.

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Without diving into a 20-minute tangent on the exact mechanics of the Dark Tower's magic system, the short version is that they win.

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The beams are saved and reality is stabilized.

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And can you believe it?

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This is where the story gets, shall we say, even more contentious for a lot of people.

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To start with, the final showdown with the series' main villains are, well, let's just say they leave a bit to be desired.

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If you're expecting a monolithic Wheel of Time style final battle that takes up an entire book, you will be disappointed.

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Because the Crimson King himself is essentially reduced to a crazy old man trapped on a balcony outside the tower,

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throwing weaponized Harry Potter snitches at Roland until he's casually and quite literally erased from existence,

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which is very low-key given the pretty monumental buildup of this dude across the series.

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Now, that would all be one thing, but then we still have yet to get to the very end.

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After taking you on what can only be described as a titanic journey, Roland finally reaches the Dark Tower,

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and King himself actually knew what he was writing here would make people furious.

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And I've never seen anything else like this, but he actually wrote a warning to the reader right there before the final chapter to stop reading.

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But like, come on, did anyone ever actually stop there.

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Okay, so deep breath.

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What happens is that Roland's memories are completely wiped

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and he's thrown right back to where book one began standing

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in the middle of the desert with the entire series ending with the exact line it started with.

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

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So yeah, the whole thing is a time loop and a lot of people hated it.

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And you can understand why.

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After we spent decades walking alongside Roland, watching his friends suffer and die, only to be told that the journey they just read was simply an iteration is a lot.

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But it does have to be said that some people love it.

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After all, remember that Ka is a wheel.

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And if you go back and reread the series, it's hinted that this loop isn't an exact copy of the last one.

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In the final chapter, Roland finds himself with the Horn of Eld, an artifact from his youth that he dropped on the previous iteration.

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So reading between the lines, some people think that this means that this new iteration will be the one Roland finally gets right.

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Now woof.

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If you managed to get through all that, pat yourself on the back.

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But also, I cannot overstate how much I greatly, greatly simplify things.

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I haven't mentioned so, so many wild things in here.

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Like the Great Old Ones for instance.

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hyper-advanced society that's referenced throughout the series.

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Or Merlin's Rainbow, these colored glass orbs with terrifying powers.

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And of course, Gan, the ultimate supreme deity of King's universe.

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And the Dark Tower itself is said to literally be Gan's physical body.

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So much of the Dark Tower is deliberately left open-ended, packed with weird side tangents and unexplained history.

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But the ambiguity is kind of the whole beauty here.

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King is definitely not giving you a clean textbook encyclopedia

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and instead he trusts you and your imagination to fill in the gaps,

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which arguably makes everything feel way larger and more mysterious than anything he could ever write.

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Speaking of writing, all of that insanity is wrapped in some truly exquisite, just entertaining and fun writing.

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And the style itself mimics this crazy, genre-blending nature of the story,

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merging this dense, archaic, mythic prose with coarse street-level slang spoken by a recovering heroin addict from 1980s New York,

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with some beautiful, to-the-point, strong quotes thrown in throughout it, like, quote, first comes smiles,

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then lies, last is gunfire.

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Or, a coward judges all he sees by what he is.

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End quote.

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And of course, maybe the most important and haunting line, quote, go then, there are other worlds than these.

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End quote.

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Speaking of endless sprawling worlds like Roland's mid-worlds, if you're spending hours at your desk reading lore,

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Whether you're looking for dark, gothic vibes or clean, Japanese-inspired aesthetic art, Arcalute has a massive collection with pretty much everything.

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Massive thanks to Arcalute for sponsoring today's video and supporting the channel.

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Okay, so taking a step back, we should probably look at how a series this utterly unique ever came about.

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Because if you somehow don't know anything about Stephen King, the guy is regarded as the king of horror.

366

So a genre-bending, high-fantasy epic is a bit out of left field, right?

367

Well, sort of.

368

For a series that reads like a fever dream, you might guess that its inspirations were equally chaotic.

369

And you'd be absolutely right.

370

King was pulling from wildly different corners of culture from American Western, Spaghetti Western, the Bible, and The Seven Samurai.

371

But some loom larger than others, with the good, the bad, and the ugly, with Clint Eastwood being an enormous inspiration.

