This collection of fun, odd, and excellent phrases and terms remembers the faces of its fathers and mothers well: Furth, the internet-catalog-keepers, and the Constant Readers. In advance of The Dark Tower’s film adaptation, in theaters Friday, we’ve compiled a beginner’s guide to the strangest, coolest words and phrases within The Complete Concordance. The Dark Tower Will Be the Rarest of All Gifts: A 90-Minute Summer Blockbuster Just like that, TDT joined Lord of the Rings and A Song of Ice and Fire as a classifiable universe. “If anyone in the world knows more about Dark Tower and its universe than Stephen, it’s Robin Furth,” said Marvel Comics editor Ralph Macchio in 2008, referencing the company’s new, Furth-plotted Tower comics. The internet also happened - big capital-I Internet back then - and crude, adoring fan sites took root, some still there today in all their Angelfire ‘n’ Geocities glory.īut King’s assistant Robin Furth was the heroine who finally corralled The Dark Tower’s lore and language into one fat tome, The Complete Concordance, born of Uncle Stevie’s need for easy-to-find fact-checks as he finished the series. It was the perfect time to take a breather and finally dive into this sci-fi/fantasy/Western, or to reread, tracing connections and taking new mental notes each time. First, King’s career-defining ‘80s hot streak lightly cooled to a temperature where the new novels weren’t automatic culture-dominators. He began TDT with The Gunslinger as a college student and finished the seventh book as a 57-year-old, imposing five- and six-year waits between installments that varied as much in style as they did in substance.Ī few things happened in the ‘90s, though, and The Dark Tower approached encyclopedia-readiness. Stephen King is about as improvisatory as a writer of fiction can be, almost never outlining or plotting in advance, or overly questioning his decisions and inventions. The Dark Tower series probably wasn’t meant to have an encyclopedia.

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