Eye of the Dragon
Eye of the Dragon is a single-player roleplaying gamebook written by Ian Livingstone, illustrated by Martin McKenna and published in 2005 by Wizard Books. It forms part of Steve Ian Livingstone's Fighting Fantasy series, it is the 21st in the Wizard series. Eye of the Dragon was the first new Fighting Fantasy gamebook published by Wizard, although the book is an extended version of the adventure from Ian Livingstone's earlier book Dicing with Dragons rather than a original adventure; the book is made up of 407 references rather than the usual 400. In a tavern in Fang, a mysterious stranger offers YOU the chance to find the Golden Dragon the most valuable treasure in all of Allansia, but it is hidden in a labyrinth beneath Darkwood Forest and is guarded by the most violent creatures and deadly traps. To begin your quest YOU must drink a terrible potion, to succeed, you must find maps, artifacts, magic items, jewels and an enslaved dwarf; this Fighting Fantasy gamebook is set in the Allansia region.
The player must claim a solid gold dragon from within a dungeon beneath Darkwood Forest. The book, although a new gamebook published for the first time, by Wizard, was written like an old gamebook's typical dungeon trawl. During the journey the player allies with a character called Littlebig, a relative of a character from a previous Fighting Fantasy gamebook; the player must collect keys during the journey. These keys will allow the player to open boxes at the final puzzle; the player must pull five weapons out of the wall in the correct order or be electrocuted and killed. The player must find the second emerald eye of the dragon or be killed by poison darts while trying to move the golden dragon. There’s a portrait of Ian Livingstone hidden in the interior art of the game book. It's the old man in an apron who keeps a storeroom in the picture for book reference number 329. Artist Martin McKenna added the author’s face to his artwork for all the game books he illustrated that were written by Livingstone
Misery (novel)
Misery is a 1987 psychological horror thriller novel by Stephen King. The novel was nominated for the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 1988, was made into a Hollywood film and an off-Broadway play of the same name; when King was writing Misery in 1985 he planned the book to be released under the pseudonym Richard Bachman but the identity of the pseudonym was discovered before the release of the book. The novel focuses on Paul Sheldon, a writer famous for Victorian-era romance novels involving the character of Misery Chastain. One day he is rescued from a car crash by crazed fan Annie Wilkes, who transports him to her house and, once finding out what he has done to Misery in his latest book, forces him to write a new book modifying the story – no matter what it takes. Paul Sheldon, the author of the best-selling series of Victorian era romance novels surrounding the character Misery Chastain, had just finished the manuscript of his new crime novel, Fast Cars, he has an alcohol-induced impulse to drive to Los Angeles rather than fly back home to New York City, but is caught in a snowstorm in a remote section of Colorado, causing him to drive off a cliff and crash into a snowbank.
He awakens to find that he has been rescued by a former nurse living nearby. Annie is an avid reader of Paul's Misery series, proclaiming herself Paul's "number one fan." She refuses to take Paul to the hospital despite his having two broken legs, nursing Paul herself using her stockpiled food and illicit stash of codeine-based painkillers, to which he becomes addicted. When Annie reads Misery's Child, the last book in the Misery series, Annie learns that Paul has killed protagonist Misery Chastain off, she falls into a rage, leaving Paul alone in her house for over two days, sending him into withdrawal and a semi-comatose state. When Annie returns, she forces him to burn his new manuscript – which he hoped would launch his post-Misery career – and presents him with an antique Royal typewriter, for the purpose of writing a new Misery novel that will bring the character back from the dead. Biding his time, Paul begins a new book, Misery's Return, allows Annie to read it as he writes, he manages to escape his room in a wheelchair on several different occasions, searching for more painkillers and exploring the house.
