The Dark Tower

The Dark Tower is the seventh and final volume of Stephen King's Dark Tower series, published in 2004. Grant in association with Scribner, and the subjects attach apocalyptic literature, epic fantasy, Roland of Gilead and the Dark Tower itself to the work.

The novel opens with the group divided. Susannah-Mia has been taken from the Dixie Pig in the summer of 1999 to a birthing chamber in Thunderclap; Jake and Father Callahan have entered a restaurant on Lexington and Sixty-first with Oy between them and expect a fight; Roland and Eddie are accompanying John Cullum in Maine in 1977, searching for the site on Turtleback Lane where walk-ins have repeatedly been seen.

The book's problem is therefore coordination across time as much as combat, since the characters need to reunite in a setting where the same world can be entered at different dates. Its publisher describes the fundamental difficulty as a realisation the travellers reach themselves: the world they need to escape is the only one that matters. The series had run for more than twenty years by this point, and this volume closes it.