I haven't actually read much, if any Stephen King, but with a long drive, I figured the audiobook of The Gunslinger was a good place to start.

And a hell of a start it was. "The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed" is an all time banger of an opening. Roland, the titular gunslinger, is a wanderer in a world that has moved on, in the echoing apocalyptic phrase that describes his world. He was once a kind of knight in a feudal land of green hills and harsh justice. Now he chases the man in black, seeking vengeance for his destroyed home, and the secrets of the Dark Tower, a kind of nexuses of universes which might hold the secret to healing the world and redeeming the gunslinger.

So what works is the tone. King is a master of atmosphere, of evoking the strange, dry, dying world. The characters Roland encounters, from the farmer Brown, the dead people of the town of Tull, and the uncanny boy Jake, refugee from our New York, are stark and haunting.

The plot, the prophecy, the doom of Gilead, all of that stuff figures, but I also figure it doesn't really matter. Just hang out and enjoy the way the words land.