The Dark Tower

King has given the origin of this series many times and it is two things: Browning's poem for the title, and Leone's film for everything else. Roland is the Man with No Name, transplanted whole. A near-silent gunslinger in a duster crossing an enormous empty landscape after a goal he will not explain, in a world where the institutions have collapsed and the surviving technology is a gun. King has said explicitly that he wanted to write a story with the scope of Tolkien and the feel of a Sergio Leone western. The Dark Tower is the answer to that sentence.

King has described the ambition directly: he had read Tolkien as a teenager and wanted to write something with that scope, but refused to write it with Tolkien's furniture. What carries over is the quest structure, a fellowship assembled from different worlds, and a landscape that is itself the evidence of a catastrophe nobody alive remembers. The graph already records Tolkien pointing at The Stand on similar grounds.