Empire Australasia August 2017

Hollywood has been in the Stephen King
business for just about as long as Stephen King
has been in the Stephen King business. From the
moment the great American horror novelist
burst onto the scene in the mid-1970s, studios
and big-name directors such as Kubrick,
Carpenter, De Palma, Cronenberg and Romero
have been queuing up to adapt his work. Even
his vastly ambitious doorstop novels, such as
The Stand and It, have been made into
mini-series for the small screen, as Hollywood
voraciously optioned virtually every word King
wrote. If he’d written this paragraph, studios
would be circling it even now.
But one major King work has remained
conspicuously unadapted.
“The man in black fled across the desert, and
the gunslinger followed.” Those words kick off
1982’s The Gunslinger, the first novel in a series
that together form The Dark Tower. It’s a work
of staggering breadth, depth and ambition,
spanning hundreds of years and multiple worlds.
It’s about obsession, and guilt, and the act of
creation, and the unblinking, unsentimental eye
of fate, or ka, often depicted as a wheel,
constantly turning on a ceaseless journey.
The tl;dr version? It principally concerns the
efforts of the aforementioned gunslinger, Roland
Deschain, and his heroic band of followers, the
ka-tet, to find and protect the Dark Tower, the
nexus of all existence, from the forces of evil
determined to destroy it. Whichever way you
look at it, though, The Dark Tower is King’s
crowning glory. “It’s the one that took the most
time and the most effort and the most creative
energy,” says the author, speaking to Empire in
a world-exclusive interview from his home in
Bangor, Maine. “You don’t sit down one day and
say, ‘Well, I think I’ll write a magnum opus.’ But
I said to myself, ‘This could be really long and
really exciting and I wanna take a crack at it.’
Look what happened.”
What happened is that King had written
something so audaciously ambitious, so