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The Road to the Dark Tower: Exploring Stephen King's Magnum Opus
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In 1970, Stephen King embarked on what would become the crowning achievement in his literary career-the Dark Tower. The seven-volume series, written and published over a period of 30 years, was inspired by Robert Browning's poem "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came," as well as J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, and the spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone. With the full cooperation of Stephen King himself, The Road to the Dark Tower examines the epic journey of the author to complete a story that threatened to overwhelm him. In this indispensable companion, Bev Vincent presents a book-by-book analysis of each volume in the series, tracing the Dark Tower's connections to King's other novels including The Stand, Insomnia, and Hearts in Atlantis, and offering insights from the author about the creative process involved in crafting his lifelong work-a work that has consumed not only Stephen King, but his legion
465 pages, Hardcover
First published September 1,2004
This edition
- Format
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465 pages, Hardcover
- Published
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October 1, 2005 by Cemetery Dance Publications
- ISBN
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9781587671043
- ASIN
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1587671042
- Language
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English
About the author
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Bev Vincent is the author of The Dark Tower Companion, The Road to the Dark Tower, the Bram Stoker Award nominated companion to Stephen King's Dark Tower series, and The Stephen King Illustrated Companion, which was nominated for a 2010 Edgar® Award and a 2009 Bram Stoker Award. In 2018, he co-edited the anthology Flight or Fright with Stephen King.
His short fiction has appeared in places like Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, Borderlands 5, Ice Cold, and The Blue Religion. Four stories were collected in When the Night Comes Down and another four in a CD Select eBook. His story “The Bank Job” won the Al Blanchard Award. “The Honey Trap” from Ice Cold was nominated for an ITW Thriller Award in 2015 and “Zombies On A Plane” was nominated for an Ignotus Award in 2020.
His work has been translated into: Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, Serbian, Spanish and Ukrainian.
He has been a contributing editor with Cemetery Dance magazine since 2001 and writes book reviews for Onyx Reviews. He has served as a judge for the Al Blanchard, Shirley Jackson and Edgar Awards.
His short fiction has appeared in places like Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, Borderlands 5, Ice Cold, and The Blue Religion. Four stories were collected in When the Night Comes Down and another four in a CD Select eBook. His story “The Bank Job” won the Al Blanchard Award. “The Honey Trap” from Ice Cold was nominated for an ITW Thriller Award in 2015 and “Zombies On A Plane” was nominated for an Ignotus Award in 2020.
His work has been translated into: Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, Serbian, Spanish and Ukrainian.
He has been a contributing editor with Cemetery Dance magazine since 2001 and writes book reviews for Onyx Reviews. He has served as a judge for the Al Blanchard, Shirley Jackson and Edgar Awards.
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Rating(4.1 / 5.0, 96 votes)
5 stars
39(41%)
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30(31%)
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27(28%)
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96 reviews All reviews
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It's a good reference book if nothing else. I did pick up a few theories (none I can remember off the top of my head) that didn't occur to me while reading the series originally. But I'm still disappointed with the series overall.
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I enjoyed this book. Certainly easier to read than the Dark Tower concordances. Well written and well researched, the author does an excellent job of summarizing and highlighting the parts of the Dark Tower series (seven books) while illuminating key facts one might miss while reading this opus. Helps tie things together and even mentions some concepts not everyone will pick-up during a first read-through. I found some of the sections repetative but still interesting and useful as a whole.
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Disappointed in this one. I was hoping for some new insights into the Dark Tower series, subtle things I might have missed, connections I might not have made, etc. What I got was 90% lifted word for word from the subject novels. I just finished reading The Dark Tower, I didn't start this book so that I could read it again.
Chapter 1 was a moderately interesting account of the publishing history of the series. Chapters 2-8 contain a synopsis of the entire series, and this section was painful to get through. Vincent basically just took quotes from the series I just read, and put them together to form a synopsis. There is almost no analysis of any kind. The chapter on major characters was just as bad.
The last few chapters are by far the best in the book. A few interesting theories are presented for some of the not fully explained mysteries of the series. If the entire book had been like these chapters, or even if it was simply a short essay containing ONLY the last few chapters, I would have been much more satisfied. As it was, I came away feeling like I had read the whole series twice, and that I had gained little additional insight the second time around.
If you do read this book, do yourself a favor and skip to the end. That is where the only "Exploring" of Stephen King's great series takes place. And it isn't enough to salvage this completely unnecessary book.
Chapter 1 was a moderately interesting account of the publishing history of the series. Chapters 2-8 contain a synopsis of the entire series, and this section was painful to get through. Vincent basically just took quotes from the series I just read, and put them together to form a synopsis. There is almost no analysis of any kind. The chapter on major characters was just as bad.
The last few chapters are by far the best in the book. A few interesting theories are presented for some of the not fully explained mysteries of the series. If the entire book had been like these chapters, or even if it was simply a short essay containing ONLY the last few chapters, I would have been much more satisfied. As it was, I came away feeling like I had read the whole series twice, and that I had gained little additional insight the second time around.
If you do read this book, do yourself a favor and skip to the end. That is where the only "Exploring" of Stephen King's great series takes place. And it isn't enough to salvage this completely unnecessary book.
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All I can say is, I picked this up thinking it'd give me a look into the (from what I'd heard, completely batshit) world of the Dark Tower series and see if there was something in there worth delving into the full series. I'm quite glad I did because hot damn, it was a bizarre, nonsensical slog of made-up jargon and incomprehensible fantasy logic that went right off the rails and off of a cliff. It took me quite a bit just to figure out what in the hell was going on between the talking trains and the spaghetti-western-by-way-of-the-multiverse worldbuilding...
Honestly, I'm glad I went here first. Smart move.
Honestly, I'm glad I went here first. Smart move.
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Very insightful
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A good companion to The Dark Tower series with plenty of extra info included. It's basically just made me want to read all 7 books again as well as the various related works!
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Unreadable in Kindle format
Almost all punctuation has been stripped out as well as the odd space between words. This is a huge disappointment.
Almost all punctuation has been stripped out as well as the odd space between words. This is a huge disappointment.
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