I’d add in The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant by Stephen R. Donaldson. The real-world pages are a bit of a slog (maybe a quarter of the story in total), but events in The Land are well worth the price of admission.
What it is about is Stephen King trying to explain create a story around how his books come to him and that it isn’t entirely his fault.
What happens is vaguely detailed above.
Really explaining the plot involves a bit of spoilering, because it takes a few books for King to really establish the setting, he added things as he went along, and a few things changed along the way to the point where he later had to revise the first book in order to fix his mistakes. I’ll try to briefly explain what it’s about without spoiling too much;
[SPOILER] The main setting is Mid-World, one of many parallel Earths. Three or four thousand years ago, it had a civilization more advanced than our own; they built sprawling megacities, made use of cold fusion, and had sophisticated AIs and robots of human size and larger. They were culturally very similar to us, though; they had the Bible and a recognizable if not identical version of Christianity, and the Beatles and ZZ Top both existed there among other bits of pop culture. That civilization collapsed for unknown reasons; all that’s left are ruins and myths. In its wake, a new civilization arose that was basically a league of feudal states, whose knights were called “gunslingers” and wielded revolvers as their weapons of choice.
That civilization fell apart a few hundred years ago due to the influence of Randall Flagg (villain from The Stand, who goes by many different names within the Dark Tower and in other King books), a centuries-old wizard, himself descended from Arthur Eld’s court wizard Maerlyn, working to destabilize the multiverse in the name of his master, the Crimson King (I.e. Satan). His ultimate goal is to destroy the Dark Tower, a magical building at the center of the multiverse which holds all of existence together, which will allow the Crimson King to usurp God, tear all of Creation apart, and start it over to his own liking. By the time the books start, Flagg’s done so much damage that Mid-World has started to “move on” - time no longer flows at the normal rate, the distance and direction between places changes from day to day, and it’s easier and easier to walk from one universe into another without even noticing it.
The main character is Roland of Gilead. He’s the last living gunslinger, and the remnant of the most important feudal house in Mid-World - he’s a distant ancestor of Arthur Eld (Mid-World’s equivalent of King Arthur), the founder of his society, and his revolvers were forged from the wood and metal taken from Excalibur after Eld’s death. He fought in the final battle against Flagg’s forces when his order was destroyed, and for a few hundred years since he’s been on a quest to find the Dark Tower for reasons of his own (which are explained in detail later on), chasing Flagg across the desert so he can find out what Flagg knows about how to reach the Tower.
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It’s a pretty fun read - a bit of a thematic mishmash, but the characters are interesting and it has a satisfying ending (regardless of what others might tell you, I think the ending works perfectly.) You don’t need to have read much of King’s other books to follow it, but it helps - the ones I recall being most closely tied into the mythos are The Stand, It, The Eyes of the Dragon, Insomnia, and some of the short stories in Hearts in Atlantis and Everything’s Eventual. It’s really not a horror story like the rest of King’s oeuvre - it’s more of a Lord of the Rings-esque epic fantasy with a liberal dose of American pop culture mixed in.
I have done Lord of the Rings, Game of thrones, Aubrey Maturin… Its just the fact im stuck at sea with no internet connection and can easily transfer the DT books to my pad for reading… In fact I have just finished re-reading the Game of Thrones (asoiaf) books again and enjoyed them better than last time, just wish he would publish the next one before he fucking dies…
It’s brilliant in parts. The first 4 are all great. Boom 4 in particular I think doesn’t get enough credit as a vivid bit of world building and a really compelling stand alone story. Books 5 & 6 are… Not good. Wolves is almost good, but it’s not. Book 7 is back to being pretty good but the ending… You will either like it or it will make you mad. If you invested years if your life waiting for the story to finish it pissed you off. But upon reflection it had the only ending that could possibly be. It still pissed me off but I get it.
It’s probably less Infiniti you didn’t wait for the books to come out in real time.
It’s really about an epic knight’s quest / fool’s errand in the tradition of Don Quixote, Moby Dick or King Arthur and the Holy Grail (in fact Arthurian legend features prominently in the story).
As others have pointed out, the setting is a series of interconnected parallel worlds/universes (including ours) that significantly overlap each other. Roland’s world has “moved on”. That is to say, the fabric of reality has been damaged, leading to not only traditional apocalyptic problems like war, famine and environmental collapse, but also distortions in time and space (distances between places change, etc) and various universes bleeding into each other (typically in the form of locations, monsters, pop culture references and various characters).
Roland’s quest is ostensibly to reach the Tower at any cost so he can fix all this.
A lot of people give the books crap about the ending. I think they are missing the point. The Dark Tower is about Roland’s journey and how he gets there, not his destination. It might as well be called “McGuffin Tower”. No one says Moby Dick sucks because he doesn’t kill the whale at the end.
Smapti - Also IIRC, The Mist ties into The Dark Tower as well. They created a rupture to one of the more unpleasant universes or something.
I think it was one of his best works (assuming you like Stephen King). The first book is a bit slow, but I think they pick up from there. I definitely would recommend giving them a try.
I’m a huge King fan. Even with some instances of anti-climax throughout the series, I recommend them unequivocally mostly because of the magnificent character work. Make sure you read “The Wind Through The Keyhole” when you finish. Overall, the fourth novel in the series, essentially the origin-how-did-all-this-crazy-stuff-get-started book, was my favorite.
