Hello, friends.
A long but surprisingly good week concludes. While the Day Job has certainly been running me through the wringer, the writing career had some really good things that happened. It’s another snowy weekend where I live so I guess I should hunker down and keep warm by typing. Here goes!
Welcome to the 159th installment of Gauthic Times, the newsletter about my writing, my life, and Stephen King’s Dark Tower stories. If you’re a reader who subscribes via Substack, my website, or Patreon, your encouragement helps motivate me. I’m not breaking any records but I’m thankful to have any audience.
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My main focus this week has been on Project: Amusement Park. I went through just over 50 pages of the novel this week and pared the book down by about 170 words or so. In all, I’ve lost about excised about 2,000 words from the novel between the second draft and this third draft. I’ve gone through about 350 pages and have another 300ish left to go through. I have to say that most days I’m really enjoying myself. I hope you’ll love it when you get your hands on it.
I’ve been posting the first draft of Four Moons daily on Patreon now. If you’re interested, Patrons at the $5 tier and above have access but there is also a way to buy into the whole book for $13.99, and you’ll be notified when new installments are posted. You don’t have to be a long-term Patron for that second option.
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This week, authors Christopher Golden and Eric LaRocca both shared posts about how much they like The Monster in the Closet, and Eric sent along a blurb. I’m thrilled and humbled. I came up with the following ad as a result:
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Thirty-five years ago, almost exactly, I began my first journey to the Dark Tower by buying the only two volumes that were out of Stephen King’s epic fantasy series The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger and The Drawing of the Three. I had no idea that all these years later, I would complete my third (for some volumes fourth and fifth) journey to the field of roses and the Dark Tower itself.
The first volume, The Gunslinger, seemed a departure for me. But then, reading was almost a departure for me. The previous August I’d bought The Shining, which became the first adult novel I read. It took me a few months to get through and I loved it. I then read novelizations for the Star Wars Trilogy that were all in one volume from 1987. Both of which I’d bought on my 13th birthday in 1990. Now February vacation was beginning and I asked my father to take me Downtown to the local independent bookstore, Baker Books (gone for about a decade now, I think). An adult neighbor whose kids I babysat for and I talked one summer night outside about Stephen King and he’d told me The Gunslinger was supposed to be pretty good. Weird, but good. For some reason, despite all the classic King novels available, something about the paperback cover of this strange tower in a night sky appealed to me. It having a sequel also appealed to me. It also seemed weird. A western but a fantasy story. I decided to give it a shot. I got the two books, along with the first version of George Beahm’s The Stephen King Companion, and went home.
Now I’ll pause the story for a moment to state that I’m a slow reader. I always have been and have not changed much. I’m a little faster than back then, but it can still take me a crazy amount of time to read a book. It’d taken me nearly three months to read The Shining back then, and then from November through February to read the three Star Wars novelizations. While The Gunslinger was fairly short, The Drawing of the Three seemed as long as—or maybe longer than—The Shining. Still, I figured let’s try them.
It took me five days to read The Gunslinger. I bought it and began it on the Monday of February vacation and finished it that Friday. Like Roland, the last gunslinger, I was now on the journey to the Dark Tower.
Not only did I love the story, which was actually a collection of novellas marking Roland’s first major part of his quest, but there was also an amazing afterword by King where he talked about writing the stories and what was to come. It was the first time I’d read something like that from a writer in a book and I loved it. At the end of the essay, he signed it with his name and Bangor, Maine. I decided to do something I never would’ve thought to do prior. I wrote him a letter.
Addressed only to Stephen King, Bangor, Maine, I wrote that I was 13 and that I’d read The Shining and now The Gunslinger and I wanted to be a writer. I asked if he had any advice. The letter went out with the mail and then I began reading The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three. It took me from February to May to get through the book and if I’d loved the first book, I was absolutely hooked by the second. Like Roland, Eddie Dean, and Susannah Dean (former Odetta Holmes/Detta Walker), I was part of the ka-tet that would trek to the Dark Tower and it’d consume me.