He discovers that her telephone does not work, finds a scrapbook full of newspaper clippings, suggesting that she is a serial killer who has murdered over thirty people, was charged but acquitted of killing infants at a Boulder hospital maternity ward. Meanwhile, Annie grows depressive, reveals that she knows about Paul leaving his room, she punishes him by cauterizing his ankle with a blowtorch. When Paul complains about the typewriter breaking down, she cuts off his thumb with an electric knife. A Colorado state trooper arrives at Annie's house in search of Paul, when Paul attempts to alert him, Annie murders the trooper by running him over with her riding lawnmower, she temporarily hides Paul in the basement while disposing of the body and car, where Paul steals a can of lighter fluid. After being moved back into the bedroom, Paul finishes Misery's Return. Annie arrives to read it, only to find that he has doused the manuscript in lighter fluid and lit a match to burn it before she can read it.
While Annie tries to put out the flames, Paul attacks her with the typewriter and they engage in a violent struggle, in which Annie hits her head. Paul escapes the room but passes out, upon awakening manages to alert officers who have come to search for the missing trooper, he warns them that Annie is alive and in the guest bedroom, passes out when they tell him the room was empty. It is revealed that Annie had escaped through the window and gone to get a chainsaw to kill Paul, dying from her head wound in the process. Returning home to New York, Paul submits Misery's Return to his publisher, set to become an international bestseller. Paul suffers frequent nightmares about Annie, continues to have withdrawal from painkillers, he has become an alcoholic with writer's block. After a random encounter on the street, Paul gains inspiration to write a new story, weeping both in misery for his shattered life and in joy that he is able to write again. One of Stephen King's inspirations for Misery was the reaction his fans had to his 1984 novel The Eyes of the Dragon.
Many fans rejected The Eyes of the Dragon because it was an epic fantasy book, with none of the horror that made his reputation. Paul Sheldon feeling chained to the Misery books by his fans was a metaphor for King's feeling chained to horror fiction. Another source was King's addiction to drugs and alcohol, his struggle to give them up, he stated: "Take the psychotic nurse in Misery, which I wrote when I was having such a tough time with dope. I knew. There was never any question. Annie was my drug problem, she was my number-one fan. God, she never wanted to leave." When further addressing the idea of whether the character of Paul Sheldon was based on himself, King stated that in certain ways, he was, but in the ways where every character is a part of the author in some way: "It would be fair enough to ask, I suppose, if Paul Sheldon in Misery is me. Certain parts of him are... but I think you will find that, if you continue to write fiction, every character you create is you."King has attributed a dream he had while on a trans-Atlantic flight to London with the situation and characters that became fleshed out in Misery.
He noted that he wrote the idea on an American Airlines cocktail napkin when he woke up so he co
Pet Sematary
Pet Sematary is a 1983 horror novel by American writer Stephen King. The novel was nominated for a World Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 1986, adapted into two films: one in 1989 and one in 2019. In November 2013, PS Publishing released Pet Sematary in a limited 30th-anniversary edition. Louis Creed, a doctor from Chicago, is appointed director of the University of Maine's campus health service, he moves to a large house near the small town of Ludlow with his wife Rachel, their two young children and Gage, Ellie's cat, Church. From the moment they arrive, the family runs into trouble: Ellie hurts her knee and Gage is stung by a bee, their new neighbor, an elderly man named Jud Crandall, comes to help. He warns Rachel about the highway that runs past their house. Jud and Louis become close friends. Since Louis's father died when he was three, he sees Jud as a surrogate father. A few weeks after the Creeds move in, Jud puts the friendship on the line when he takes the family on a walk in the woods behind their home.
A well-tended path leads to a pet cemetery where the children of the town bury their deceased animals. The outing provokes a heated argument between Rachel the next day. Rachel disapproves of discussing death, she worries about how Ellie may be affected by what she saw at the "sematary". Louis himself has a traumatic experience during the first week of classes. Victor Pascow, a student, fatally injured in an automobile accident, addresses his dying words to Louis even though the two men are strangers. On the night following Pascow's death, Louis experiences what he believes is a vivid dream in which he meets Pascow, who leads him to the deadfall at the back of the "sematary" and warns Louis to not "go beyond, no matter how much you feel you need to." Louis wakes up in bed the next morning convinced it was, in fact, a dream—until he finds his feet and bedsheets covered with dried mud and pine needles. Louis dismisses the dream as the product of the stress he experienced during Pascow's death, coupled with his wife's lingering anxieties about the subject of death.
