Man, I cant wait 4 November 2 come around...
I've never been a huge fan of Stephen King's work - no denying the guy's genius,
but his stuff just doesnt do that much 4 me (except maybe Carrie and Salem's Lot)
That was until about 6 years ago, when my cousin introduced me 2
The Dark Tower part 1: 'The Gunslinger' and I was totally hooked.

I was just intruiged 2 see if anyone else on here has followed this series, and what their thoughts are?

4 more info, check out the awesome website dedicated 2 The Dark Tower, and Roland's quest...
http://www.stephenking.co...movie.html

only the buffy series

Thanx 4 that.
NEXT!

dayum...the last stephen king novel i read wuz nightmares & dreamscapes, and that wuz like a couple years ago.

bananacologne said:

if i was still working at my old place i would have been able 2 "leak" bits of the book 2 u

that's kind...but I aint that kind of guy. Sma with movies - I avoid as much publicity as I can about em, then just dive in and devour!
The good thing about King is he always plays his cards close 2 his chest.
Nice thought tho - cheers

At the moment I'm catching up. I just started the 3rd book 2 days ago. It's really good.

I wanted to read the books earlier but a friend of mine advised to wait a while because the complete story wasn't finished yet and waiting was very frustrating.

I think by the time the Wolves of the Calla (Dark Tower V) is released I have read all the previous books and I can join the waiting group for the next book. But that should be summer 2004, "Song of Susannah" and the final installment November 2004, "The Dark Towerd"

King also updated The Gunslinger. About 20 pages were added.

In the short story collection "Everything's eventual" is a short story about Roland's younger years: "Little sisters of Eluria"

Greets!
Erik

I'm reading up on King, and haven't got to the Gun Slinger books yet. Can't wait. I'm on the Talisman right now. Phenominal book.

TwIsTeDmInD said:

You must like the Dark Tower series if you like Talisman. Talisman has a sequel, Black House.

Best books (my opinion) are:
Misery, The Stand, Pet semetary and Needfull things.

I'm reading that too! I started reading the Black House, but wanted to learn more about Jack (the main character) so i started up the Talisman.

I've read the whole series so far, as well as everthing else he's ever written. I am a huge King fan, and have been since I was about 10 years old. I can't wait for the new one to come out, but I've heard rumours (that I refuse to believe) that he's retiring after the series is completed.

Marmelstein Said:

Yeah, I know all that, read all of them 2 date, and cant wait 4 the revised editions, so I can go back and read them again (the good thing being that much like a good film, there are always different ways of looking at it/things u havent noticed be4 when u watch it the 2nd time around)
Wizard & Glass is my fave so far - a little different than the other books in the series up 2 that date, but once u get in2 it, it's awesome.

minneapolisgenius said:

RECENT QUOTE FROM STEPHEN KING:
Amazon.com: Do you consider the Dark Tower series your opus?

King: Yep. I do. Each time I would stop, I would come back and say "This time it's going to be really hard and this time I'm really going to have to dig and force myself to do the job." And every time it was like the story was just waiting to take me back in. I would say to myself when I was working on it, "Why did I ever stop for as long as I did?" There's no real answer to that except that when I finished each book there seemed to have to be a pause for the well to refill. And when I got to the end and sat down to finish, I think it was in probably July of the year 2000, I'd had an accident and I was in a lot of pain. And that made it physically more difficult than some of the other ones have been. But still, it's the greatest pain reliever in the world, to just go into that other world. I love it.

Amazon.com: Awhile back there were quite a few rumors circulating saying that you were planning to retire from writing soon. How did these get started? And is there any truth to the rumors?

King: I did an interview with a lady from, I think, The LA Times, and she said, "What's in the future?" I told her everything I was doing, which at that time was finishing the Dark Tower books, and I was working on writing 13 episodes of a TV series called Kingdom Hospital. I said, once I get those things done I'm going to push back because I've pretty well said everything that I have to say. And she jumped from that and said, "You're retiring?" And I said, I've said pretty much all I have to say and if that's retiring that's what I'm doing. So, the story came out. Stephen King is retiring...or whatever.

I can't see me reaching a point where I would stop working, because I really enjoy what I'm doing and it passes the time. I'm entertaining myself. John D. MacDonald said that once. "I'm entertaining myself before I entertain anybody else."

But, having said that, I would say, in a way, having finished the Dark Tower, it puts a real bow on the whole package. It does kind of summarize everything else. And I think, after that, that everything would be almost kind of like an epilogue to what I've done with my life's work.

I think that I will slow way down in terms of publishing because, frankly a lot of it's a pain in the ass--the celebrity part of it, having people recognize you. That's a direct outgrowth of all the publicity, which is a good thing as far as the publishers and sellers are concerned because it means you have a high recognition factor. But if I want to go to a baseball game or go to dinner, maybe it's not such a good thing. I mean, it's a double-edged sword. You go out and if the restaurant is full they find a table for you, but then everybody comes up to the table and they want you to sign menus or something like that. It's not a very private deal. It works both ways.

