The Dark Tower Companion: A Guide to Stephen King’s Epic Fantasy (2 page)

Introduction

The Journey Begins

The Little Sisters of Eluria

The Battle of Tull

The Way Station

The Man in Black

Sheemie's Tale

M
ARVEL
G
RAPHIC
N
OVELS
: G
UIDES AND
A
LMANACS

The Dark Tower Sketchbook

Gunslinger's Guidebook

End-World Almanac

Guide to Gilead

M
ARVEL
G
RAPHIC
N
OVELS
: T
HE
C
ONTRIBUTORS

Introduction

Robin Furth

Peter David

Jae Lee

Richard Isanove

Michael Lark

Stefano Gaudiano

Laurence Campbell

D
ARK
T
OWER
G
UIDE TO
M
ANHATTAN

O
UR
W
ORLD
P
EOPLE
, P
LACES AND
T
HINGS

People

Places

Things

T
HE
H
ISTORY OF
M
ID
-W
ORLD

T
IME
L
INES

T
HE
G
EOGRAPHY OF
M
ID
-W
ORLD

M
ID
-W
ORLD
P
EOPLE
, P
LACES AND
T
HINGS

People

Places

Things

Mid-World/Manni/Calla Words and Expressions

S
OME
S
TORIES
L
AST
F
OREVER

R
OLAND
D
ESCHAIN'S
E
NEMIES

T
HE
E
ND AND
W
HAT
I
T
M
IGHT
M
EAN

A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS

I
n my first book,
The Road to the Dark Tower
, published a month after the final installment in Stephen King's Dark Tower series in 2004, I wrote for an audience who had already read to the end of book seven. The only way to discuss the significance of certain events in the first book as they related to the way the series ended was to talk about how the series ended. For that reason, the introduction to that book warned readers to set it aside until they reached the final page of
The Dark Tower
.

This book is aimed at a different audience. My assumption is that you haven't necessarily read the entire series, or that you are currently reading it. Perhaps you became interested because of the Marvel graphic novel adaptations and want to learn more about certain characters, events or locations. Maybe the concept of
ka
has you a little mystified and you'd like to find out what it really means. Perhaps you took a break between reading
The Waste Lands
and
Wizard and Glass
and you'd like to refresh your memory of the earlier books. Maybe you're planning a trip to Manhattan and would like to visit some of the real or imaginary locations mentioned in the series. The Dark Tower really does stand at the corner of Second Avenue and 46th Street in Turtle Bay—and Maturin dwells nearby, too. Or maybe you've read the entire series but you can't remember who Theresa Maria Dolores O'Shyven is. If any of these apply, this book is for you.

The spoilers come sequentially. At the end of each chapter about one of the individual books, you'll find a labeled, easily avoided section where I mention a few things that the book foreshadows about the rest of the series. The glossary is a different matter—each entry there contains a summary of everything known about the person, place or thing, so if you read the entry about the Dark Tower itself, you will see things you might not want to know until you're done with the series.

A few things have changed in the Dark Tower universe since 2004. First, there is the Marvel graphic novel series that tells Roland Deschain's story between his coming of age and the end of
The Gunslinger
. Though these comics adapt existing material from the Dark Tower novels, they also expand upon it. Some incidents that are mentioned in passing in King's books are developed into full scenes. For example,
The Long Road Home
turns a few pages from
Wizard and Glass
detailing Roland, Cuthbert and Alain's journey back to Gilead after their adventures in Mejis into a five-issue adventure. The story of the fall of Gilead has never been told before, so the Marvel graphic novels venture into uncharted territory there. At the helm is Robin Furth, King's research assistant when he was working on the latter volumes in the original series, so the graphic novel series is in hands that respect the Dark Tower mythos; however, these stories diverge from King's at times because of the nature of the graphic format. You'll hear from many of the writers and artists involved about their contributions to the series.

There have been developments at King's Web site, too. The Dark Tower section has undergone a couple of redesigns since the series ended, the most recent in 2012. In 2009, the site debuted an interactive game called Discordia, in which players play the part of Tet Corporation's Op19, who explores the Dixie Pig, the “mind-trap” tunnel leading to Fedic and, ultimately, Mid-World and the rotunda at the Fedic Dogan. Discordia represents another component of the expanded universe of the Dark Tower, one that is also directed by Robin Furth, who, together with a team of collaborators, developed an intricate mythos around the battle between Tet Corporation and Sombra/North Central Positronics and how this conflict opened the way for a mobster with a Dark Tower fascination to make her way to Mid-World. Phase II of this game—the Mid-World section—launched in early 2013, and Phase III is in development.

Attempts to adapt the series for film have come and gone. Ron Howard currently owns the rights and seems eager to adapt the series in his unique hybrid vision of film and TV miniseries. Hear what he and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman have to say about their plans.