Louis is forced to confront the subject of death at Halloween, when Jud's wife, suffers a near-fatal heart attack. Thanks to Louis's prompt attention, Norma makes a quick recovery. Jud is grateful for Louis's help and decides to repay him after Church is run over outside his home at Thanksgiving. Rachel and the kids are visiting Rachel's parents in Chicago, but Louis frets over breaking the bad news to Ellie. Sympathizing with Louis, Jud takes him to the pet sematary to bury Church, but instead of stopping there, Jud leads Louis farther on a frightening journey to "the real cemetery": an ancient burial ground, once used by the Miꞌkmaq Tribe. There Louis buries the cat on Jud's instruction. Louis thinks -- until the next afternoon when Church returns home, it is obvious. While he used to be vibrant and lively, he now acts ornery and "a little dead" in Louis's words. Church hunts for mice and birds much more but he rips them apart without eating them; the cat smells so bad that Ellie no longer wants him in her room at night.
Jud confirms that this condition is the rule, rather than the exception, for animals who have been resurrected in this fashion. Louis is disturbed by Church's resurrection and begins to wish that he had never done it. Several months two-year-old Gage is killed by a speeding truck in a horrible accident. Overcome with despair, Louis considers bringing his son back to life with the help of the burial ground. Jud, guessing what Louis is planning, attempts to dissuade him by telling him the gruesome story of the last person, resurrected by the burial ground, Timmy Baterman. Timmy Baterman was killed in action during World War II. Timmy's body was shipped back to the U. S. and his father Bill buried Timmy in that cemetery. Timmy came back malevolent and hellish, terrorizing the people of the town with secrets that Jud asserts he had no earthly way of knowing. Jud and the men fled in horror, it is revealed to Louis that Timmy was stopped by Bill. The traumatised Bill set their house on fire before shooting himself.
Jud states that he believes that whatever came back was not Timmy, but a "demon" that had possessed his corpse. He concludes that "Sometimes, dead is better" and states that "the place has a power... its own evil purpose," and may have caused Gage's death because Jud introduced Louis to it. Despite Jud's warning and his own reservations about the idea, Louis's grief and guilt spur him to carry out his plan. Louis inters him in the burial ground. Gage returns from the dead different from the child he was, he is demonic and more vicious than Timmy, speaking as if not Gage at all but something else. He kills both Rachel. After killing Church, Louis confronts his son and sends him back to the grave with a lethal injection of chemicals from his medical supply stock. After burning the Crandall house down, Louis returns to the burial ground with his wife's corpse, thinking that if he buries the body faster than he did Gage's there will be a different result. Following all of these tragic events, Louis has aged in physical appearance, with white hair and wrinkles.
In fact
Loom
A loom is a device used to weave cloth and tapestry. The basic purpose of any loom is to hold the warp threads under tension to facilitate the interweaving of the weft threads; the precise shape of the loom and its mechanics may vary. The word "loom" is derived from the Old English geloma, formed from ge- and loma, a root of unknown origin. In 1404 it was used to mean a machine to enable weaving thread into cloth. By 1838, it had gained the meaning of a machine for interlacing thread. Weaving is done by intersecting the longitudinal threads, the warp, i.e. "that, thrown across", with the transverse threads, the weft, i.e. "that, woven". The major components of the loom are the warp beam, harnesses or shafts, shuttle and takeup roll. In the loom, yarn processing includes shedding, picking and taking-up operations; these are the principal motions. Shedding. Shedding is the raising of part of the warp yarn to form a shed, through which the filling yarn, carried by the shuttle, can be inserted, forming the weft.
