The Gunslinger, The Drawing of the Three, The Waste Lands, Wizard and Glass, Wolves of the Calla, Song of Susannah & The Dark Tower
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Inspired by Robert Browning's poem "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came", it's obvious that this series means a lot to King; indeed, judging by the prefatory and closing remarks which appear in most of the volumes (not to mention the content - and the massive length - of the series itself), he seems to have come to regard it as his magnum opus - the central work in his massive ouevre and imaginary.
Above all else, it's a Western, tracing the gunslinger's weary progress towards the Tower, accompanied by his companions, and that predominant thread is woven through all of the books' other elements. And it's also structured as an epic, constructed around a plot with the highest of stakes and spanning huge distances and times - but this is where it falls down a bit, for while the story is strong, it doesn't compel in the way that the best books of this type do (which is not to say that the overarching narrative isn't plenty gripping - it'd have to be, to keep me reading through seven books at, on average, some 600 or 700 pages each!).
One of the striking things about the series is the extent to which each of its constituent books is limited to a particular part of the overall arc (which is not to say that they're in any real sense self-contained) - Wizard and Glass (largely devoted to Roland's relating of the story of his coming of age in Mejis) and the Seven Samurai-esque Wolves of the Calla particularly come to mind. The first in the series, The Gunslinger, is the most interesting, and, I reckon, comes closest to the spirit of Browning's poem in its cryptic, tersely poetic series of fragments, but it's not until The Drawing of the Three that King really hits his stride and things begin to take the shape they'll more or less hold for the duration.
To be honest, I was disappointed that it wasn't darker - I read the standalone short story "The Little Sisters of Eluria" a while back, and was very struck by its intensity and darkness, but the same isn't to be found in the series at large, which is more oriented towards action and (necessary, I suppose) exposition - and its central protagonist, Roland himself, not more solitary...but all up, while I don't think I'll be re-reading any time soon (probably not ever), it's eminently readable - and the last few pages make a killer ending, too.
