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{{work|wppage=The Dark Tower (series)}}
[[File:darktower_3389.jpg|frame]]
{{quote|
So begins ''
A proposed film adaptation and television series is currently in [[Development Hell]]. Prequel comics, initially adaptions of flashbacks in the novels and now original stories, are ongoing from Marvel.
The books in the series are:
* "The Little Sisters of Eluria" (1998)
* ''[[The Dark Tower
* ''[[The Dark Tower
The story begins in a [[Scavenger World]] [[After the End]]. Roland Deschain of Gilead is pursuing a mysterious man across the desert, to get information about the titular tower. Roland himself begins as an enigma--for about the first third of the first book, he's referred to in the narration only as "[[The Gunslinger
▲* ''[[The Dark Tower (Literature)/The Gunslinger|The Dark Tower]]'' (1982)
▲* ''[[The Dark Tower (Literature)/The Drawing of the Three|The Dark Tower]]'' (1987)
▲* ''[[The Dark Tower (Literature)/The Waste Lands|The Dark Tower]]'' (1991)
▲* ''[[The Dark Tower (Literature)/Wizard and Glass|Wizard and Glass]]'' (1997)
▲* ''[[The Dark Tower (Literature)/Wolves of the Calla|Wolves of the Calla]]'' (2003)
▲* ''[[The Dark Tower (Literature)/Song of Susannah|Song of Susannah]]'' (2004)
▲* ''[[The Dark Tower (Literature)/The Dark Tower|The Dark Tower]]'' (2004)
▲* ''[[The Dark Tower (Literature)/The Wind Through the Keyhole|The Dark Tower]]'' (2012)
▲The story begins in a [[Scavenger World]] [[After the End]]. Roland Deschain of Gilead is pursuing a mysterious man across the desert, to get information about the titular tower. Roland himself begins as an enigma--for about the first third of the first book, he's referred to in the narration only as "[[The Gunslinger|the gunslinger]]". As the series goes on, we learn more about him, his world, and what drives him on his quest.
Roland is the last gunslinger, a sort of knight with revolvers, as well as [[Last of His Kind|the last survivor]] of his lineage, his city, and his kingdom. It's not really clear, even to him, how long it's been since Gilead fell and he began pursuing the Dark Tower. The very world he lives in, called Mid-World, seems to be unraveling--even compass directions and the passage of time are not reliable. "The world has moved on," as they say.
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Unspoiled readers should use caution when reading this article. Although major spoilers are blocked out, some of the descriptions have minor spoilers for events later on in the books.
▲(This series is not to be confused with the unfinished book in Lewis' ''[[Space Trilogy]]''.)
{{franchisetropes}}
* [[A Boy and His X]]: Jake Chambers of New York and Oy of Mid-World
* [[After the End]]: Far after. Though time has little meaning on All-World, thousands of years have passed since the devastating war of the Old Ones. And the world is still trying to heal.
* [[
** Case in point: Blaine the Mono. Killed his only companion, tried to kill the protagonists (and himself), and would've done it even if Eddie hadn't [[Logic Bomb|logic bombed]] him.
** One exception is Stuttering Bill (named as a [[Shout-Out]] to Bill Denbrough of ''[[IT]])''. He gave Susannah and Roland a much-needed lift across Empathica in his snowplough.
* [[Ancestral Weapon]]: The ancient revolvers. Apparently forged from Excalibur.
* [[And Man Grew Proud]]: Directly stated to be the reason the world moved on: the technologically advanced Great Old Ones replaced the magical beams (which are the underlying structure of reality) with ones based on their technology, and sought to shape reality itself to their whims. They ultimately destroyed themselves in cataclysmic wars which left most of All-World devastated and poisoned. With no Old Ones to perform repairs and maintenance, their remaining technology slowly deteriorated, including that which supported the beams.
* [[Anti-Hero]]: Roland, at first. {{spoiler|He allows Jake Chambers to fall to his death, rather than be delayed to try and save him.}}
* [[Anyone Can Die]]: And most do.
* [[Apocalypse How]]: Class X-5! Almost a Z, but the [[Big Bad]] wants a chaotic void leftover (i.e. his home.)
* [[Arbitrary Gun Power]]: When Roland gets ammunition for his guns in an [[Alternate Universe]] New York, he buys .45 (probably Colt) rounds, yet at various other points his guns are always described as being ridiculously powerful, more powerful than .357 magnums or other high-powered guns.
** .45 Long Colt rounds, which are similar in power profile to [[Dirty Harry|.44 Magnum rounds]]. Not .45 ACP rounds, which are more anemic.