On the modern loom and intricate shedding operations are performed automatically by the heddle or heald frame known as a harness. This is a rectangular frame to which a series of wires, called healds, are attached; the yarns are passed through the eye holes of the heddles. The weave pattern determines which harness controls which warp yarns, the number of harnesses used depends on the complexity of the weave. Two common methods of controlling the heddles are a Jacquard Head. Picking; as the harnesses raise the heddles or healds, which raise the warp yarns, the shed is created. The filling yarn is inserted through the shed by a small carrier device called a shuttle; the shuttle is pointed at each end to allow passage through the shed. In a traditional shuttle loom, the filling yarn is wound onto a quill, which in turn is mounted in the shuttle; the filling yarn emerges through a hole in the shuttle. A single crossing of the shuttle from one side of the loom to the other is known as a pick; as the shuttle moves back and forth across the shed, it weaves an edge, or selvage, on each side of the fabric to prevent the fabric from raveling.
Battening. Between the heddles and the takeup roll, the warp threads pass through another frame called the reed; the portion of the fabric, formed but not yet rolled up on the takeup roll is called the fell. After the shuttle moves across the loom laying down the fill yarn, the weaver uses the reed to press each filling yarn against the fell. Conventional shuttle looms can operate at speeds of about 150 to 160 picks per minute. There are two secondary motions, because with each weaving operation the newly constructed fabric must be wound on a cloth beam; this process is called taking up. At the same time, the warp yarns must be released from the warp beams. To become automatic, a loom needs a tertiary motion, the filling stop motion; this will brake the loom. An automatic loom requires 0.125 hp to 0.5 hp to operate. The back strap loom is a simple loom, it consists of two bars between which the warps are stretched. One bar is attached to a fixed object and the other to the weaver by means of a strap around the back.
The weaver uses their body weight to tension the loom. On traditional looms, the two main sheds are operated by means of a shed roll over which one set of warps pass, continuous string heddles which encase each of the warps in the other set. To open the shed controlled by the string heddles, the weaver relaxes tension on the warps and raises the heddles; the other shed is opened by drawing the shed roll toward the weaver. Both simple and complex textiles can be woven on this loom. Width is limited to. Warp faced textiles decorated with intricate pick-up patterns woven in complementary and supplementary warp techniques are woven by indigenous peoples today around the world, they produce such things as belts, bags and carrying cloths. Supplementary weft patterning and brocading is practiced in many regions. Balanced weaves are possible on the backstrap loom. Today, commercially produced backstrap loom kits include a rigid heddle; the warp-weighted loom is a vertical loom. The earliest evidence of warp-weighted looms comes from sites belonging to the Starčevo culture in modern Serbia and Hungary and from late Neolithic sites in Switzerland.
This loom was used in Ancient Greece, spread north and west throughout Europe thereafter. Its defining characteristic is hanging weights. Extra warp thread is wound around the weights; when a weaver has reached the bottom of the available warp, the completed section can be rolled around the top beam, additional lengths of warp threads can be unwound from the weights to continue. This frees the weaver from vertical size constraint. A drawloom is a hand-loom for weaving figured cloth. In a drawloom, a "figure harness" is used to control each warp thread separately. A drawloom requires two operators, the weaver and an assistant called a "drawboy" to manage the figure harness; the earliest confirmed drawloom fabrics come from the State of Chu and date c. 400 BC. Most scholars attribute the invention of the dra
The Little Sisters of Eluria
"The Little Sisters of Eluria" is a fantasy novella by American writer Stephen King. It was published in 1998 in the anthology Legends. In 2002, it was included in King's collection Everything's Eventual. In 2009, it was published together with the revised edition of The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger by Grant in a limited edition of 4,000 numbered copies of the Artist Edition signed by illustrator Michael Whelan and 1,250 numbered copies of the Deluxe Edition signed by Whelan and Stephen King. Both editions contain Whelan's additional new illustrations for The Gunslinger; the tale features Roland of Gilead. At the time of telling he is accompanied by a horse and is following Walter o'Dim, the Man in Black, he plans to buy another horse, or a mule, which ties in with the events at the beginning of The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger. Roland and his horse arrive at a deserted village, where they encounter a feral dog bearing a cross-shaped spot in its fur attempting to eat a dead body. Roland scares it off, while looking over the corpse, finds a rectangular medallion.
