On Other Worlds than These

I have been blazing through the rest of the Dark Tower series by Stephen King these last couple of weeks. I took a long break after reading The Gunslinger earlier this year. I'm on book seven now, and I'm still trying to unpack everything from books two to six. There is something fantastic going on in King's mind—how this series integrates with his psyche. He really lets you into the mind of a writer, more specifically him and his process, in a way that even On Writing wasn't able to accomplish.

Song of Susannah (Book six), particularly, was genius in the way it blended his entire storytelling universe with this set of characters and even his life, taking a scalpel to reality in a way that his novels often hint at but never fully realize until now. The diary entries at the end—you can't tell if they are real entries mixed with fiction (such as the newspaper clippings about the walk ins and his death) or whether they are entirely fictionalized—discuss how this story is the only one that…