“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”
That’s how Stephen King introduces us to The Dark Tower. Twelve words. A man fleeing. Another following. A desert stretching between them.
You immediately want to know who these men are, why one is chasing the other and what waits for them at the end of the desert. More importantly, you can already feel that you have stepped into somewhere strange.
The world of Roland Deschain grabs you from that opening line and never completely lets go.
I recently wrote about the mystery of imagination in “Where Do They Come Up With This Stuff?” How does someone create something that didn’t exist before? Not merely a new character or story, but an entire reality?
When it comes to world building, I’d be hard pressed to find anything more interesting than The Dark Tower.
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The world has moved on
Roland is part warrior, part priest, part Jedi and part poet. He’s the last remnant of an ancient order whose customs we only gradually begin to understand. He carries revolvers forged from something almost sacred, follows rituals from a civilization that has largely disappeared and speaks with the gravity of someone who belongs to another age.
His world has “moved on.”
It’s one of the most evocative ideas King has ever created. Time no longer behaves properly. Distance has become unreliable. Technology from the past lies scattered among the ruins, sometimes worshipped and sometimes barely understood. The structures holding reality together appear to be weakening.
It feels as though the universe is being slowly pulled apart, a dystopian unwinding from order into chaos.
At the centre of everything stands the Dark Tower.
The Tower is a place, but it’s also much more than that. It’s the axis holding worlds together, the destination toward which Roland has sacrificed nearly everything and a mystery that grows more powerful the less completely it’s explained.
Around it, King builds an extraordinary mixture of mythology, mysticism, horror, science fiction, fantasy and Western folklore. There are ruined cities, ancient machines, impossible doors, alternate histories and creatures that feel as if they escaped from a nightmare you only half remember.
Everything is in there.
The impossible doors
By the end of the second book, The Drawing of the Three, King has made the impossible feel strangely plausible. You begin to imagine that there really might be doors hidden throughout our own world, doors that could open onto Roland’s dreamlike reality if you happened to find one at exactly the wrong, or perhaps exactly the right, moment.
That’s what great world building can do. It doesn’t merely show you another world. It leaves you half believing that the other world might exist somewhere beside our own.
But halfway through the series, I began to worry that King had created his world too well.
How could anyone possibly finish a story this large?
Can any ending equal the journey?
That has always been King’s Achilles’ heel for me. His journeys can be so imaginative, so engrossing and so full of possibility that the eventual destination is almost inevitably a little disappointing. The mystery expands until no answer could ever feel as powerful as the questions.
The Dark Tower is no exception.
Without getting into spoilers, the final three books go off the rails a little. The story becomes increasingly strange and self aware, and some choices work better than others. At times, it feels as though even King is struggling to contain everything he has created.
And yet, the imagination never stops being astonishing.
Even when the story wanders, it wanders into places no other writer would have conceived. Stephen King sometimes seems as though he’s pulling ideas from another dimension. There’s simply too much of it, the characters, creatures, histories, images and entire worlds, for it to feel like the product of one person’s mind.
King the craftsman
Describing King as imaginative can obscure something equally important. He’s an extraordinarily skilled writer.
Because he became one of the world’s most popular authors, it can be easy to take that skill for granted. Popularity is sometimes treated as the opposite of literary merit, as though being widely read means a writer can’t also be serious about the craft.
King’s On Writing should put that idea to rest. It’s worth reading for anyone who loves to write, or who simply wants to understand how writing works. King knows how to create momentum, establish a voice and make readers care. He understands that even the most fantastic world must be grounded in believable human fears, loyalties and failures.
That’s why Roland’s world stays with me.
Why I keep going back
I’ve returned to The Dark Tower many times over the years. Not because every part of the series works perfectly, and not because I’m entirely satisfied with where the journey eventually leads.
I return because I want to enter that world again.
I want to walk beside Roland and his ka tet. I want to see the abandoned machines, hear the old stories and stand before those impossible doors. I want to experience that feeling that reality is larger, stranger and less stable than it appears.
Perhaps that’s why the idea of a world that has “moved on” feels even more powerful now than it did when I first encountered it.
Sometimes our own systems seem to be fraying. Institutions weaken. Technology advances faster than our ability to understand what it is doing to us. The past becomes something we dimly remember, while the future feels increasingly difficult to imagine.
Sometimes it really does feel as though our world is moving on.
And somewhere beyond it, at least in the part of my imagination King permanently claimed, the Dark Tower is still standing.
Books mentioned
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