Stephen King's The Dark Tower

Foreword

by Stephen King

The tale of Roland of Gilead's search for the Dark Tower is a single tale, picaresque in nature (think Huckleberry Finn with monsters, and characters who raft along the Path of the Beam instead of the Mississippi), spanning seven volumes, involving dozens of plot-twists and hundreds of characters. It's hard to tell how much time passes "inside the story," because in Roland Deschain's where and when, both time and direction have become plastic. Outside the story -- in what we laughingly call "the real world" -- thirty-two years passed between the first sentence and the last one.

How long were the lapses between the individual books which make up the entire story? In truth, Constant Reader, I do not know. I think the longest lapse might have been six years (between The Waste Lands and Wizard and Glass). It is a miracle the story was ever finished at all, but perhaps an even greater one that a second volume ever followed the first, which was originally published in a tiny edition by Donald M. Grant, Publish ... read full excerpt from Stephen King's The Dark Tower: A Concordance, Volume I ebook