jelly doughnut!') every three pages or so. There's Eddie, an ex-heroin addict from Brooklyn, who is meant to be the comic relief of the series, spouting a corny saying ('Roll me in sugar and call me a. During the first four books, he acquires a 'ka-tet' composed of three New Yorkers from different historical eras.

The central figure throughout is Roland, who is essentially Clint Eastwood's spaghetti western antihero, except he's not afraid of the occasional hug. He filled the stories of 'The Dark Tower I' with foreshadowing, laying the groundwork for a place called Mid-World. King plunged ahead, with the combustible mixture of confidence and naïveté that seems to propel his writing still.

This is the sort of awkward idea most writers would not admit to having even considered. According to King, he was inspired to start writing this story after watching 'The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,' and he had the further notion to combine a western with a fantasy like J. In the opening chapters of 'The Gunslinger: The Dark Tower I,' our hero, Roland Deschain, blows away an entire town. The 'Dark Tower' series is not the longest popular novel ever written, but it's easily the one with the highest body count. Should you decide to do this, be prepared: it won't exactly be the year of reading Proust. The message: faithful fans must make the journey to the tower if they wish to comprehend the master. To emphasize this point, the back of each volume shows a picture of King as a young man (perched over a typewriter, naturally) juxtaposed with one of him now. He has folded in characters from his non-'Dark Tower' novels, turning this into an über-narrative that, he suggests, is the keystone to his other work. King has built the series into a monument to his ambition. So now, with the 'Dark Tower' books stacked before us, the question can be answered: would anyone read these things if they weren't by Stephen King? It's not an idle question. Man, we just started shaking our heads and saying, 'There goes the Tower, it's tilting, it's falling, ahhh. He was almost killed in a 1999 roadside accident, and, as he has written, the reaction of a Michigan reader was typical: 'I was with this good friend of mine when we heard you got popped. If that fact alone does not send a shiver up your spine, you're probably not a King fan. With the publication of 'The Dark Tower VII,' the series has topped the 4,000-page mark and, mercifully, reached its conclusion. As the first line in the 'Dark Tower' series, it begins a story King intended to be the longest popular novel in history.

IN 1970, when he was 22, Stephen King wrote a sentence he liked: 'The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.' It's an innocent sentence - pulpy and suggestive - but it grew to become a monster.

The dark tower series books