372

Quote, before the film was even half over, I realized that what I wanted to write was a novel that contained Tolkien's sense of quest and magic,

373

but set against an absurdly majestic western backdrop.

374

And that brings us to another pillar, or beam if you will, of the Dark Tower, which is of course Tolkien.

375

King wanted his own fellowship, or quartet, and a lot of the world building was directly inspired from Middle-earth,

376

with the naming styles like mid-worlds, and even his own constructed language in high speech.

377

plus, you know, Tolkien literally had a dark tower or two of his own.

378

Probably the largest spark of inspiration actually came from the 1855

379

narrative poem Child Roland to the Dark Tower came by Robert Browning,

380

which King read and apparently just sent his imagination into overdrive.

381

Quote, still nobody knows what the Dark Tower is.

382

And so I started off wondering, what is this tower?

383

What does it mean?

384

And I decided that everybody has some sort of a dark tower in their lives that they want to find.

385

And they know it's destructive and will probably mean the end of them.

386

So I thought, maybe it's different things to different people.

387

And I can play with that a little bit.

388

End quote.

389

Now, the actual writing of the gunslinger started in 1970 while King was still at university.

390

While he was apparently working at the library

391

and he found this ream of bright green heavy-duty paper

392

that someone left behind and simply couldn't stand the sight of a blank sheet of paper.

393

Now, it was not written all in one go.

394

Far from it.

395

He would write it in starts and stops throughout the years, with the first book, The Gunslinger, being something of an evolving work.

396

And when The Gunslinger finally made its way into the world, it didn't exactly arrive with a trumpet blast, but more of a whimper.

397

It actually trickled out in pieces serialized in the magazine of fantasy

398

and science fiction starting in 1978 because King basically didn't think anyone would actually want to read the thing.

399

It wasn't until years later in 1982 it was finally released in limited edition

400

and even then it wasn't exactly static because King went back

401

and reworked the gunslinger extensively and a few times over the years saying

402

that the original was written by a very young and pretentious man.

403

So if you're picking up a version of The Gunslinger today, it's very likely it's a version that has been revised by King.

404

Fortunately, once the series started going, it became slightly less spasmodic.

405

And on the bare-bones surface, it's actually refreshingly straightforward.

406

With the main line consisting of The Gunslinger in 1982, The Drawling of the Three in 1987,

407

The Wastelands in 1991, Wizard and Glass in 1998, Wolves of the Kala in 2003, Song of Susanna in 2004,

408

and finally The Dark Tower in 2004.

409

So if you were paying attention to the publication release dates, you'll immediately notice some pretty interesting patterns.

410

Because the series spans much of King's career, and this goes a long way of explaining why the series feels

411

so incredibly tonal different throughout each book because the first four were written a bit meanderingly, I guess you could say,

412

in fits and starts through the 80s and 90s at a grueling slow pace.

413

It wasn't really until after Stephen King's famous car accident almost

414

killed him where he got letters from fans on death row

415

or who were terminally ill begging him to tell them how the series would end.

416

And so with this catalyst, King got to work and pumped out the final few volumes.

417

But it does have to be said

418

that one of the most common critiques of The Dark Tower is that the pacing is completely all over the place, with the latter half moving at a breakneck,

419

almost frantic pace, and with King dropping in some of the kookier elements like the fourth wall breaks

420

and those Harry Potter references.

421

But if the main series isn't your cup of tea, there are actually other stories that make up the series.

422

The Little Sisters of Luria in 1998, which is a prequel.

423

Then, a bit unexpectedly, a full eight years after the main series wrapped up, King returned in 2012 with The Wind Through the Keyhole,

424

which was kind of book 4.5 between Wizard and Glass and Wolves of the Calla.

425

Now, one other cool thing about the publication history that's quite cool

426

and unique is that every book in the main series was published with a set of illustrations,

427

with each individual book having its own illustrator for the whole thing, from Michael Whelan all the way to Jay Lee,

428

and some of these are gorgeous and I've been putting a lot of them on screen.

429

Speaking of the screen, I know some of you are probably screaming at it, spittle flying directly onto the channel's logo.

430

Because we're probably, what, halfway through the video, and we haven't even talked about arguably one of the most interesting,

431

intimidating, and confusing aspects of the Dark Tower, which is, of course, its connection to Stephen King's broader universe.

432

So because of the multiverse shenanigans in the series, it overtly, and covertly I guess, connects to pretty much all of King's works.

