The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly

by Bev Vincent

Meet 8 secondary characters from The Dark Tower series who didn't make it into Bev Vincent's acclaimed The Road to the Dark Tower.

Genres: Nonfiction, Horror

Nook

First published April 20, 2009

About the author

Bev Vincent is the author of The Dark Tower Companion, The Road to the Dark Tower, the Bram Stoker Award nominated companion to Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, and The Stephen King Illustrated Companion, which was nominated for a 2010 Edgar® Award and a 2009 Bram Stoker Award. In 2018, he co-edited the anthology Flight or Fright with Stephen King.

His short fiction has appeared in places like Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Borderlands 5, Ice Cold, and The Blue Religion. Four stories were collected in When the Night Comes Down and another four in a CD Select eBook. His story “The Bank Job” won the Al Blanchard Award. “The Honey Trap” from Ice Cold was nominated for an ITW Thriller Award in 2015 and “Zombies On A Plane” was nominated for an Ignotus Award in 2020.

His work has been translated into: Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, Serbian, Spanish and Ukrainian.

He has been a contributing editor with Cemetery Dance magazine since 2001 and writes book reviews for Onyx Reviews. He has served as a judge for the Al Blanchard, Shirley Jackson and Edgar Awards.

Reviews

[Chris Haught · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a decent little companion book to The Road to the Dark Tower: Exploring Stephen King's Magnum Opus. Here's where Vincent explores a few characters that didn't fit into the main book. Useful to Dark Tower junkies, but that's about it.

[Geoff · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a chapbook containing cut content from Bev Vincent's "The Road to the Dark Tower" book. Cemetery Dance released this as a promotional chapbook, as well as the original book.

This cut material is about side characters in the Dark Tower story. They are categorized as either good, bad, or ugly. Calvin Tower is an example character here. A pretty prominent character I think, but he was left out of the original book. Anyway, this chapbook deals with eight secondary characters, and it tells their stories, that they played in the Dark Tower series of books. There's not too much here, as it's just some cut content. But, it was nice to read, as a complement to "The Road to the Dark Tower."

Of note: this was not released in 2009, as I read this in 2007. Maybe the stated published date is for the ebook?

[Phil Zimmerman · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn't really enjoy this chapbook. The author said that it was a chapter that was left his book on the Dark Tower. It read like a description of eight characters. No real thread or connection or reason for these 8. No really what I expected.