by Matthew Peckham |
With the seventh and final book in Stephen King's The Dark Tower series arriving on King's 57th birthday
(September 21, 2004), Matt explores the stories, themes, and ideas that comprise the inner and outer layers of
King's "Jupiter," covering the seven core novels, fifteen related books, inspirational and reference material.
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a column by Matthew Peckham The seventh book in a cycle of seven called The Dark Tower opens with Jake and Father Callahan in a showdown at the Dixie Pig in New York circa 1999, as Roland and Eddie in Maine circa 1977 attempting to ensure the safety of a vacant lot that contains a single rose -- our world's manifestation of the Dark Tower. Eventually the broken ka-tet is reunited, and its members resume their journey along the path of the beam to the place the breakers are kept. There, they must permanently end the plot to break the beams before the final stage of the journey.
a column by Matthew Peckham The sixth book in a cycle of seven called The Dark Tower opens with Susannah Dean fleeing through an inter-dimensional door. Her destination: New York City, summer 1999. Susannah's companions attempt to follow through the same door. Thwarting their intentions, the door splits them into two groups and flips their destinations: Roland and Eddie are sent to 1977 where they must locate a bookseller who owns a vacant lot sheltering an all-powerful rose, while Jake and Callahan are sent to 1999 to prevent Susannah's capture by minions of the Crimson King.
a column by Matthew Peckham The fifth book in a cycle of seven called The Dark Tower opens with Roland and his companions journeying to a deceptively tranquil village named Calla Bryn Sturgis. Every 20 years or so, great packs of "wolves" come riding on horses from Thunderclap to raid the village and take its children. The children are eventually returned to the village, but stricken with horrific mental and physical handicaps. Now the wolves are coming to the Calla in one month.
a column by Matthew Peckham The fourth book in a cycle of seven called The Dark Tower is in fact a novel secreted within a novella; the novella concludes the third book's cliffhanger and progresses Roland's ka-tet a minute distance along the path of the beam toward the Dark Tower, while the "novel within" is a ripping 496 pages of flashback: the tale of Roland Deschain of Gilead's first love affair, and the terrible events which first and finally awaken him to his quest to locate the arcane, ailing crux of all time and space.
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a column by Matthew Peckham The third book in a cycle of seven called The Dark Tower opens somewhere north of the Western Sea some months later, in an enormous forest known as the Great West Woods. Roland has been training Eddie and Susannah to become gunslingers, knights of the ancient ways (a sort of Arthurian chivalric code grafted onto the American West mythos), whose talents with projectile weapons are only exceeded by their mental discipline.
a column by Matthew Peckham This is the second book in a cycle of seven called The Dark Tower which describes the quest of the world's last gunslinger -- Roland Deschain of Gilead -- to put right whatever has tainted or "wronged" his rapidly decaying reality. At the center of space and time is the Dark Tower, a nexus for all realities; Roland believes something has corrupted the tower and perverted what he thinks of as "love and light."
a column by Matthew Peckham Stephen King finished scribing his epic seven-book The Dark Tower series in 2003, producing an estimated 2,500 manuscript pages for the final three books in less than two years (the first four total around 2,000). But instead of resting on his laurels, he turned a fastidious revisionist's eye back to the first tale, the one that started it all in the October 1978 issue of Ed Ferman's The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. The result is a greatly improved book that retains the original's post-apocalyptic-western flavor, while leaving no word, phrase, or punctuation mark unturned.
Climbing the Tower: Preface
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