** Also, in the latest book, The Wind Through the Keyhole, it is mentioned that the bullets use a 76 grain gunpowder load. It doesn't state whether its with blackpowder or smokeless powder however, but given that the original .45 Long Colt used between 28-40 grain blackpowder loads and had muzzle velocities of up to 1000f/sec, it's not a huge leap to assume Roland's guns are exceptionally powerful.
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* [[Artifact of Doom]] (The thirteen different-hued crystal balls of "the Wizard's Rainbow" -- the most dangerous of them all being ''Black Thirteen'')
* [[Ass Pull]]: {{spoiler|Patrick Danville's ability to erase/create matter with his magical pencil being introduced conveniently a couple of chapters right before he erases the [[Big Bad]] out of existence. [[Lampshade Hanging|Lampshaded]] in that King deliberately admits that it's a [[Deus Ex Machina]]. Justified in-universe (see [[Deus Ex Machina]]) as King deliberately helping the characters after they save his life.}}
* {{spoiler|[[Author Avatar]]: Stephen King himself shows up in book six, when Roland and friends travel to "our" universe where he's writing the Dark Tower novels. Getting him to continue writing, as well as saving his life, become major plot points.}}
* [[Author Existence Failure]] : {{spoiler|Stephen King's near-fatal accident in 1999 becomes a major plot point in Book 7, leading directly to Jake Chamber's death, and King's decision (in-universe and in-reality) to finish the books.}}
* [[Badass]]: Roland and his Ka-Tet.
* [[Badass Creed]]: The Gunslinger's Creed:
{{quote|
He who aims with his hand has forgotten the face of his father.
I aim with my eye.
I do not shoot with my hand;
He who shoots with his hand has forgotten the face of his father.
I shoot with my mind.
I do not kill with my gun;
He who kills with his gun has forgotten the face of his father.
I kill with my heart. }}
* [[Badass Normal]]: Roland and his Ka-Tet.
* [[Badass Preacher]]: {{spoiler|Father Callahan in Dark Tower 7}}
* [[Beauty Equals Goodness]] (Even more blatant in the [[Backstory]] ''[[The Dark Tower
* [[Because Destiny Says So]]
* [[Beware the Nice Ones]]: Jake.
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* [[Black Knight]]
* [[Blasting It Out of Their Hands]]
** Played with in [[The Dark Tower
* [[Book Ends]]: {{spoiler|The Man in Black fled across the desert, and the Gunslinger followed.}}
* [[Brand X]]: The parallel Earths that appear throughout the series are differentiated from "Keystone Earth" primarily by the existence of different consumer products, like Nozz-a-la Cola, Takuro Spirit automobiles, and a baseball team called the Kansas City Monarchs.
** The Kansas City Monarchs are likely a reference to the [https://web.archive.org/web/20120717014823/http://www.nlbpa.com/kansas_city_monarchs.html Negro League] team of the same name.
* [[Canon
* [[Celebrity Paradox]]
* [[The Chessmaster]]: Marten Broadcloak in the back-story of Roland's homeland of Gilead, who was responsible for organizing the forces that wrought its downfall. {{spoiler|Marten's other alias, Walter, who organizes several "traps" for Roland in the Mohaine Desert.}}
* [[Comedy
* [[Comic Book Adaptation]]: There are a series of comics written by Robin Furth and Peter David that tell the story of the events leading up to Roland's quest for the Tower.
* [[Compound Interest Time Travel Gambit]]: {{spoiler|Eddie's plan to make the Tet Corporation more powerful than Sombra rests on making investments in 1977 that will reap huge profits by 1987.}}
* [[Continuity Drift]]
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* [[Cosmic Deadline]]
* [[Cosmic Keystone]]: The cosmic keystone to all other cosmic keystones: The Dark Tower.
* [[Crapsack World]]: All-World. Much of the world is still heavily poisoned from the apocalyptic wars of the Great Old Ones, and several of their ancient weapons continue to wreak havoc. Aside from the {{spoiler|Callas in Book Five}}, most of the world is a wasteland, with sparse human survivors from ancient times and the destruction of All-World's last true civilization, the Affiliation of Baronies. As if all of that weren't bad enough, the world itself is falling apart. Clocks and compasses no longer accurately record time, and distances seem to grow and shrink with no rhyme or reason.
* [[Creator Breakdown]]
* [[Crisis Crossover]]: A number of characters from King's other books, including ''[[The Stand]]'', ''[[
* [[Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass]]: Eddie.
* [[Dark Is Not Evil]]: The titular Dark Tower {{spoiler|is the axis upon which the countless realities and universes spin, and is implied to be the manifestation of the creator Gan Itself}}
* [[Death Is Cheap]]
* [[Defeat
* [[Desert Punk]]
* [[Determinator]]: Roland.
