He stood in a field of crimson flowers, stretching outward to the horizon, bathed in the golden hues of a sunset. A weathered man, staring out, his eyes piercing my soul. His vestments spoke volumes: the archetypal Western man, with a rose held tightly in one hand and a revolver in the other. A field of roses, a man, and a tower of gargantuan size, ominous above the whole. I've never forgotten his face, a face that bore the weight of countless lifetimes. Some stories begin at the conclusion, and the beginning of my story is no exception.

I first saw this cover on a mundane trip to the store with my mother. These trips were routine, like most adult tasks. For me, they included sojourns along the fragrant aisle of roasted coffee beans. The many scents blended in my olfactory system into a bliss and comfort I find nowhere else. The aisle that held much more than a passing interest, however, was that of the literary variety.

Grocery stores carry all manner of goods: the bare necessities, the consumerist offerings tailored to entice your spending, and an often overlooked selection of literature. Your first thoughts may stray towards the vapid tabloids and periodicals discussing celebrity gossip, and the highly questionable publications engaging in discourse on conspiracies. The exceptions are the novels. Beyond the countless "bodice rippers" that find their way into the carts of lonely souls searching for thrills that only their dreams can provide lie diamonds in the rough. Tucked away, a discerning eye will find a selection of stories lauded, applauded, even adored. I've found a few in my time: the likes of Mickey Spillane, the extended Tolkien publications that build out the Legendarium, and novelizations of media adaptations and spinoffs.

One name shows up time and again: Stephen King. To say his writing is divisive is selling it short. Frequently the butt of jokes, King is a regular fixture in these aisles. And so it was that I first saw Roland, standing at the base of a spire of undetermined height, in a rack at my local Hilander. Three words sat above his head: The Dark Tower. I had no idea that what first pulled me towards it was the last entry in the series proper.

Growing up, I heard his name and made the connection: Stephen King makes horror. I didn't watch or read any of his work until after I saw that cover, and my first experiences with it came through adaptations. First came an ill-advised viewing of The Langoliers. I terrified myself of falling out of time and being eaten by corrupted polygons. The longest-standing effect came from Maximum Overdrive, in the form of a homicidal truck with the face of the Green Goblin. I saw it on television as a kid, but the truck still plagues my nightmares. Then came a visceral viewing of the IT miniseries. After that, I watched The Shining for the first time on a Sunday while suffering from a serious furnace-induced migraine. These stories left my young mind fearful of clowns, trucks, and getting out of sync with linear time.

I was in my junior-year English class (yes, the one with Mr. Bingley) when I read my first Stephen King story: "Sorry, Right Number," a teleplay King printed in script form in Nightmares & Dreamscapes. The premise was simple. A woman receives a phone call; the caller is sobbing at the other end, and the woman assumes the caller is her daughter, away at boarding school. She calls and discovers that her daughter is fine. The woman goes to bed, and her husband settles in to watch a program in the living room. Later that night, she finds her husband dead in his armchair.

The story then jumps ahead years, to her daughter's wedding day. She has remarried, but she still misses him, and grief leads her to desperation. In a last effort, she calls their old phone number. To her horror, she realizes that she was the caller all along, and her sobs were attempts to warn her past self about her husband's impending heart attack. This story had me shook, bridging my then-fixation with science fiction and the world of horror fiction.

About a decade ago, a viewing of the content and context surrounding Maximum Overdrive flipped the first "switch" in my opinions.

You see, I bought into the broader view that pop culture paints when discussing King. Cocaine benders and inanimate objects, BUT EVIL. Watching the original trailer for Maximum Overdrive, I saw how it was advertised. The man himself says he finally decided to direct one himself: "I just wanted someone to do Stephen King right." If you've never seen it yourself, I'll link it here: Maximum Overdrive Trailer (1986). Do yourself a favor and buckle up while you watch.

Shakespeare's work has been culturally turned into "High Art," yet its purpose was popular entertainment: bawdy, boisterous, wild, and drunken. A "Shakespearean actor" would need a dose of smelling salts after viewing a true representation of the way the shows were actually staged. We're taught to put it on a pedestal, when it was made to be accessible.

King's work is MEANT to be entertaining. Don't take it too seriously. He KNOWS how ridiculous the concepts are, and he KNOWS how raunchy and visceral his writing is. That isn't to say it's lowbrow or a formulaic YA novel touching on the basic interpersonal situations you tend to find in real life. These are stories that push boundaries, twist concepts, and make you, as the reader, feel like you're along for the ride.

With my opinion shifted, and some courage acquired through maturity years later, I saw the new IT films (02017 and 02019). I wasn't the only one who found them to be solid works either.

The casting was great, and the acting superb. While I'd seen the miniseries as a child, and occasionally on reruns, this adaptation was like watching the story for the first time. By splitting the two timelines into their respective films, it makes for a great two-parter for a Halloween Night viewing.

Not long after the release, work on a streaming series set in the same continuity began. The first season received much praise last Fall, and deservedly so. The most intriguing aspect connects to The Dark Tower's fluid concepts of time, which makes IT: Welcome to Derry both a Prequel and Sequel Simultaneously.

Now I'm reading the books themselves. I'm nearly done with The Shining, and I've nearly finished The Gunslinger. I'm following a fan-consensus reading order that slots King's tie-in novels in ahead of the Dark Tower books that pay them off. The Dark Tower sits at number seventeen of twenty on that list. I intend to reach the book whose cover started all of this finally.

The MCU didn't start the concept of a multiverse. Don't give them so much credit, and don't let their mixed successes be the litmus test, or the warning, for stories that are part of a connected universe. Michael Moorcock was using the concept for years before Marvel began to include it, even within its comic universe. His 01963 novella The Blood Red Game used the word "multiverse" for a set of parallel worlds. Works like Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber are yet another example of interconnected and layered worlds, though those exist as a singular series, rather than the extended bibliography of one writer. (I have Zelazny’s entire series in a massive tome on one of my bookshelves as well…)

It was during my writing of this article that I learned that the most recent King release was in fact a long-awaited conclusion to his collaboration with Peter Straub, The Talisman Trilogy. This release matters because it directly connects to the tower and the Ka-tet (yes, I've been aware of this concept long before reading the series proper) and their shared setting: Midworld, the world of The Dark Tower. The title of this concluding tome echoes a line from the first Dark Tower novel, Other Worlds Than These. Fittingly, that story is likely to be the last one on my readthrough of the extended canon. My list does not encompass the entirety of the King Corpus, but it does include the stories that best connect and pay off alongside the Dark Tower series.

These 20 entries provide the most direct connections, and thematically represent the series. This list is compiled from countless sources and fan opinions, including the most widely agreed entries of import. Following this list gives me a solid foothold for tackling the canon without wading through the countless other tales of strange happenings.