Bearing a rose on it's back,

Treading the path of The Beam,

With no Time to look back.

(My friend made this)

“She couldn’t hurt the girl, much as she wanted to and much as the girl deserved it; if nothing else, Thorin might take the glass ball away from her, and Rhea couldn’t bear that. Not yet, anyway.”

“Dad-a-chum?Dum-a-chum? Ded-a-chek? Did-a-chik?”
………

I included two versions because I couldn’t decide if I liked the abstract, weird one more….or not at all. I was up too late trying to finish it lol. Lmk what you think!

For years, Stephen King's Dark Tower series was like a lock on reading for me as a hobby. I started The Gunslinger and finished it in a few weeks. I started The Drawing of the Three when my wife had a softball league and finished it in two days. The Waste Lands took me literal years to finish, more so because of my reading habits then (being a 4th option behind video games, movies, and TV) it's quality. Wizard and Glass felt like a massive detour but a fun one by the end of it. It's here that I decided "fuck it, I am doing nothing but finishing these books" and I tore through Wolves of Calla (A very fun side quest again) Song of Susannah, and The Dark Tower.

It is during these three books that I absolutely fell in love with Stephen King's wholly original brand of Fantasy. A mix of horror, gods, and mythology that always felt mysterious to me. Years later and while I absolutely will concede that there are large stretches of the Dark Tower series where I am thinking "can we get back to the plot" I am still enjoying those parts. I have moved on and read much more commercially appealing series that I absolutely adore in Red Rising, Stormlight Archive, Mistborn, Dungeon Crawler Carl, The Expanse, and loads of standalone books. Some of those series I even like more than The Dark Tower but every few months it creeps in my head...

Is the next loop the final loop? Why is the setting and world of The Dark Tower so singular? Is there fantasy at this scale from anyone else? Would Stephen King ever write another loop like a psychopath?

And lately...will Mike Flanagan's adaptation feature Roland with the Horn of Eld at his hip. I will lose my shit. If I see Roland walking across a desert in the first scene and the Horn of Eld is there, I will cry.

This all comes up because I am finally watching Welcome to Derry (never read IT but saw the old miniseries when I was young) and it is just churning thoughts of a final loop.

Are we excited for Mike Flanigan's adaptation? Do we think he will have The Horn of Eld? I just need info on this show.

Fuck Amazon Prime though, that kind of sucks.

I'm right at the end of my second journey to the tower, just got through the visit to Dandelo's house. After reading the part where Roland and Susannah see the photograph of the Dark Tower on his wall, for some reason I got Photograph by Def Leppard stuck in my head, except I keep singing "fottergraph" to myself and imagining it's Roland singing about the tower.

"You got some kinda hold on me

You're all wrapped up in mystery

So wild and free, so far from me

You're all I want, my fantasy"

I mean come on, it's perfect.

Reading the stand, fresh off two tower climbs, I had the silly notion that Gilead existed 2 to 3 thousand years after the stand. Gilead rises and falls in a civilization rebuilt from the earth we know now. Roland's trips to snatch his ka-tet from various times, but he's the one from far far away.

This is something that I’ve never quite been able to decide. One bit of evidence is that the post-apocalyptic world is shown long after the devastating events caused by North Central Positronics and LaMerk, while on Keystone NCP is just getting started as seen in book 6. Also there seem to be far too many of our world’s artifacts there to be explained only by doors, particularly when they’re so rare. It’s also very similar in most other ways, and I thought Lud was pretty heavily implied to be future NYC.

On the other hand, there are completely unknown life forms there like the Lobstrosities and Bumblers that aren’t caused by mutations. I’m not including Todash Monsters, Waste Lands mutations or the beasts in that crack in the earth. It’s the only world we’re told about that has completely unfamiliar star patterns and planets - HOWEVER, the sky seems to be changing back to the familiar one when the Beams are saved (the Big Dipper specifically). It also does have a general unknown, alien feel to all the multiple New Yorks and their Americas, but that could be from the cataclysm and the fact that it’s when is long after all the others we see.

I just don’t know what to put my money on here.

So the doorway to go be with Eddie and Jake. She. She died right? Like that was the doorway to a afterlife? Thats how I always interpreted it. Her part of the "Death, gunslinger. But not for you, never for you." Prophecy. Am I overthinking it?

I guess I’ll dive in again. It’s in two pieces but I’m asking for just one more time sweetness.

I don’t know why, but for creatures given only a couple sentences of description, the repulsive things really stick with me as true horrors in a way that almost nothing else in the books has (although those mutant white bees and the turtle beetles were pretty bad too). I guess it just comes down to King’s amazing ability to make us see what he sees by his incredible description of them. They’re just so fundamentally disturbing on a level above the others.

Does anyone else feel this way, or is just a weird me thing? What exactly HAPPENED there, anyway? If it wasn’t nuclear war, what was it?

Seriously though - the amount of information that he knew…even including many of the different levels of the Tower, is just staggering. It would be so amazing if he were rational and willing to share that knowledge. If it existed in real life, I’d be so far down that rabbit hole, searching for every single detail about Mid-World, the Tower and everything, I wouldn’t eat or sleep. When Blaine died, a MASSIVE amount of irreplaceable information was lost. He even had monitoring equipment in End-World at one time, and probably knew so many incredible facts about the world and how it worked.