Roland takes it and is attacked and rendered unconscious by a group of slow mutants. He awakens in a hospital marquee run by a strange group of nuns. Calling themselves The Little Sisters, they use tiny bug-like creatures they call "doctors" to heal his severe injuries. Roland discovers the Sisters are vampires, who bring stray survivors back to their "hospital" only to feed on them once they've recovered; the medallion Roland took from the dead body in the village proves to be a sort of holy protection from them. He notices another "patient" next to him who bears a matching medallion, Roland comes to learn that the dead man whose medallion he removed is the brother of his fellow patient. Roland's wounds are healed, but he is powerless to escape from his malevolent benefactors, who keep him weakened with potions. One of the Sisters, Sister Jenna, reveals to Roland that she had involuntarily joined the others and longs to leave them, she sneaks a dose of a powerful herb to Roland, which counteracts the weakening potions, he regains his strength until they are ready to escape.
The Sisters bring one of the mutants to the hospital to remove the medallions from Roland and the patient next to him, since the Sisters are unable to touch the medallions themselves. The mutant realizes the Sisters will most kill him after he has removed the medallions, so he removes the medallion from the patient next to Roland and slashes the patient's neck open; the sight of gushing blood incites the Sisters into a feeding frenzy, allowing the mutant to escape and Roland to retain his medallion. The next night and Sister Jenna initiate their escape, but the other Sisters try to stop them. Sister Jenna reveals an ability to command the "doctors", their leader, Great Sister Mary, soon catches up with them, but is attacked and killed by the same cross-bearing dog Roland first encountered. Roland and Sister Jenna declare love for each other, but Jenna disintegrates into what may have been her natural state, the tiny doctors, while Roland is asleep. Roland allows himself a moment of sorrow – before his quest for Walter continues, once again "quite alone".
In The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla, Roland mentions Sister Jenna, noting that after Susan Delgado there was only one woman of note. In The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah and The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower, the "doctor" bugs make another appearance in the Dixie Pig restaurant; the vampires and Low Men receive Mia/Susannah shortly afterward in the Arc 16 Experimental Station, where Sayre threatens Dr. Scowther, it is indicated in The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower on pg. 654 that the Mid-World creatures known as "throcken" or "billy-bumblers" are natural predators of these insects, in the statement: "ever had kind stood enemy to theirs". In the novel Black House, there is a mention of the "Little Sisters" after Jack Sawyer flips to the territories with Judy's twinner. Stephen King short fiction bibliography The Little Sisters of Eluria on Stephen King's Official Website Stephen King Short Movies Little Sisters of Eluria Website for a Dollar Baby Short Film
The Talisman (King and Straub novel)
The Talisman is a 1984 fantasy novel by American writers Stephen King and Peter Straub. The plot is not related to that of Walter Scott's 1825 novel of the same name, although there is one oblique reference to "a Sir Walter Scott novel." The Talisman was nominated for both the Locus and World Fantasy Awards in 1985. King and Straub followed up with a sequel, Black House, that picks up with a now-adult Jack as a retired Los Angeles homicide detective trying to solve a series of murders in the small town of French Landing, Wisconsin; the book is dedicated to the authors' mothers: "This book is for Ruth King, Elvena Straub." Jack Sawyer, twelve years old, sets out from Arcadia Beach, New Hampshire in a bid to save his mother, dying from cancer, by finding a crystal called "the Talisman." Jack's journey takes him through the American heartland and "the Territories," a strange fantasy land, set in a universe parallel to that of Jack's United States. Individuals in the Territories have parallel individuals, in our world.