King did not publish The Dark Tower books quickly. I was lucky in that the third volume, The Waste Lands, was published in 1992, during my freshman year of high school, a mere one year since I’d begun my journey. However, I wouldn’t know how the cliffhanger that ends the third book would be resolved until 1997. I was twenty years old and expecting a child when Wizard & Glass was released. Six years later, the fifth volume, Wolves of the Calla marked the beginning of the end of the journey, with the sixth and seventh books—Song of Susannah and The Dark Tower—being released between 2003 and 2004. In all, it took 13 years for me to complete my first journey to the Dark Tower.
It’s funny how the art we consume when we’re young has such a lasting effect, even if we’re not always aware of it. By nature, we move on. Yes, we’ll rewatch or reread something but we rarely think about the impression they make. I’ve written and spoken a lot about how Star Wars laid a foundation to who I am as a person and as a storyteller. I’ve mentioned the works of Stephen King have also had a big influence. What I tend to forget, until I decide to take another trip to the Tower, is just how big of an influence The Dark Tower has had on me.
Between 1993 and 1997, I purchased audiobook versions of the first three volumes read by King. Those versions are long out of print and I wish I had a way to convert the cassettes to digital. I remember listening to them and enjoying the hell out of them.
I re-read the first four books in 2003 when the revised edition of The Gunslinger was released to tie in better with the las three books. In 2012, I reread all seven books in anticipation of The Wind Through the Keyhole, a Dark Tower story set between the events of the fourth and fifth books. I actually read the four books, then Wind, and then the last three books, which was a terrific experience.
Then in December 2024, I decided the time had come to take another trip. This time wholly through audiobook. It took me until this past week, early-February 2026, to finish all eight books (Oh! And the novella The Little Sisters of Eluria). George Guidall reads the first book and the last three, Frank Muller reads the second through fourth books, including The Little Sisters of Eluria, and King himself returns for The Wind Through the Keyhole.
As I listened, I was struck by just how much I’d internalized the language of the stories as well as the way King used them to tie in…well…everything he’s written. I remembered his audacity at having some of the biggest surprises of the last three books be…um…I shouldn’t say. Even though it’s been more than 20 years since the main story was completed, those who haven’t read it need to see the surprise and decide for themselves whether a place the story goes is good or bad. For me, I thought it was brilliant.
Not only have the stories influenced my own writing and storytelling, but some of my best friendships are partly due to The Dark Tower. Followers of Roland Deschain of Gilead tend to be able to speak a special language, perhaps because we’re brought together by ka.
The Dark Tower stories really feel like stories written by a man who loves stories but also felt like no one was watching. While the books began to gain a large following, they were never (apparently) as popular as most of King’s other books and I feel like King just went for broke. He went where the story took him and that was that.
In the end, the story is exciting, enthralling, hopeful, heartbreaking, and scary, and I already want to take another journey to the Tower. Maybe this time rereading the books properly instead going through the audiobooks.
I could write more about this reread, like how I kept noticing weird things that felt Dark Tower related in my life, the word tower coming up and the number 19. If we learned anything, though, it’s that ka is a wheel. It always comes back. Yes, I could write more, but I think I’ll stop now. My love for The Dark Tower could probably fill a book and I don’t have that space here.
I will end by saying, Thankee, sai King, for sharing this wonderful world with us. I wish you long days and pleasant night, may it do ya.
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I have an appearance coming up at Once Upon A Bookstore in Fall River, Massachusetts!
Join Brennan LaFaro and myself as we launch our novels The Denizens and The Monster in the Closet on February 21st at 6 PM.
I’m looking forward to this. It should be fun!
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That’s this week’s newsletter. Thank you so much for subscribing, reading, and for your support. Be safe out there, friends.
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Gautham: Bill Gauthier.com 
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