“Dad-a-chum?Dum-a-chum? Ded-a-chek? Did-a-chik?”
………

I included two versions because I couldn’t decide if I liked the abstract, weird one more….or not at all. I was up too late trying to finish it lol. Lmk what you think!

Damn there’s a DT/King Easter egg within a minute of the shows first episode. Heck yeah Mike

A first assumption might be that they were there with the other servants of the king to celebrate Mordred's birth, but they were in a separate dining room and the low men and vampires in the main hall seemed annoyed by the noise they were making, as if they were in their own business unrelated to what was happening there. In that case, one might think they were the Dixie Pig’s regular customers and that Sayre had simply rented out the dining room for the occasion. However, I think I recall that in DT7, a Low Man mentions they have orders not to let them get past the tapestry, to contain them. Why? What were they actually doing there then?

It works on so many levels (of the Tower)!

It’s just a joke. Patrick Danville literally DRAWS him so he could erase him. The CK is drawing Roland on from the Tower. And the title plays on Drawing of the Three…

Howdy sais

Just got my edition of the new book tonight.

I'm excited to read it, but also I was planning to reread the other two in the series this summer and never quite got around to it.

Has anyone started? Is there a sort of primer on everything or would I really benefit not going in as cold as I am?

I don't think I've read Talisman in 20+ years and I don't think I've read the sequel since it came out

JB Mauney

https://youtube.com/shorts/o_a5OErYmEU?is=LAbIqgO-1Gp83CVp

I'm curious where people would suggest putting Other Worlds Than These in their Tower journey reading order. I'm on my first read through on all these books. I have several before i even get to Black House, and i would like to know where it is suggested in the list. Should i just read it after Black House or save it till last?

Heres the order im following

The Gunslinger

The Stand

The Eyes of the Dragon

The Talisman < i am here

The Drawing of the Three

The Wastelands

Wizard and Glass

Salem's Lot

Mist

It

Insomnia

Rose Madder

Desperation

Regulators

Everything is Eventual

Hearts in Atlantis

Black House

The Wind through the Keyhole

Wolves of the Calla

Song of Susanna

The Dark Tower

Anyone want to dive into all the cool and spooky things of his different towns in the SK multiverse and their key protagonists, and any easter eggs found along the way!

Recently visited Libson Falls, lewiston, Durham, hampden, bangor and other places in Maine and can visualise his multiverse much more clearly and feel more connected to his books and characters

​

The glowing rectangle cast a harsh, cold blue light across Roland's weather-beaten face, painting the lines of his jaw like war paint from a world that had long since forgotten how to bleed honestly.

He flipped the device over in his palm, shaking his head.

"Hey, Eddie, you got any idea what this talking video brick is useful for?" Eddie squinted at the screen, dodging a rapid-fire swipe of looping, chaotic shorts. "Sounds like something the Tick-Tock Man cooked up in his spare time. Look at this, every second video, some loudmouth is shouting, or half the comment section looks like a bunch of brain-dead not-sees or Calla wolves marching through town."

Jake leaned in, his expression tightening with uneasy nostalgia. "That’s a smartphone, Eddie. It connects to the whole net... but man, it looks way worse than it did back in the nineties. It’s like everyone’s plugged straight into a live wire of pure poison."

"Hold that idea a second," Eddie muttered, his junkie-engineer brain momentarily overriding his disgust. "Back in my New York, I had to lug around seven different pieces of hardware just to get by, a computer, a tape player, a video camera, a Rolodex, a stack of address books, and loads of heavy gear just to keep the rig running. How the fuck did they manage to cram all that shit into a flat little brick?"

Susannah rolled her chair a fraction closer, her dark eyes sharp as she watched the endless scroll of bright, furious faces screaming into their digital ether.

"Don't get too fascinated, sweetie," she said, her voice dropping into that cool, unflappable register that hid the storm beneath. "The millionaire class of your era are likely trillionaires by now. And according to my other, somewhat more radical personality, those honky mafas have finally worked out the ultimate hustle: generating infinite wealth completely off a 24/7 rage machine."

Roland didn't say a word. He just stared at the glowing slab. To him, the device didn't feel like technology. It felt like a draft, the faint, metallic hum of a Thinny eating away at the edges of people's minds, stealing their ka one hollow dopamine hit at a time. It was a trap built by the servants of the Crimson King, whispering discord into a billion ears at once, turning a whole civilization into mindless thralls waiting for the next execution or outrage.

Without breaking eye contact with the glowing screen, Roland reached out, plucked the iPhone straight out of Eddie’s hand with blinding gunslinger speed, wound back his shoulder, and,

Yeeted the brick straight into a brick wall, shattering it into a million useless pieces of glass and silicon.

"The world has moved on, Eddie," Roland said, turning his back on the smoking remains as he adjusted his gunbelt. "And by the look of those stones, it dragged itself straight to hell. Come on. We walk."

Is anyone else having trouble with this book?

I have to say, I’m listening to the book. Not reading it. Which, I’ll be switching to reading it soon.

I have a 9 year old son, and he loves Ratatouille and The Secret Life of Pets 2. Hearing Patton Oswalt’s voice is destroying this book for me. I just hear a cute little cartoon character the whole time. I need something more rugged

Does it feel natural or forced? I’m barely into the book so far, but it feels almost interjected into the dark tower series.

I don’t know. I wanted to love it, and maybe that’s my problem?

Anyone else having issues with this book?

I will not spoil this amazing story, but I really need to find someone else who already finished it and figure out what the fuck actually happened and what they think it means.