Quibble*: King freakin’ cheats on a lot of this. He promised multiple times that everything would come together and connect and tie together. But by the last two books or so, King got freaked out that he wouldn’t be able to finish them and just rushed through. Insomnia especially is a huge fucking cheat–Insomnia builds into a huge cliffhanger that King promises would be resolved in the Dark Tower series. And the big resolve in Dark Tower is (more or less) “Oops, guess not. It was all a dream” (that’s not it, but it gets the spirit across).
The other thing: everyone’s divided on the ending–there’s about a 50/50 split between “The ending sucks” and “Huh–though provoking”, but everyone I’ve ever met hates the “author’s note” he tacks in just before the ending (It’s about 4 or 5 pages long). My take is when you get to the “author’s note”, just skip it** and keep reading. It’s not the ending that’s terrible, it’s the insufferably smug, obnoxious note he sticks in the book a few pages before the end. Seriously, skip that note. If necessary, read the ending and then go back and read the crappy author’s note. But don’t ruin any chance of enjoying the ending by reading that smug bit of jerkitude.
*Objectively, I gotta admit it’s a quibble, but it really pissed me off.
**The “If you’re such a dick that you care about endings, I guess I can write one for you, but if you read it, you’re a stupid troglodyte, you lowbrow swine.” author’s note. King has never seemed like more of a complete douche than in that note.
Also, “The Little Sisters of Eluria,” in Everything’s Eventual.
It’s an uneven series. I gnashed my teeth over a lot of sections in the books. But at times King knows how to crawl up into the deepest darkest parts of my brain, and hence the best parts of the series are really, really, really great, and outshine anything in WoT, Covenant (and I’ve read all 10 books of that), Sanderson, and most other fantasy I’ve read.
And I found the ending to be perfect.
Just MHO of course, but I think it’s worth it.
Out of curiosity, what did you think of the author’s note that comes before the ending?
Spoilers: Ahab dies at the end. There is a definitive resolution, with lessons about personal obsessions to be garnered. The hero of the quest doesn’t have to win for the story to be good. But he does have to resolve it somehow. A better example would be if Melville ended the book before the final confrontation and instead wrote a paragraph telling the readers to re-read the book from the start again and again until the end of time.
I get the desire to.portray those of us who were displeased with the non-ending ending of the series as somehow unable to “get it”, as if we need sunshine and lollipops to be satisfied. As condescending as that is, it’s also inaccurate.
I’m not who you asked, but I’ll not let that stop me from answering. Marked me down as liking the ending and despising the author’s note.
Of the hundreds of books I’ve read over the years, this series sticks out in my mind more than any other. I think books 3 and 4 were the best ones, but the others were excellent as well. As far as he ending goes, that may be resolved in the upcoming movie.
I think the event that occurrs about 2/3rds of the way through book 7 was actually the worst (saddest) part, and the ending was actually appropriate. That particular scene is the most tragic part of the series, and even though I read it almost 10 years ago, it’s as vivid in my mind today as the day I read it.
From what I understand, the upcoming movie will be more like parts 8-14 rather than a movie version of the 7 books we have right now. That may or may not fix the issue that some people have with the ending.
That’s a vague enough note that it could describe five or six events in the middle part of book 7. 
I’m gonna go out on a limb, though, and guess you mean the scene where Oy is mortally wounded saving Roland’s life from Mordred, and croaks out “Olan” with its last breath.
Loved the first four books, found the last three very uneven to the point of being incoherent (but with a few excellent moments), and found the ending…satisfactory.
I found that much less than perfect.
I was actually referring to the event that set that off.
I meant the part where Pimli Prentiss kills Eddie. If Eddie hadn’t been shot, I think Jake doesn’t get run over. At that point the ka-tet needs someone who can drive to get to SK before he gets hit while on his walk. If Eddie hadn’t been shot, he would probably have been able to get to SK a little before Irene Tassenbaum. With that change, Jake wouldn’t have been run over. Eddie would have had an easy time with Dandelo. I think a full ka-tet would have then had an easy time with Mordred, and Oy would have survived that encounter without injury. When they all reach the tower, Eddie, Jake, and Oy could just walk through the door to happy 1980s New York with Susannah. The final ending doesn’t have to change, but the last part of the book would have been a lot better. Roland could still have his Dark Tower and his final door without having consigned Eddie, Jake, and Oy to their fates. Yes, I remember how he made up the alternate Eddie, alternate Jake, and alternate Oy, but it’s not the same thing.
Movie spoiler
The upcoming movie has Pimli Prentiss, but no Eddie or Susannah. I’m not sure what the idea behind that is, but I’m hoping he meets a grisly demise in the movie. Pimli Prentiss is easily my #1 most hated villian of all time.
I’m very fond of DT, especially the second book, and any parts that are heavy on my favorite characters Eddie (who is basically Larry from The Stand), Blaine, and the book shop guys. As a body of work I have to admit that it’s not very strong, but it’s a lot of fun.
For a shorter, more cohesive work with a similar feel, I’d recommend The Talisman which was coauthored with Peter Straub. (In fact, I still get a few bits of that story muddled in my head with events from Dark Tower.)
Anyway, enjoy the series. They are great escapism and very readable if not the pinnacle of literature. Feel free to skim through Wizard and Glass, though. It’s a bit…hokey. 