The Dark Tower

The Dark Tower is Stephen King's masterpiece, his magnum opus. The series is wildly uneven, starting strong, lagging in the middle, going strong again, then finishing on a bit of a whimper. But as a whole, it’s something marvelous – a wild ride from start to the very finish. It's also showcases the talents of one of the greatest audiobook narrators: the late, great Frank Muller.The story of the audiobook narration of The Dark Tower itself is just as twisty and as windy as the story of Rolland's quest of the Dark Tower and Stephen King's own personal journey to write it.  The original audiobook narrator was Frank Muller who narrates the first four books of the Dark Tower series. Tragically, Muller died in 2008 after a six-year recovery battle from a serious motorbike accident and was never able to complete the last three books in the series. So good, so majestic, so nuanced was Muller’s rendition of the first four books that Stephen King himself credits Frank Muller’s original reading of the first four Dark Tower books for helping King get back into The Dark Tower story to finish writing the last 3 books after the years and years of delay between the forth and fifth book. King credits Muller with this in the acknowledgement section in The Wolves of Cala (Book V of the Dark Tower).In essence, Muller becomes part of the story of the Dark Tower itself and becomes an essential element of both King and King's hero Roland journey to the Dark Tower. George Guidall took over from Muller, finishing the last three books. But it left a broken continuity to the series with Muller’s narration of the first four then Guidall’s voice for the last three. To fix this, Guidall goes back and narrates new versions of the first four books. As such, the most common version of the Dark Tower audiobooks are Guidall's modern reading of them.However, while Guidall does a good job, he never lives up to the mastery that was Muller. To ignore the power that was Frank Muller's original reading (back in the infancy of the audiobook movement when audiobooks were distributed as tape cassettes) is to lose something vital, something powerful, something primal to the reading of The Dark Tower. Frank Muller's voice was the voice of Roland of Gilead  and Sussana and Detta Walker.  So. For one of the best audiobook performances ever to grace the world, listen to Frank Muller’s The Dark Tower (the first four books). Additionally, Muller also narrates the tie-in novel ‘The Talisman’ and a number of King's older books (Shawshank Redemption, The Green Man, etc). To find Muller's version, you may have to search wide and far online. I don't believe you can buy this version directly from Audible / Amazon.