Just got home from Illinois, locked the front door, old boy, got to set down, take a rest on the porch.

Imagination sets in.

Early soon I'm singing, do, do, do, do, looking out my back door.

This giant...

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

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

and this week's, one of the big ones for me, as I step back through the magic door into the strange yet familiar land of Midworld,

home of gun-toting knights, dimension-hopping

magicians, the nexus of all realities, and monstrous crustaceans who'd like

to talk to you before chopping you up into bits. This week I return to the world

of Roland Dischain, the last gunslinger in a world that's moved on as he

awakens on the beach where we'd last left him in the concluding pages of the first volume of the Dark Tower,

only to find that while he might have bested the man in black, the struggles he now has to face are unpredictable and even more deadly.

The Dark Tower series is the sigil for the Uber Stephen King fan, but it's not among his most famous or widely read entries.

Personally, people I've known who have been major King fans have never been able to enjoy the Dark Tower because I've heard many of them say, I can't get into it.

I attribute that to the first entry in the series of The Gunslinger.

As you no doubt know by now, the Gunslinger was begun by a 19-year-old Stephen King,

and by 1987 in his career, which includes possessed and obsessive cars, friendly werewolves, and space turtles,

the Gunslinger is still by far his weirdest.

Between the strange dialogue, the anachronisms galore, the style of prose, and the bizarre

nature to the central story, which still doesn't really add up to much, you buy it, but

reach the tower to save the universe, it's enough to turn away those who'd come for another entry from the Master of Horror.

...