Stephen King not done with his 'Dark Tower' series

We seem to have a lot of blog readers who are big fans of Stephen King, judging by the comments on our post about the master of horror’s take on Stephenie Meyer as well as your picks on who’s the best writer between King, Meyer and J.K. Rowling. I went looking through the notes from my interview with King for a recent cover story to see if I could uncover any more nuggets you guys might like. And I think I found one.

When we were chatting about his upcoming book Under the Dome, a novel with political subtext out in November, King said he had recently had an idea for a short story. “And then I thought, ‘Well, why don’t I find three more like this and do a book that would be almost like modern fairy tales?’ Then this thing started to add on bits and pieces so I guess it will be a novel.” That idea, according to King, is for a new Dark Tower novel, a continuation of his epic seven-part fantasy/sci-fi/Western series about a lone gunslinger named Roland and his ongoing hunt for the Man in Black. “It’s not really done yet,” King admits of his magnum opus. “Those seven books are really sections of one long uber-novel.” Click read more to find out what other Dark Tower plans he has.

The Dark Tower is King’s Lord of the Rings or Star Wars, a saga steeped in strong mythology that keeps readers coming back. It debuted in 1982 with The Gunslinger, and King (assumably) wrapped the series with three consecutive books following the 1999 accident where he was hit by a minivan. “I was hooked on pain medication, I didn’t feel good, I couldn’t walk right,” King says. “I was miserable a lot of the time, and that’s not conducive to either clear thought or good work.” King is also overseeing the current Dark Tower prequel series published by Marvel Comics.

He rewrote the first Dark Tower novel in 2003, and also wants to go back and revise the other ones to put the whole work in focus. “In essence, what I put out there for sale was a first draft. People wanted the story,” King explains. “The story was happening over a long period of time, and when it got to the last three books, I just said, ‘I’ve gotta sit down and write these as one thing,’ which is basically what I did. For a year and a half, I didn’t do anything but write Dark Tower books, which is why, when some lady called for an interview from the Los Angeles Times, I said I’m probably gonna be retire. At that point, I felt like retiring! I was so tired of that constant, fantasy world.”