Twinners' births and other major life events are paralleled. Twinners can "flip" or migrate to the other world, but only share the body of their alternate universe's analogue; when flipped, the Twinner, or the actual person, will automatically start speaking and thinking the language of where they are flipping into subconsciously. In rare instances, a person may die in one world but not the other, making the survivor "single-natured" with the ability to switch back and forth and mind, between the two worlds. Jack is taught how to flip by a mysterious figure known as Speedy Parker, the twinner of a gunslinger named Parkus in the Territories. In the Territories, the beloved Queen Laura DeLoessian, the twinner of Jack's mother is dying as well. Various people hinder Jack in his quest. Of particular importance are the werewolves, known as Wolfs, who inhabit the Territories; these are not the savage killers of tradition: they serve as royal herdsmen or bodyguards, can sometimes under stress voluntarily change to wolf form, in addition to facing an involuntary transformation that lasts about three days at the time of the full moon.
A sixteen-year-old Wolf named Wolf, is pulled into America by Jack Sawyer and adopts Jack as his pack, serving as his companion. Wolf is likeable, kind and friendly, much like a dog, though his wolf nature shows through on occasion. On the other hand, some Wolfs have joined the malevolent faction, trying to stop Jack; as the story goes back and forth between the Territories and the familiar United States, or "American Territories" as Jack comes to call them, Jack escapes from one life-threatening situation after another. Accompanied by Wolf and by his childhood friend Richard, Jack must retrieve the Talisman before it falls into the hands of evil schemer Morgan Sloat, Richard's father, who, we learn, was Jack's father's business partner before arranging to have the latter murdered, he wants to seize their business from Jack's mother. Morgan Sloat's twinner, Morgan of Orris plans to seize the Territories in the event of Queen Laura's death; the idea of writing The Talisman first took form when Stephen King moved with his family to London in early 1977.
It was there he met Peter and Susan Straub, their children. The two writers became friends. King and his family left London three months to return to the United States. Straub and King had talked multiple times before about collaborating to write a book, but nothing surfaced until years after King returned stateside, when the Straubs moved to the United States. According to King, after Straub moved, "the talk got serious," and they began collaborating, their literary friendship continued. A third and final book in the Jack Sawyer series is planned; when Jack "flips," he finds himself in a parallel world, physically smaller than the world from which he comes. Throughout the course of the novel, Jack uses the size differential as a method to travel across the country; the eastern region, corresponding to the Eastern Seaboard, is the most densely populated and is governed under a feudal system headed by the Queen. The central regions corresponding to the American plains, are a grain growing area known as "the Outposts."
Beyond them the western region of the Territories is a destroyed area known as "the Blasted Lands". It was wrecked by radioactivity and has dangerous mutants and occasional fireballs. Where Jack begins his quest and meets Speedy Parker, it is a decaying building on the New Hampshire coast, at the end of the novel deserted except for Jack's mother. Its parallel in the Territories is the summer palace of the dying queen; the Alhambra was a notable location in King's novel The Tommyknockers. A bar in the fictional western New York town of the same name; the owner, holds Jack as a virtual slave. Jack despises him for this mistreatment; when Jack and Wolf are accused of mischievous "hitchhiking" and "trouble-making" by a highway police officer, they are sent by the court to a camp/school for troubled youths run by evangelist Robert "Sunlight" Gardner/Osmond. It is located in eastern Indiana and parallels a terrible open pit mine in the Territories where slaves are used to gather radioactive ore for Morgan.
Jack and Wolf are held as wards of the state in Sunlight Gardener's School for one month, escaping after Wolf tran
The Dark Tower (series)
The Dark Tower is a series of eight books written by American author Stephen King that incorporate themes from multiple genres, including dark fantasy, science fantasy and Western. It describes a "gunslinger" and his quest toward a tower, the nature of, both physical and metaphorical; the series, its use of the Dark Tower, expands upon Stephen King's multiverse and in doing so, links together many of his other novels. In addition to the eight novels of the series proper that comprise 4,250 pages, many of King's other books relate to the story, introducing concepts and characters that come into play as the series progresses; the series was chiefly inspired by the poem "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" by Robert Browning, whose full text was included in the final volume's appendix. In the preface to the revised 2003 edition of The Gunslinger, King identifies The Lord of the Rings, Arthurian Legend, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly as inspirations, he identifies Clint Eastwood's "Man with No Name" character as one of the major inspirations for the protagonist, Roland Deschain.