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* [[Did Not Do the Research]]: King originally misplaced Co-Op City in New York, but then used this discrepancy to illustrate how Eddie's home universe is subtly different to the Keystone Earth (ours).
* [[Disney Death]]: {{spoiler|Jake. The first time by falling to his death, the second time by leaping in front of a car to push Stephen King to safety.}}
* [[Doorstopper]]: ''The Gunslinger'' is the only book shorter than 400 pages in length for the hard-cover. Books 4,5, and 7 are exceptionally long, with each being well over 700 pages in length (and Dark Tower 7 being nearly 900 pages in length).
* [[The Dragon]]: Randall Flagg.
* [[Driving Question]]: What lies at the top of the tower?
* [[Dropped a Bridge
* [[Eldritch Abomination]]: Creatures in the todash darkness
* [[Eldritch Location]]: All-World. North may be southwest the next day, distances seem to grow and shrink almost at random, and time is so warped that clocks are unreliable.
* [[Encyclopedia Exposita]]
* [[Enfant Terrible]]: The Little Red King
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* [[Fantastic Honorifics]]: "Sai" is a gender-neutral, catch-all honorific.
* [[Fantasy Gun Control]]: One of the most prominent aversions in fantasy. Roland's guns are made from the melted-down sword of his ancestor Arthur Eld, King of All-World. It's quite heavily implied that Arthur Eld is '''the''' [[King Arthur]]. Which would make his sword [[Excalibur]].
* [[Fastest Gun in
* [[Feet of Clay]]: {{spoiler|The Crimson King}}
* Fictionary: We hear bits and pieces of the High Tongue, but there's no real sense of a separate grammar or syntax distinct from English.
* [[First Episode Spoiler]]: The Man in Black is really Marten Broadcloak, the Wizard from Gilead who had an affair with Roland's mother. And Roland's quest isn't to kill Marten...it's to interrogate him so he can find the Dark Tower.
* [[Fish Out of Temporal Water]]
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* [[I Am X, Son of Y]]: This form of introduction is common in Roland's world.
* [[I Call It Vera]]: Tricks Postino and his M16, "The Wonderful Rambo Machine".
* [[I Have Many Names]]: Randall Flagg (Real name Walter Padick), the Crimson King's [[The Dragon|Dragon]] (and [[The Starscream]] to boot), also appears as Marten Broadcloak, Walter o'Dim, anything with the letters 'RF' in it, and in a brief scene even impersonates ''[[
* [[Heroic Sacrifice]]: Several, particularly in Book Seven.
* [[Horny Devils]]: The demons of Roland's world include the equivalent of succubi and incubi. In fact, some can be [[Gender Bender|both incubi and succubi]].
* [[Iconic Item]]: The rose, Roland's revolvers, and of course the Tower itself.
* [[I Just Knew]]: Insights driven by "Ka", or destiny.
* [[Improbable Aiming Skills]]: Roland is the embodiment of this trope. It also applies to Eddie, Susannah and Jake to a lesser extent.
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* [[Interdimensional Travel Device]]: The doors that allow the characters to travel between different timelines and alternate universes, including {{spoiler|one in which they meet [[Stephen King]].}}
* [[Jedi Mind Trick]]: {{spoiler|1=Jake's key in Book III, Susannah's turtle in Book VI.}}
* [[Jerk
* [[Jigsaw Puzzle Plot]]
* [[Judge, Jury, and Executioner]]
* [[King Arthur]]: Roland's greatest ancestor is Arthur Eld, his universe's equivalent of King Arthur who conquered and ruled All-World more than a thousand years before Roland was born. His sword was melted down to create the two guns that eventually became Roland's.
* [[Kudzu Plot]]: {{spoiler|King adds an increasingly large number of side-plots and characters in the later books. We have Father Callahan, Mia and her "chap", the storyline with Stephen King, their attempts to get Calvin Tower to sign over the least for the plot with the Rose, and so forth.}}
* [[Land of the Shattered Empire]]: The series features this, across parallel universes no less. Roland wanders different parts of his homeworld with scattered governments and anarchy to track down the Man in Black and the titular tower.
* [[Last of His Kind]]: Roland's the Last Gunslinger.
* [[Lemony Narrator]]: Of a sad, subtle sort. Most prevalent in the final book.
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* [[Mad Lib Fantasy Title]]
* [[MacGuffin]]: The Tower itself, though to a greater extent the Rose.
* [[Meanwhile in
* [[Mix-and-Match Critters]]
* [[Canon Welding]]: ''The Dark Tower'' draws in characters, plot-lines, and themes from about two dozen other King novels.
* [[The Multiverse]]: The setting for ''The Dark Tower'' series, as well as what Roland and his Ka-Tet are trying to save.
