I'm finally tackling The Dark Tower series by Stephen King

With Ron Howard having signed on to do the entire Dark Tower series by Stephen King in both movie and television format, I felt it was now time that I gave the series another try. I figured that I was close to being the only "Constant Reader" of King's fiction who hadn't read the series yet. That was definitely a sad state of affairs and needed to be fixed as quickly as possible.

Here's a little background on the subject. I purchased the original edition of The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger when it was first published by Donald Grant in 1982. In fact, I bought a Trade Hardcover and one of the signed Limited Editions of it. Man, I wish I still had them. I could just about retire. Anyway, I read the first book and liked it, understanding what King was attempting to accomplish when he first wrote the book while still in college. I then purchased The Dark Tower Book II: The Drawing of the Three when it published in 1987 and read it. I apparently liked it, too, because I bought The Wastelands when it was published in the nineties. The thing is I read the first couple of chapters of The Wastelands and then lost interest in it for whatever reason. A couple of years ago as I was rebuilding my Stephen King collection, I decided to buy the entire series of The Dark Tower in hardcover. I like hardcovers better than paperbacks because they look better, the print is larger, and they last longer if you take care of them. Well, the author had already rewritten The Gunslinger so that it was more in tune with the final books in the series, plus Viking had republished the first four novels in attractive hardcovers with matching dustjackets (or dustjackets that were similar to each other. I bought those and then the last three books in the Donald Grant editions. That was all my wallet could spare.

Late last year when it was announced that Ron Howard would be turning the series into films and that Stephen King had a new Dark Tower novel in the works, I began to seriously consider tackling the series. I was already thinking about re-reading some of King's earlier novels. So, as time moved along and my life changed in various ways, I finally got around to re-reading Salem's Lot and The Shining. I then wrote reviews of them for my blog and Hellnotes. I had devised a battle plan that was pure and simple. I would read a SK novel and then a couple of other novels by different authors, followed by another King book. I did this with both Salem's Lot and The Shining, and it worked perfectly for me, enabling me to enjoy the King novels more fully and to take my time with them.

Four days ago, I pulled out The Dark Tower series from the boxes of books stacked up against my living room wall (I moved to a new place to live back at the end of February and still haven't gotten around to buying a bookcase yet) and looked at them. Here were seven books offering me an adventure of a lifetime. All I had to do was take that first step. My reading time has slowed down considerably as I pursue my own writing career and the need to hit the sack early each evening to keep my health up has been forced upon me. I therefore realized it would take me between twelve-and-eighteen months to read the series. Some of the books are quite thick. Also, I still had The Stand, It, The Dead Zone, Firestarter, and several others by King to re-read during this time perios. Then, when you consider I also have other authors I wanted to read (Steve Hamilton's Misery Bay, Robert McCammon's The Wolf's Hour and Five, Duane Swierczynski's Fun & Games and Hell & Gone, F. Paul Wilson's last three Repairman Jack novels and other books in the Adversary Cycle series, Dan Simmons new novel, Flashback, along with the last "Spenser" novel, books by James Lee Burke, John Connolly, Brent Ghelfi, Lee Child, Christa Faust, Tom Piccirilli, Jack Ketchum, Ray Garton, Dean Koontz, and a score of others) it's becomes mindbloggling to say the least. At the speed I'm now reading, I've probably just covered the next five years of my life, if I live that long.

Okay, so I've already started reading the revised edition of The Gunslinger. I found it a little hard getting into, but it finally started to pick up speed when the Gunslinger shot everybody in the small town of Tull, reminding me of Clint Eastwood in Pale Rider. Now, I'm a hundred pages into it and wondering if I should just continue on with The Drawing of the Three afterwards. Decisions...decisions.

Old friends who are members of the Stephen King message board have been encouraging me with this project, envious that I have all of these SK books ahead of me to read for the first time. I have to admit to being excited about the journey. Maybe I should just quit my job, stop writing, and immerse myself in the adventures of The Dark Tower for the next three months. Ha! Wouldn't that be great? Well, when I finish The Gunslinger, I'll review it here and on website, Hellnotes. As the old Chinese proverb says, "The journey of a thousand miles begins with but the first step."