King's style of location names in the series, such as Mid-World, his development of a unique language abstract to our own, are influenced by J. R. R. Tolkien's work. A film based on The Gunslinger and serving as a sequel to the events of The Dark Tower due to the nature of said book's ending was released in August 2017. Stephen King saw The Dark Tower series as a first draft planning to rewrite it to eliminate continuity errors. However, after revising The Gunslinger, "he is trying to decide how much he can rewrite." In the story, Roland Deschain is the last living member of a knightly order known as gunslingers and the last of the line of "Arthur Eld", his world's analogue of King Arthur. Politically organized along the lines of a feudal society, it shares technological and social characteristics with the American Old West but is magical. Many of the magical aspects have vanished from Mid-World, but traces remain as do relics from a technologically advanced society. Roland's quest is to find the Dark Tower, a fabled building said to be the nexus of all universes.
Roland's world is said to have "moved on", it appears to be coming apart at the seams. Mighty nations have been torn apart by war, entire cities and regions vanish without a trace and time does not flow in an orderly fashion. Sometimes the sun rises in the north and sets in the east; as the series opens, Roland's motives and age are unclear, though installments shed light on these mysteries. For a detailed synopsis of the novels, see the relevant article for each book. Along his journey to the Dark Tower, Roland meets a great number of both enemies. For most of the way he is accompanied by a group of people who together with him form the Ka-tet of the Nineteen and Ninety-nine, consisting of Jake Chambers, Eddie Dean, Susannah Dean, Oy. Among his many enemies on the way are The Man in Black and The Crimson King. King created a language for his characters, known as the High Speech. Examples of this language include the phrases Thankee and Dan-Tete. In addition, King uses the term Ka, the approximate equivalent of destiny, or fate, in the fictional language High Speech.
This term originated in Egyptian mythology and storytelling, has figured in several other novels and screenplays since 1976. The term appears in King's short story, "Low Men in Yellow Coats", in which Ted describes its meaning to Bobby. While the series was declared finished with the publication of the seventh volume in 2004, King described in an interview in March 2009 an idea for a new short story he'd had: "And I thought,'Well, why don't I find three more like this and do a book that would be like modern fairy tales?' This thing started to add on bits and pieces so I guess it will be a novel." According to King, the idea was a new Dark Tower novel. King said, regarding The Dark Tower, "It's not done yet; those seven books are sections of one long über-novel." Stephen King confirmed this during his TimesTalk event at The Times Center in New York City on November 10, 2009, the next day King's official site posted that King would begin working on this novel in about eight months, with a tentative title being The Wind Through the Keyhole.
King noted that this novel would be set between the fourth and the fifth books of the series. The book, titled The Dark Tower: The Wind Through the Keyhole, was announced on Stephen King's official site on March 10, 2011, was published on April 24, 2012. In July 2016, director Nikolaj Arcel confirmed that the Dark Tower film would be a sequel to the novels as well as a direct adaptation, with Roland in the next cycle of his journey to the Tower; each book in the series was published in hardcover format with a number of full-color illustrations spread throughout. Each book contained works by a single illustrator only. Subsequent printings of each book in trade paperback format preserve the illustrations in full, except for books I and IV. Pocket-sized paperback reprints contain only black-and-white chapter or section header illustrations; the illustrators who worked on each book are: Michael Whelan. Phil Hale – the only Dark Tower illustrator who created a second set of illustrations for a printing of the book he illustrated.
Ned Dameron. Dave McKean – the only Dark Tower illustrator to work in photocollages. Jae Lee – an illustrator who had worked on the Marvel Comics adaptation of the series, illustrated The Wind Through the Keyhole. Bernie Wrightson – illustrato