433

Although the degree of the connection does kind of vary wildly, and it's something people can absolutely lose their minds over.

434

So if you're familiar with modern shared universes like Sanderson's Cosmere, it's actually a lot more closer to Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion multiverse.

435

Everything is vaguely connected, sometimes through major character crossovers, sometimes with a subtle, wait, is this what I think it is?

436

And sometimes stories aren't even linked directly to the tower, but rather connected through a second book's connection to it.

437

And so on one end of the spectrum, you have heavy hitting primary tie-ins.

438

The Stand, Insomnia, and Salem's Lot features major characters in the series.

439

Then something like the Eyes of the Dragon takes place directly within Midworld.

440

Actually, Salem's Lot is a real book in the Dark Tower series, and King himself said

441

that pretty much everything he was writing in the 90s was connected to the Dark Tower in some way.

442

But again, not all are created equal, because on the other end of the spectrum, you have minor echoes and subtle universe bleed-ins.

443

Now, sure, you could look at all of this and just dismiss it as cocaine-bender logic.

444

But the impressive thing about the meta-interconnected nature of the Dark Tower universe is how real-world stories like The Wizard of Oz,

445

Arthurian Legend, or Charlie the Choo Choo exist as actual tangible realities across its worlds.

446

And in the same way, it makes total sense that King's stories would also be real and echo throughout his worlds.

447

And because the Dark Tower is the center of the universe, of course, the Dark Tower series would stand at the center of King's work.

448

And in that way, it's kind of brilliant.

449

Quote, I have written enough novels and short stories to fill a solar system of the imagination, But Roland's story is my Jupiter,

450

a planet that dwarfs all the others.

451

Dwarfs the others, did I say?

452

I think there's more to it than that, actually." Now, that sounds great, but this does present a bit of a problem,

453

because does this mean that you need to read a bajillion King books just to understand the Dark Tower?

454

Well, not necessarily, but maybe.

455

And if you have, I salute you, and you get your very own Billy Bumbler.

456

But the core series does stand on its own.

457

However, reading ancillary books will definitely enrich your experience.

458

But there's a few different ways to do this on how extreme you want to go.

459

If you just want the original straightforward experience, you can simply pick up the main books and read them in order.

460

Easy, right?

461

But if you want to brave the full brain-melting rabbit hole of reading every single King book that touches the beam,

462

creators like James Van Fleet made incredible videos breaking down exactly how these various parallel worlds crisscross into Romalist's narrative.

463

I've also linked a few incredible comprehensive community guides and reading orders in the description below to help you navigate the madness.

464

And if you choose to take that path, may Ka guide you, my friend.

465

Ants, if all of that somehow still is not enough Dark Tower content for you, you greedy little ca sausage,

466

we're actually still not done.

467

The series has spawned several companion books, like Robin Furst, The Dark Tower,

468

A Concordance, which is an encyclopedia-style reference guide that was actually put together as a database for King's personal use.

469

Then you have The Road to the Dark Tower and The Dark Tower Companion by Bev Vincent, and actually the Love of Reading YouTube channel has a great interview with Vincent,

470

which I'll link below.

471

Finally, in a kind of hilarious piece of meta-publishing, there is an actual real-life release of Charlie the Choo-Choo in 2016 that is featured in the Dark Tower series.

472

And true to the original story, the picture book is pretty unsettling with these gorgeous but deeply eerie illustrations.

473

So speaking of other media, if your first thought on the Dark Tower is how on earth would you ever put this on screen, well, you don't.

474

And that's why, famously and a bit sadly, there were never any adaptations of The Dark Tower and definitely no movie.

475

Oh, what's that?

476

I see someone in the back screaming and pointing to what? That?

477

Oh, you mean that Dark Tower movie?

478

Uh, are you sure you want to talk about that?

479

All right, if you insist, we can palaver about it.

480

All right, jokes aside, The Dark Tower movie actually did have a pretty fascinating decade-long history.

481

Now, this started back in 2007, and fresh off the massive success of Lost, everyone's favorite, J.J.

482

Abrams, optioned the rights from King for a symbolic $19, which is a neat little nod to the book's lore.

483

King was a huge fan of Lost, and it seemed like the perfect fit.

484

But after two years of staring into the narrative abyss that is the Dark Tower, Abrams backed away in 2009, admitting that the project was just too massive and tricky to tackle.

