The Dark Tower

On the data. Two ordering problems, and they pull in opposite directions. The first is The Wind Through the Keyhole. It was published in 2012, eight years after the series finished, and it is numbered as the eighth book, but it takes place between Wizard and Glass and Wolves of the Calla, which is why King himself calls it book 4.5 and why the official site lists it in that position. It is a story inside a story inside the main line and it advances nothing, so it can be read in place, saved for afterwards, or skipped entirely without leaving a hole. Story order on this page puts it at 4.5 because that is where it happens; publication order puts it last, which is why the release view and the story view disagree here and nowhere else in the core eight. The second problem is The Gunslinger. It first appeared as five separate stories in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction between 1978 and 1981, was collected as a book in 1982, and was then rewritten by King in 2003 before Wolves of the Calla came out. The revision is not cosmetic: it adds material, alters names and details, and pulls the book into line with the six that follow. Almost every copy sold since 2003 is the revised text, and it is the version the official site lists. If you read the 1982 text you will hit small contradictions later and they are the book's fault, not yours. The item here is dated 1982, its first publication as a book, with the edition question flagged rather than hidden. The connected novels are a separate group on purpose. None of them is required. Each one supplies something the Tower books later assume you know, and each pays off at a different point: 'Salem's Lot before Wolves of the Calla, Hearts in Atlantis before books five to seven, Insomnia and Black House before book seven. Black House is a sequel to The Talisman, written with Peter Straub in 1984, so reading Black House without The Talisman first is the one genuinely awkward gap on this page; The Talisman is not listed because its own connection to the Tower is faint. Also left out of this group: Rose Madder, Desperation and The Regulators, The Eyes of the Dragon, Everything's Eventual with its Roland novella The Little Sisters of Eluria, and the many later novels that nod at the Tower in a line or two. IT and Pet Sematary both belong to the same web of connections, most obviously the turtle in IT, and both already have their own pages on SagaList, so they are cross-referenced from here rather than duplicated into this list. The Marvel comics, which retell Roland's youth and are canon-adjacent rather than canon, are not listed. On screen there is one film. The 2017 Dark Tower compresses seven novels into ninety-five minutes and is written as a later turn of the cycle rather than as an adaptation of the first book, which is why it opens with a Roland who already remembers everything. It failed commercially and the television series planned alongside it did not go ahead. Mike Flanagan took the rights in December 2022 and has said repeatedly since, most recently in early 2026, that the project is alive, that scripts exist, and that it will start at the opening line of The Gunslinger. There is no broadcaster announcement, no episode count and no date, so nothing unreleased is listed here.

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