Stephen King’s The Dark Tower is back: it did the multiverse years before Avengers: Doomsday

Stephen King’s eight-book The Dark Tower series is having a moment again, and the timing makes sense. As Marvel heads toward Avengers: Doomsday with another reality-coming-apart storyline, King’s saga feels very close at hand. Everything in it turns on the Dark Tower, the thing keeping every reality from splitting apart.

If all the multiverse talk around Marvel has your attention, it’s worth looking back at where King took that idea decades earlier. He kicked off a similar trip with The Gunslinger in 1982, sending Roland Deschain after the Dark Tower and the job of protecting the force that holds all worlds together.

That overlap is hard to miss. Avengers: Doomsday is expected to bring colliding universes and existence starting to fray, and The Dark Tower runs on almost the exact same danger: if the Tower goes, every world goes with it.

There’s also an early shared-universe thread running through these books, with connections to It, ’Salem’s Lot, and The Stand. On top of that, you’ve got an eight-book blend of fantasy, sci-fi, horror, and western storytelling that King has called his magnum opus, shaped by Browning, Tolkien, and old-school westerns.

Interest has picked up again because of Other Worlds Than These and Mike Flanagan’s Prime Video series. Flanagan has called the project his “Holy Grail,” and King has said he signed off on the first-season script after the 2017 movie left fans cold.

If you want a multiverse story that’s more interested in fate and obsession than pure spectacle, The Dark Tower is an easy one to pick up. The books are there now, and Flanagan’s TV series is still in development at Prime Video.