Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Stephen King cast, one man's musings on the works of Stephen King.

Each week I will review one entry in the bibliography of Stephen King and the chronological order of publication,

and this week we come to the clearing at the end of the past. Over 100 episodes have led to this moment.

In real time, it was a 22-year journey that led to the moment of September 21st, 2004,

when audiences worldwide saw the conclusion of a series that had that point been comprised of six publications

with at least six more tie-in novels that comprised of 5,293 pages.

22 years in which the audience, the constant reader, dreamed about this moment of driving to the bookstore to pluck from its shelves a book that was not a book,

but a doorway that would, one final time, allow us to enter into a magical, fantastic,

strange, dangerous, familiar, unrecognizable world filled with robots, monsters, devils, witches, ghosts, spirits, old friends, and an even older warrior,

the man who had crossed multiple worlds, multiple times, loved greatly, lost more, the complicated, tragic character of Roland, the last gunslinger as he finally reaches

the dark tower as I stayed many times before the dark tower was an incredible

journey for me as a reader I began it as a teen and I ended it as an adult and the years and the months built up

to the moment where I went to the bookstore and hoisted this massive novel from the shelf.

I was caught between a desire to consume and to fast.

I couldn't wait to finish it but I didn't want to finish it. but I didn't want to finish it.

What would I do when I finished it?

And would King be able to meet all of the incredibly unrealistic expectations that I've had for years?

In the months between the publication of the two previous Dark Tower novels, it sent me for a loop where I over-analyzed everything that had occurred and scoured the internet every time

a new Michael Wheelan image was released.

Weillan, of course, is the illustrator commissioned for this novel, the same one fittingly,

who began it with King so many years before.

Three images, I believe, had been released prior to publication,

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