* [[Must Make Amends]]: Roland, the "good guy," ends up {{spoiler|letting Jake, a boy he has grown to love, fall to his death by dropping him off an underground railway into a bottomless cavern in order to continue his quest}}. However, {{spoiler|Jake}} is only in the same universe as Roland because he re-incarnated there after being killed in New York City. Roland unexpectedly ends up in {{spoiler|Jake's}} New York, and, because Roland still loves him and regrets his previous decision, takes the opportunity to prevent the original death. This not only saves {{spoiler|Jake}}, but creates a horrible paradox solved only when Roland helps him cross again to his world, where he embraces him as a son and trains him to take part in his quest.
** It is said that this is due to {{spoiler|Stephen King's own guilt at having killed off the character of Jake, whom he liked, in the first place, in which case Jake's role in the next six books is nothing more than a successful attempt to make amends.}}
*** Not quite; to borrow from [[George
* [[Myth Arc]]: For many Stephen King works, and for King himself.
* [[Names to Run Away From Really Fast]]: Mordred. And, anybody with the initials "R.F.". {{spoiler|The latter does not apply if you are Mordred.}}
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* [[The Nothing After Death]]: Todash Darkness.
* [[Omnicidal Maniac]]: The Crimson King.
* [[Our Vampires Are Different]]: There are three "types" of vampire, including the type of vampire that showed up in ''[[
* [[Painting the Fourth Wall]]
* [[The Place]]
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* [[The Quest]]
* [[Ragnarok Proofing]]: Played with. While some of the Great Old Ones' technology continues to function thousands of years later, most of it is breaking down, ranging from their trains to the Beams holding up the Tower.
* [[Rape
* [[Real Life Writes the Plot]]: Stephen King was run over and almost killed by a van between writing the fourth and fifth books. This winds up being ''very'' important in the story, foreshadowed through the fifth and sixth books and seen in the seventh.
* [[Reconstruction]]
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* [[Reliably Unreliable Guns]]: Mostly averted, but played straight with anything fully automatic. Machine guns ''always'' jam, and things typically get worse for their wielder from there.
* [[Replacement Goldfish]]: {{spoiler|After Eddie and Jake are killed in the final book, Susannah goes off to live in an alternate universe where they're still alive. In the new universe, they're brothers named Eddie Toren and Jake Toren. The commentary from King suggests that they will eventually get a replacement Oy to be the family dog}}.
* [[Retcon]]: In ''[[The Dark Tower
* [[Revised Ending]]
* [[Sad Clown]]: Eddie, Cuthbert.
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* [[Series Goal]]: Reach and enter the Dark Tower. In order to do so, however, the Ka-Tet must save it first.
* [[Shoot the Dog]]: {{spoiler|Roland leaves Jake for dead.}}
* [[Shout-Out]]: To many different stories, from the [[Fantastic Four]] to [[
* [[Snicket Warning Label]]: King outright states it.
* [[Sole Survivor]]: Roland was the only survivor of the battle on Jericho Hill.
* [[The Starscream]]: Flagg, to the Crimson King.
* [[Thirteen Is Unlucky]]: The thirteen orbs of Maerlyn's Rainbow.
* [[To Become Human]]: A succubus actually wants to become human so that she can have a child. With a [[Deal
* [[Town
* [[Trapped in Another World]]
* [[Trilogy Creep]]
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* [[Walking the Earth]]
* [[Welcome to The Real World]]
* [[The Worf Effect]]: Taken [[Up to Eleven]] in the final book. {{spoiler|Flagg, who's been Roland's nemesis since the first book,}} is [[Dropped a Bridge
* [[World Tree]]: The Tower itself is {{spoiler|the axis which holds the worlds together.}}
* [[Writers Cannot Do Math]]: It's inconsistent what year Susannah came from. In the second book, it's stated that it's been three months since the assassination of [[John F. Kennedy|JFK]]; that means it's February 1964. Not much later, it's stated that August 19, 1959 (when she lost her legs) was five and a half years before; that means it's February 1965. In the third book, the year is several times said to be 1963. In the following books, it's consistently stated to be 1964. However, in the sixth book, she reminiscences about the murders of Civil Rights activists James Cheney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, which happened in June 1964. It might be a [[Lampshade Hanging|lampshade]] on this that Susannah thinks in the seventh book that she lived in America until 1964 "or was it '65?".
* [[You Are the Translated Foreign Word]]
* [[Young Gun]]: Eddie.
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{{reflist}}
[[Category:The Dark Tower]]
[[Category:The Epic]]
[[Category:The Seventies]]
[[Category:Works
[[Category:Fantasy Literature]]
[[Category:Western Literature]]
[[Category:Horror Literature]]
[[Category:
[[Category:
{{DEFAULTSORT:Dark Tower, The}}
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