Amazon.com: So will we see any other new Stephen King titles published between June's re-issue of The Gunslinger and The Dark Tower in November, 2004?

King: I have not started a new novel since finishing the Dark Tower novels. This is March. I finished the last one, I think, in October. This would be an ordinary fallow period for me anyway. I have some ideas, but not anything I've started to work on yet. I think the Dark Tower novels will be published and then you might see a period of silence from me that would maybe go from two to five years. But there would definitely be something, I think, unless I should keel over dead.

Amazon.com: God forbid.

King: God forbid. Oh yes.

bananacologne said:

Thanks BC.

Wheww!

Without reading any of the replies on this thread, I will state that I really love the whole Dark Tower series thus far. The first books were really great.

I've only read parts I, II, III. In fact, I am the proud owner of the original hardcover editions from Grant for The Gunslinger and The Drawing of the Three. Anyone else have the Grant limited editions?

u jammy sod!

Now you got me all ready for the next Dark Tower books!

TheMax said:

No.

bananacologne said:

Read the first one. Got annoyed when it took years for him to follow it up. Are they all done now?

ian said:

Yeah, they are - he finished the final book in the series in October of last year. They drop 'Wolves of The Calla' this November. U may find this following excerpt from a recent interview with him of interest:


Amazon.com: Has the Dark Tower series been finished now?

King: Yes. It has.

Amazon.com: The first Dark Tower book was published in 1982, and in the afterword you say you started writing it in 1970, over 30 years ago before even Carrie, your first published novel. When you finally completed the last book of the Dark Tower series, was there a different feeling than you experienced upon completion of your other books?

King: There's always a feeling. You get a feeling when you finish any book because it's a fairly long project. The longer the project, the stronger the feeling you get. With this one it was so…I've never felt anything like it. It was really strange. I don't know how to describe it really.

Amazon.com: The fifth book in the series, The Wolves of the Calla, is scheduled for publication in November 2003, and then the remaining books will be released in fairly quick succession, with Song of Susannah set for release in the summer of 2004 and the final book, The Dark Tower, coming in November of the same year. There was a long period of time between the publication of the previous titles in the series. Why the rush with these final books?

King: Because it seemed to me that once I got started with the actual writing, this time it felt like one of those WWF wrestling matches where it's for all the beans. It's for everything. And I felt like if I didn't finish this time I never would. So I thought, I'll sit down and I'll just hammer away until they're done. And once they were done, there was no reason not to publish them as soon as possible. My original request to the publisher was to publish all three at once. For various reasons they didn't want to do that. One of the reasons was just trying to get as many people as possible interested in the books that had already been published.

When I go places and ask people, "How many of you have read one of my books?," they're there because I'm there, so they all raise their hands. Then I say, "Put your hand down if you've never read any of the Dark Tower books," and always 50 percent of the audience puts their hands down.

Amazon.com: Why is that?

King: I think there are a couple of reasons. First, they think it's really different from everything else I've written, and it's really not. I mean, the same mind, the same intelligence, the same twisted, warped person wrote it all. But the other thing is, I think a lot of people kind of felt like "I don't want to get started on something that isn't finished." And now they are. So I wanted to give them a bit of a chance at Viking to reissue the backlist.

I think the other thing is that it kind of makes up in a way for all the waiting people had to do, to be able to say to them that these books are going to come in fairly rapid succession. A lot of people were pissed at me at the end of The Wastelands because it ends with them on this train that's going to kill them if they don't win this riddling contest. And then Blaine says, "So, cast your nets, wanderers! Try me with your questions, and let the contest begin!" and then... there's a three-year silence. And there were a lot of people who were just ripshit about that. And so to kind of make up for this I wanted to publish these as closely together as I could.

The other thing, Wolves of the Calla and Song of Susannah, they both end on notes that you really want to know what happens next. They're sort of cliffhangers, but I would say I didn't do that on purpose. It's just that if I'm doing my job, then all the time that you're reading the books you should want to know what happens next.

I don't like classifying things--just saying, we can put this guy in a pigeon hole and that's the way it is. The people who read my stuff understand and fortunately there are enough of them so I don't have to explain myself very often

Amazon.com: With 30 years between the first page and the final page of this series, did it end as you'd always planned it to end?

King: It's like shooting a nuclear missile over 3,000 miles. You're happy if it lands in the same neighborhood where you wanted it to finish up. And that's pretty much what I did. I would say that once I got a little way down the path, I was pretty well locked in on where it was going to come out. Some of the other books express that. The non-Gunslinger books that refer to the Gunslinger refer to where it's going. I think that if I did my job correctly, people are going to be really surprised but then they're going to say, "Yes, it just has to be this way."

Love that last cryptic bit!