The Dark Tower Review Roundup – Hollywood Reporter

Hollywood has been trying to adapt Stephen King’s eight-book saga for well over a decade, but the first film adaptation left the critics underwhelmed.

The Dark Tower reviews are in and the critical consensus can charitably be summed up with one word: meh.

I had been looking forward to this movie, being a big fan of the books, but everything I’ve heard about it has made me want to avoid it. Not only because it may be a truly bad movie, but because seeing it will change the way I see the characters and locations the next time I read the series. This has happened with the Lord of the Rings. I used to reread those books every ten years or so, but the last time I tried, I had too many images from the films – which, in this case, were very good – that ruined the novel.

Source: The Dark Tower Review Roundup | Hollywood Reporter

Stephen King on The Dark Tower movie: An EW podcast – EW.com

The quest to The Dark Tower is already underway, with Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey currently filming the big screen adaptation of Stephen King’s sprawling fantasy western.

For those seeking an early preview of how the February 2017 film is coming together, Entertainment Weekly presents this podcast version of our conversation with King himself, as well as director and co-writer Nikolaj Arcel (A Royal Affair.)

I am so looking forward to this. These are some of my favorite books. (Yes, I like Shakespeare, Proust, and Stephen King.) I think the casting is great; I have no problem with Roland not looking like Clint Eastwood.

Source: Stephen King on The Dark Tower movie: An EW podcast | EW.com

10 Novels Strongly Connected To Stephen King’s The Dark Tower

Gunslinger

“Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series is his magnum opus; the culmination, in a sense, of his life’s work. It’s a gathering together of all the worlds he has created through dozens of novels spanning multiple decades, and at some point in the next few years, a massive feature film adaptation of the series will be launched. An epic fantasy crossed with a Sergio Leone western mixed with sci-fi elements and horror, it’s unlike anything else in King’s catalog even while binding his voluminous output together.

The journey to make the series into a big screen production — a journey that, after many long years may finally be coming to an end — makes this a perfect time to examine some of the books connected to The Dark Tower, which itself spanned seven novels, plus an eighth standalone story (The Wind Through The Keyhole) published after the conclusion of the original series.”

I’ve recently started re-reading the Dark Tower series for the third time; I’m just at the end of the second book, The Drawing of the Three. I have always appreciated Stephen King’s work, but the Dark Tower stands out not only because the breadth and complexity of the story line, but because it is a long series. King is not a series author, though he has recently been writing a short series around a detective.

After I first read the Dark Tower, I realized how many links there were to King’s other books, and I went back and re-read some of them. This article – unfortunately, one page per book to increase clicks – highlights ten of them, including some not written by King.

If you haven’t read The Dark Tower, now is a good time to start. You can start with the first book, The Gunslinger (Amazon.com, Amazon UK), or you can even pick up a box set of the first four books (Amazon.com, Amazon UK). But if you’re a fan of science fiction and fantasy, you really should read these books. They are epic, and memorable.

Source: 10 Novels Strongly Connected To Stephen King’s The Dark Tower