The Ran(King) of King — The Tower Looms
The second leg of the pilgrimage came down the back stair this week, and the Keeper noted at once how the road had changed. The first six verdicts wandered the wide territory of King’s standalone horrors; these five turn, inexorably, toward a single point on the horizon — a dark tower at the centre of all stories. Daniel (@dungeondive) confesses himself a tower junkie, and the ranking board tilts accordingly.
There is a werewolf to see off first, illustrated in Bernie Wrightson’s exquisite line, and the thousand-page cosmic dread of Derry to survive. But then the desert opens, the man in black flees across it, and the gunslinger follows — and the series reveals its true subject: the importance of story itself, the ritual bond between teller and listener, the way fiction shapes the worlds that read it. By the close, a maimed hero and three drawn souls have rearranged the summit entirely.
The Keeper has filed these five in the order King wrote them, the horror-canon companion folded in. The board’s verdict, for the curious: The Drawing of the Three now reigns.
Exhibit Catalogue
- Cycle of the Werewolf — a slight tale carried by Bernie Wrightson’s gorgeous, gruesome line work.
- The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger — the man in black flees; a young King finds a colder, stranger voice.
- IT — a thousand pages of cosmic dread, held together by the Losers’ fierce love.
- The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three — the hero maimed by page ten; possibly the best 160 pages King ever wrote.
- The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands — portals, Beams, and a billy-bumbler, capped by the cruellest cliffhanger.
- The Top 10 (my favorite) Horror Books of All Time — the wider horror-canon companion to the pilgrimage.
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– The Keeper
Observes that the surest sign a story has its hooks in a reader is when he begins hunting down every book it names — and notes the gunslinger’s road has a way of making junkies of us all.