Stephen King Offers Free Online Prologue to Dark Towers 5

Posted on August 29, 2001

Stephen King, the prolific bestselling horror and suspense novelist, has posted a prologue to the fifth book of his Dark Towers series on his website. The 11,000+ word prologue can be read for free online as a webpage or downloaded as a text file or PDF document. On the site King explains that the prologue is available for free, "to repay the readers of these stories, if only a little, for their patience."

Stephen King has written four other Dark Towers novels, The Gunslinger, The Drawing of the Three, The Waste Lands and Wizard and Glass. The first three novel were written closely together while the fourth novel (Wizard and Glass) did not come until last year -- several years after the third book in series. Stephen King says he expects there will be three more books in the series. He also said the title of the fifth Dark Towers book will not be The Crawling Shadow, as previously reported.

Stephen King has used his website for a variety of purposes including dispelling rumors; selling downloadable content; announcing new books and films and providing information to readers about future projects. Some of his notable online projects to date include The Plant, a fee-based downloadable serialized novel and Riding the Bullet, an ebook co-published between Scribner and Philtrum Press, King's own press. In June, 1992, Stephen King was in an unfortunate accident in which he was struck and thrown by a van while walking on the side of the road. He included a detailed account of the accident in On Writing, his part autobiography, part writing book.