And, finally, we have an eighth novel in the Dark Tower series:
The Wind Through the Keyhole
, which King has dubbed “The Dark Tower 4.5.” The Voice of the Turtle spoke once again and King found himself revisiting Roland, Eddie, Jake, Susannah and Oy, filling in a gap in the “contemporary” story of the
ka-tet
's quest, adding another incident from the young gunslinger's adventures and introducing readers to a “fairy tale” from the olden days of Mid-World.

This companion contains a list of all the characters, places and things from the eight Dark Tower novels and the Marvel graphic novel series. You'd be
ka-mai
not to check it out.

Finally, King talks about the series and reveals a few secrets. For the first time ever, he reveals the name of Roland's sister. Did you even know Roland had a sister? You do now!

T
he Dark Tower is a series of eight novels written by Stephen King between 1970 and 2011, set (mostly) in an alternate reality called Mid-World. The books detail a gunslinger's quest to save the Dark Tower, which is the linchpin of reality. The series combines the feel of a Clint Eastwood Western with the epic scope of
The Lord of the Rings
and the horrors of, well, a Stephen King novel.

The gunslinger's name is Roland Deschain. He was born into one of the noble families of Gilead in the Barony of New Canaan, the hub of “In-World.” He is the equivalent of one of King Arthur's Knights of the Round Table, except he carries revolvers instead of a sword. The other big difference is that, in his universe, Arthur Eld died many generations before. The other gunslingers of Roland's time were mostly descendants of Arthur Eld, but they too are dead, and Gilead was destroyed in a civil war. Roland is the last of his kind, and he has been wandering Mid-World for hundreds of years in search of his destination.

Technically, Mid-World is just one region of Roland's universe, which consists of In-World, Mid-World and End-World, territories that become decreasingly civilized the farther one gets from Gilead, the home base of Arthur Eld's gunslingers. However, Mid-World has become synonymous with Roland's world.

The name calls to mind Middle Earth from J. R. R. Tolkien's saga. There are similarities and differences. For the most part, Mid-World is populated by humans. There
are
nonhuman creatures, and even monsters, but except for one or two groups, they don't have cultures like the elves, dwarves, orcs and hobbits of Tolkien.

Mid-World exists in a universe parallel to our own. Some geographic locations can be seen as analogs of ones from Earth. The River Whye is like
the Mississippi and the Clean Sea is akin to the Gulf of Mexico, for example. Lud is located geographically near St. Louis but is physically similar to Manhattan. Discordia is apparently west of the White Mountains in New Hampshire.

In most ways, Mid-World is medieval. However, traces of technology date back to a once-thriving ultramodern civilization known as the Old People or the Great Old Ones. Most of this technology is broken. Other modern contraptions may appear in Mid-World because they were brought from another world—including our own—because some people still know the secret of how to travel between universes. It is conceivable that the Great Old Ones were people from our modern Earth who traveled to Mid-World in its distant past.

Mid-World is falling apart. People call this process “moving on.” Civilization has, for the most part, collapsed. Gilead, once the center of a feudal realm akin to King Arthur's—or to the Roman Empire—has been gone for centuries, defeated by insurrection and hubris. The great cities have fallen, technology has failed, and mutations run rampant among animals and even some humans.

Worse still, the once reliable physical constants of time, distance and direction are adrift. What was southeast one day may be south-southeast the next. The distance from Gilead to the Western (Pacific) Sea was once only a thousand miles, but it took Roland hundreds of years to cross it. And during those hundreds of years, Roland glanced off the surface of time the way a flat rock skips off the surface of water. He appears to be middle-aged, but he's far, far older.

The reason everything is falling apart can be traced to the Dark Tower. In one respect, the Tower is simply a building located in End-World. Imagine a black lighthouse that has a varicolored oriel window at the top and a series of balconies that follow a helical pattern around its exterior, corresponding to the windows found in rooms that extend off the spiral staircase inside. There are spires at the top, and it sits in the middle of a field of roses.

However, the Dark Tower is also the axis around which all of the (presumably) infinite versions of reality rotate. It is the sun in the solar system of reality. Each level (or floor) of the Tower corresponds to a different world. Many worlds are nearly identical, differing only in subtle details. The dollar bill has a different president on it in one parallel world. New York's Co-Op City is in Brooklyn in one reality and in the Bronx in another. The town at the end of the George Washington Bridge is Fort Lee in one world and Leabrook in another. Other worlds, though, are vastly different from ours—Mid-World
is one example. In each of these parallel universes, there is something that represents the Dark Tower. In the most important version of our world (known as Keystone Earth), it is represented by a pink rose that grows in a vacant lot in Manhattan.