485

So, round two.

486

In 2010, Ron Howard announced a massive plan, including a trilogy of films separated by two seasons of a tie-in TV series to bridge the gaps,

487

which sounded incredible on paper, but yeah, obviously that was way too ambitious for its own good.

488

And the thing bounced around getting trimmed and rewritten.

489

But interestingly enough, actors like Aaron Paul and Liam Neeson were rumored for roles like Eddie Dean and Roland, which I would have loved to see, But nothing came of it.

490

Now, third time's the charm, though.

491

And finally, in 2015, Sony picked up the pieces and fast-tracked a heavily reworked script.

492

And it got off the ground.

493

But whether this was for better or worse, well...

494

By the time the cameras actually started to roll, the production was plagued by too many cooks in the content syndrome.

495

You had Sony execs, Howard and King, all holding creative leverage

496

and test screens were reportedly so disastrous that they led to $6 million in last-minute reshoots.

497

And the studio also made the decision to squeeze a dark, gruesome fantasy epic into a sanitized 95-minute PG-13 movie.

498

Not to mention, when Elbow was cast as Roland, there was the predictable wave of backlash from people upset at

499

a traditionally white character who was being played by a black actor, with King's response being, quote, I didn't care what color he was, as long as he could command the screen,

500

draw fast, and shoot straight.

501

You know what's weirder than that?

502

You see the show Game of Thrones?

503

They're all British.

504

Westeros is basically England, and nobody ever questions that.

505

So, I mean, to me, the idea that a black man would play Roland is minor to that.

506

So, how was the film actually?

507

Well, the good?

508

What came out the other side does have some good in here.

509

The Gunslinger scenes are genuinely great

510

and Tom Taylor does solid work as Jake for a kid actor

511

and Elba and McConaughey Play off each other is just fun casting bad is

512

that the entire thing it feels like someone tried to blend the entire series into a blender

513

and it's basically a mashup of all of the different Dark Tower books crammed into one very confusing story with

514

most of the content

515

and other downright crucial scenes omitted on top of some outright insane pacing with no time to explain what

516

or why any of this is happening.

517

And the ugly?

518

Well, the reviews.

519

But at the start, the movie actually opened at number one, pulling in about 19.5 million on its first week, which again, 19.

520

But the reviews were bad, like really bad.

521

And it's currently at 16% on Rotten Tomatoes, which is rough.

522

Now, to be fair, I don't think it's quite as bad as that would lead you to believe, but either way, word of mouth killed it fast,

523

with nowhere near the franchise launching numbers that Sony clearly wanted.

524

Now, the original plan alongside the film was a companion TV series, but when the movie crashed and burned about as hard as possible,

525

the idea got reworked into a standalone prequel series, and amazingly enough, a pilot was actually shot,

526

but Amazon passed on it in 2000, reportedly because it didn't measure up to their other big fantasy swings like The Lord of the Rings

527

and The Wheel of Time, which is a bit ironic considering what happened to The Wheel of Time.

528

As for King himself, he said that he regretted signing off on the PG-13 rating

529

and thought that that was a major mistake to dilute the books, and that he would want any sequel to go R-rated, Roland to get his hat, and finally bring in the lobstrocities.

530

Now, although that's all pretty grim news, turns out we actually did get one incredible adaptation.

531

Marvel published a long-running Dark Tower comic line starting in 2007 with Jay Lee and Richard Eisenoff handling the art,

532

written by Robin Firth, who wrote some of the reference books and King himself serving as creative director.

533

So this was not a small thing.

534

The first arc covers Roland's early life, and it's fascinating to see things that were only hinted at in the books,

535

like in-depth looks at Gilead and even gorgeous maps.

536

The art itself starts in this glossy early 2000s style

537

and tips into this fever dream aesthetic that matches the tone of the series perfectly.

538

It's manic, unsettling, and uncompromisingly grip.

539

And this wasn't a one and done cash-in either.

540

This thing ran for a decade from 2007 to 2017.

541

This is a pretty massive body of work.

542

Content-wise, it's not messing around either with the fall of Gilead, the battle of Jericho Hill,

543

real dark and brutal stuff that leans into the desperation and hopelessness baked into the books.

544

Basically, if the movie is the adaptation that forgot the face of its father, comics are the one that actually remembered, and I would highly recommend them if you're a fan.

