The Dark Tower: Unraveling Stephen King's Mid-World

We had so much fun revisiting Mid-World for this episode – it’s the first series that brought us together as book nerds twenty years ago, and it’s absolutely just as good as the first day we read it. So thankful it helped tie our friendship together, and laid the foundation for meeting all the rest of you Hugonauts all these years later! 

The Dark Tower defies (or bridges) genres, with elements of sci-fi, fantasy, western, horror, and more, all rolled into one legendary package. And Roland Deschain, the Gunslinger, is an incredible main character, and we’ll never forget the rest of the Ka-Tet either. And the ending – we won’t spoil it here, but man do we like thinking about this ending (it’s one of the most polarizing in all of literature). You may be picking up on the fact that we kinda like these books.

• Join the Hugonauts book club on discord
• Or you can watch our episodes on YouTube if you prefer video

As always, no spoilers until the end when we give a heads up before getting into the full plot discussion.

Similar books we recommend: 

• Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
• Dragonriders of Pern series by Anne McCaffrey
• Book of the New Sun series - Gene Wolfe

This episode is sponsored by The Rising and the Fall of Hell by Sean Miller

If you want to jump around, here are the timestamps for the episode:

• 00:00 Intro
• 01:58 Our review (5/5)
• 03:35 Sponsor – The Rising and the Fall of Hell by Sean Miller
• 04:09 About Stephen King
• 07:26 Incredible character writing
• 08:56 A 20 year series
• 10:30 Should we be reading on drugs?
• 12:38 Cody hates Star Wars
• 15:52 Every genre combined
• 18:02 Our favorite books in the series
• 19:39 The King Multiverse
• 21:10 The Dark Tower movie
• 22:03 Inspirations from other fiction
• 27:44 Similar books we recommend
• 31:27 POST SPOILERS discussion