EXPLORING THE WORLD OF THE DARK TOWER

Horror maestro Stephen King has written more than 50 novels over a 43-year timespan, but it is his Dark Tower series that remains his masterpiece. While his standalone novels take place in the small towns and suburbs of working-class America, The Dark Tower is set in a completely new world. This is a world from a post-apocalyptic Western, one where the desert stretches out endlessly and pockets of civilisation struggle to survive.

King, who famously began the saga at the age of 19, has described The Dark Tower as his version of Lord Of The Rings. Its protagonist, Roland Deschain, is King’s Aragorn, the weary gunslinger with royal blood and a mysterious legacy, who follows the path to the Dark Tower with a flare of madness in his eyes. All around him monsters lurk and magic writhes.

A treasure trove of pop culture, the Dark Tower universe is steeped with the novels, films and music that have defined King. Roland smoulders like Clint Eastwood in The Man With No Name and he visits saloons where the Beatles’ “Hey Jude” plays on repeat. In the third book, The Waste Lands, Roland must fight a robot version of Richard Adams’s giant bear Shardik; in the fifth, Wolves Of Calla, he comes up against a pack of robots dressed in the dark cloaks of Marvel supervillain Doctor Doom. The Wolves wield golden explosives called Sneetches (a play on the word Snitch from Harry Potter) and laser sticks that resemble Star Wars’ lightsabers. In a twist, King writes himself into the last two novels: frightened of penning another Dark Tower book, Roland must convince him to continue the saga.

Then there is the mystic Dark Tower itself, a pinprick of black bleeding on the horizon, standing in a field of luscious red roses. It’s Roland’s Holy Grail; his Tower of Mordor; his enchanted fortress, and he will do anything to get there. Kimberley Ballard