545

And given how much of this world feels like it should have spawned a dozen video games by now, after all, it's about a multiversal gunslinger fighting cyborg bears,

546

the actual output is very slim.

547

There was actually only one real attempt in Discordia, which was a browser game on Kingsite in 2009.

548

It was a point and click adventure using Flash and even had brief shooting gallery segments.

549

Sadly, if you try to play it today, you'll just hit a dead end and a glorious 404 page.

550

It's largely lost to time and the death of Flash, but if someone does have a working link or way to play this, please let me know and I'll drop it in the description.

551

And all of that is a shame because a real Dark Tower game would be amazing.

552

And hey, I'll even take a Red Dead Redemption mod at this point.

553

So where does the Dark Tower stand now?

554

And are we ever going to get another book?

555

Well, it depends on what you consider a Dark Tower book.

556

Recent additions to the Kingsverse that are connected to the Dark Tower like the Gwendy trilogy.

557

And in 1984, King co-wrote The Talisman with Peter Straub.

558

And King later made it clear that the parallel dimension in those books was Midworld.

559

Sadly, Straub passed away.

560

But before then, he sent King a long letter laying out a core idea for a final installment.

561

And that novel, Other Worlds Than These, is set to release in 2026.

562

Outside of that, I couldn't find any other news of King planning any other books, at least according to his site.

563

So after that, the jury is out.

564

But he's already surprised us a lot throughout the years with prequels, so I don't know.

565

It's King, anything is possible.

566

As for screen adaptations, well, we might actually not be done.

567

Because The Torch has been passed to director Mike Flanagan, who has worked on other King films.

568

In 2022, Flanagan announced he had carved out the rights to adapt The Dark Tower into a multi-season TV series,

569

followed by two standalone feature films.

570

And King gave the pilot script his personal seal of approval.

571

Now, that sounds great, but Flanagan has admitted

572

that getting a green light on a project of this scale is one of the most complicated processes of his entire career.

573

And the last news I heard of this project is that it's honestly not looking so hot.

574

But in this era of reboots, I would not be surprised at all if The Dark Tower finally got another chance to shine.

575

But even if Hollywood stumbles, you can bet that the fandom isn't going anywhere.

576

You can hop onto the Dark Tower subreddit and find people carving custom-held keys,

577

showing off high-speech tattoos, and theory-crafting obscure lore connections.

578

Even more beautifully, one of my favorite projects that's been done is this fan-made old-school JRPG

579

that is faithfully recreating the books and looks incredible.

580

And for those curious, I'll link it below.

581

Speaking of fan projects, there's also some really incredible podcasts out there,

582

including Kingslingers, which does an excellent job going into more detail about the series, and beat-by-beat book analysis, which again, I'll link below.

583

So, all of that being said, trying to tie a neat conclusion onto the Dark Tower is practically impossible.

584

There is just too much chaos in here to summarize.

585

But it's that exact, surreal,

586

outlandish coagulation of genres that makes this series so special.

587

Love it or hate it, King pushed the envelope of what fantasy could be.

588

And in a world and time where fantasy feels more codified and boxed in by the day,

589

I personally think we need stories that refuse to play by those rules.

590

Fantasy, by definition, ought to be boundless in imagination.

591

And say what you will, but the Dark Tower is about as boundless as it gets.

592

And so, to my brave and lovely content, I wish you long days and pleasant nights.

593

No matter what path you're on walking toward your own Dark Tower, remember to never forget the face of your fathers.

594

Thank you so much for watching.

595

I want to give a huge shout out to Gunther Heyer for helping me fact check.

596

And another shout out to Quack Atomic for helping me fact check as well.

597

Of course, no shout out is ever complete without shouting out my incredible patrons.

598

Thank you to my top ones Marshall Rather Daishan Skyflakes John B.

599

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602

McGuffey Kana Bellflower Katie Dunn Time Travel Master Stonehenge Hurricane Cobra Panic Rhett Roster and Kezdrix Again,

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you patrons are awesome.

604

I could not do this without you.

605

If you want to find out more ways to join and support the channel, you can find them in the link below.

606

As always, if you ever have any suggestions about what you want me to cover next, please drop a comment.

607

I really appreciate the help and support, and it means a lot to me if you watch the entire video.

608

I really hope you have a fantastic and incredible day, and I'll see you next time.

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