‘He wanted what evil men always want: to have power and use that power…’
For many years I steered clear of Stephen King’s fantasy series The Dark Tower because I wrongly believed it wasn’t for me. After working through the entire series over an 18 month period from 2024 into 2025, the adventures of Roland the gunslinger fast became some of my favourite King writing. The Eyes of the Dragon is adjacent to The Dark Tower books whilst being very much its own thing…
Initially written as a gift to King’s daughter Naomi because she didn’t like horror novels, The Eyes of the Dragon received wide publication in 1984 (the same year as The Talisman and Thinner), and received a cool reception from fans who had grown to expect King to deliver tales of the macabre. It was this reaction that eventually inspired King to write Misery. Anyway, this book is the story of a wrongly accused Prince, a jealous little brother and an evil magician. King’s fans will recognise said magician as Randall Flagg, the main antagonist of The Stand and a huge part of The Dark Tower series.
I will begin by saying that The Eyes of the Dragon is closer to a European fairy-tale than it is to the Dark Tower books. King wanted to write a book that his teenage daughter could enjoy, and while there are certainly moments of darkness here (Flagg is as insidious as ever), the universality of this book is part of the reason it received such a backlash upon release. For me, however, this mass appeal is part of the book’s strengths rather than a weakness. King is clearly going for a Tolkienesque fantasy fable and I was totally hooked from start to finish. Obviously, if you don’t like fantasy generally, you won’t like The Eyes of the Dragon, but this should be essential reading for fans of the The Dark Tower despite the fact that it is undoubtedly one of the more forgotten works in King’s oeuvre.
While some of the characters here are broadly drawn archetypes, Thomas, the jealous Prince, and Flagg, of course, are a joy to spend time with, and while Peter, the prince in the tower, is a bit of a Gary Stu, I was still rooting for him to escape by the end. I found The Eyes of the Dragon to be as enjoyable as any of King’s Mid-World novels. High praise indeed.