Conducted by Trudy Wyss

Most people who've read Stephen King have read at least one of his stand-alone novels, like Christine, The Shining, or Bag of Bones. But hardcore King fans know that to truly understand the world's best-selling novelist, one must read the Dark Tower series, King's purest foray into the world of fantasy and, in his eyes, his most important work. The series refers to many of King's other books: The Stand, The Eyes of the Dragon, Salem's Lot, Insomnia, and others. Fans have been pestering King for years to finish this series, and he's finally done it. Books five and six, Wolves of the Calla and Song of Susannah, came out in the last year, along with new hardcover and paperback editions of books one through four. King rewrote the first book, The Gunslinger, and provided a new introduction to run in books two through four: The Drawing of the Three, The Waste Lands, and Wizard and Glass. The Dark Tower is the last novel of the series and arrives in September.

Why is this series so important to you?

Stephen King: Well, it's the longest-running series; that's one reason. It started when I was in college. I wrote the first chapters of The Gunslinger on a ream of paper that I got from the library where I worked. At that time in my life, I was such a dedicated writer that I just couldn't stand to see a ream of blank paper, and I wanted to write something. I'd been thinking for a long time that I would like to write a big fantasy; I was very much influenced by The Lord of the Rings. Somebody was saying to me the other day that young people, the people who love the movies, it's almost as though they don't realize that this has already had one run at fame, you know, in the '60s when hippies went around calling themselves Frodo and Sam and stuff like that.

Were you one of those people?

SK: I never called myself Frodo and I never thought of myself as a hippie; but, yeah, I guess I sort of was into peace, love, understanding, and all that. But what I didn't want to do was to go in and start something that would be almost a copy of The Lord of the Rings. One thing that I promised myself was that I would stop the minute an elf showed up in my book. So I waited until I had an idea that was a little bit different, and it was clearly something that was too big for me at that time. But I did as much as I could, and I went back to work on it again when I was about 25. The thing just never let me go.

So the import of this series has to do with the length of it and realizing that I'm not getting any younger and not wanting the series to wind up in the unfinished books like The Mystery of Edwin Drood or The Canterbury Tales or something like that. The other thing was that it had this big ambition. It was actually supposed to be a novel about everything: that explains existence itself.

Why do you think your other books are read more than the Dark Tower books are?

SK: I think there are a lot of people out there who respond, in the other books, to the idea of supernatural or fantasy elements when they're wedded closely to reality. I really think that's been a lot of the success of books like The Dead Zone. A book like Misery really isn't a supernatural novel at all, or Gerald's Game. But with fantasy, you have a certain hardcore audience that's very, very dedicated and a lot of other people just say, "Well, I'm not sure that this is going to be my cup of tea."

You rewrote The Gunslinger. How extensively?

SK: It's pretty extensive, but it doesn't change the plot in any real, substantive way because there are six other books that come after it, so it's kind of locked in place in terms of the things that happen in the plot. But it was written by a very young man, and I wanted to loosen it up and make it more accessible for readers. Once you get into the story, I think that it's very interesting and most people who read the books get fascinated and want more. But that first book, as short as it is, is a little bit difficult, because the guy who wrote it was only 22 years old. I was fairly pretentious. I wanted to write something that was very literary. I was concerned with that to a greater degree than I am now. And so whenever I read it over I'd kind of wince at how hard I was trying. Eventually all the Dark Tower books will be rewritten.

Oh, really?

SK: Yeah, I think so. The same way that if you finished a novel in first or second draft, you'd want to redo it and polish it and make it shine. But I really want people to read the new volumes, five, six, and seven, because I worked hard on all of them and because the thing is finally done. But if you're going to have people read the whole thing, it's very important to get them in at the beginning. So Viking and Scribner are collaborating on this publicity campaign, and that's a story in itself. That's like getting Spiderman and Superman together to do something, and the publicity line that they decided on was, "The end is near; start at the beginning." And I'm just trying to make it easier for people to start at the beginning.

So this is kind of a luxury you have, as a very famous writer, to be able to rewrite your work and have people be interested in reading new drafts of the same book. I'm thinking of The Stand also.

SK: It is nice. I think that a lot of writers would like to have the luxury. But it's really no different than say if you got a DVD, you might get the director's cut. But in the case of the Dark Tower, it actually seemed not so much like a luxury, to me at least, but like a real necessity, to say, "Let's make this book more readable; let's make it more exciting; let's pick up the pace a little bit and really try to draw readers in."

I’ve heard that you said the last Dark Tower novel would be your final novel.

SK: Well, I never exactly said that. I did an interview with the Los Angeles Times where the lady said, "What comes after the Dark Tower?" And I said, "I don’t really know if anything comes after the Dark Tower because it ties everything up in a neat bow." This lady jumped from that to the idea that I was retiring. At this point I can't see what comes next, but writing these books was very, very difficult and it wore me out. So the lady got me at a time when retirement seemed like the best idea in the world. But since then I've gotten a lot of letters from people who are clearly upset at the idea, and they're saying, "Please don’t do that. We want some more to read, if you're healthy and everything." So I just don't know. I don't want to go back and repeat myself and tell stories that I've told before and just change the names of the characters. But I really don't know what comes next.

Can you imagine life without writing?

SK: No, I never could. What I've been doing since I finished the Dark Tower books is writing short stories, and I've sold a couple of them. A couple of them are sitting in the drawer of my desk, but that's fine, too. You know, if they don't sell I still get up in the morning—after 35, 36 years of the same routine—go to the word processor and sit down. Not writing would be like going the rest of your life without having dreams.

Talk about Randall Flagg a little bit. Is he your favorite of all villains?

SK: He's the one that I keep coming back to. Of course, he's in the Dark Tower books. He always appears under different names, but you can always tell who he is because the initials are the same: R.F. He's sort of the way that I sum up all the things that I think about evil: somebody who's very charismatic, laughs a lot, tremendously attractive to men and women both, and somebody who just appeals to the worst in all of us. His face changes, of course. He may look like Tony Curtis to me and he might look like Justin Timberlake to some little teeny-bopper and he might look like somebody else to you, but whatever it is, he's saying the same thing: "I know all the things that you want and I can give them to you and all you have to do is give me your soul, which really isn't worth that much anyway."

So he first came to you when you wrote The Gunslinger?

SK: Actually, Flagg came to me when I wrote a poem called "The Dark Man" when I was a junior or senior in college. It came to me out of nowhere, this guy in cowboy boots who moved around on the roads, mostly hitchhiking at night, always wore jeans and a denim jacket. I wrote this poem, and it was basically just a page long. I was in the college restaurant, only "restaurant" is too grand a word (it was like a grease pit basically). I wrote the poem on the back of a placemat. It was published, as a matter of fact, but that idea of the guy never left my mind. The thing about him that really attracted me was the idea of the villain as somebody who was always on the outside looking in and hated people who had good fellowship and good conversation and friends. So, yeah, he was there, really, from the beginning of my writing career. He's always been around.

So you've had a lifelong relationship.

SK: I've had a lifelong relationship with Randall Flagg; that's right. He's probably all the worst things that are in me. The great thing about writing is that you can do that. You can do all these antisocial things and you get paid for them and nobody ever arrests you because they're all make-believe. Then that way if you were actually ever driven to do any of those things, the pressure's off because you'd have already written them down. It's therapy.