Obsessed, me?

What immediately springs to mind when you think of Stephen King? Horror, in some form or other, I’m guessing. Maybe the creepy-as-shit clown in It or vengeful psychic Carrie. Certainly it was that sort of terror that first came to me, and, being the terrible squeamish wimp I am, resolved that I would never touch Stephen King, not with a hundred foot barge pole.

I realise now I was missing out. There is so much more to King’s repertoire than chills and screams. Perhaps his greatest work –certainly in my mind it is – is The Dark Tower series, an epic tale of the struggle to save reality itself – alongside deep questions of what reality is that you’ll be left pondering for weeks to come.

I struggle to define what The Dark Tower is exactly; what genre does it fit into? Fantasy, perhaps; there’s plenty of magic and sorcery and evil creatures that aren’t quite human. Sci-fi maybe; multiple worlds, metaphysical questions about the nature of reality. Horror? There are certainly aspects of it (the Doorkeeper from The Wastelands possibly my favourite example of horror in TDT). Arguments could even be made for western. And yet it doesn’t quite fit into any of these categories. It’s something so unique, so totally different to anything else, that it almost creates and fits into a genre entirely of its own.

I can’t pontificate and gush enough about the merits of these books. I can’t summarise them for you; they are beyond summary. I can’t explain them; they’re beyond explanation. Read them. If you’re not hooked after the first one (it had me wriggling on the end of the ling after the first sentence!) then…I don’t know, I can’t imagine that happening enough to think of what would happen then. The Dark Tower is waiting for you, go to it.

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