“The Dark Tower IV: Wizard & Glass,” by Stephen King, 672 pages, $17.95, published by Plume, 1997.

Reading Stephen King’s best novels has always been like riding a scream into a nightmare — he startles your worst fears into revealing themselves and pushes forward with such great skill, you are forced to confront those fears with a quickening heart.

His 23-year career as a novelist is unprecedented. With the recent publication of “The Dark Tower IV: Wizard & Glass,” King has now published 27 best-selling novels under his own name, six best-selling novels under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, five best-selling collections of short stories, one best-selling work of nonfiction and nine screenplays.

Since the groundbreaking 1974 publication of “Carrie,” he has pressed against — and redefined — a genre that has stifled and confined other writers. His voice, too broad to be limited to any one device, has tested most literary waters, from the passages of historical romance in “Misery” to the rich fantasy midworlds of the epic Dark Tower series to the dark comedy in “Needful Things” to the beautifully written prose of “The Body” and “The Mist.”

His worldwide influence struck me, almost literally, in July 1993. While participating in the running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain, I came upon Stephen King’s looming, towering image when I narrowly escaped a bull’s wrath by leaping over a barricade, slicing through the crowd, and slowing my momentum by pressing my hands against a bookstore window. There, swinging above me in the wake of the beating hooves, was an enormous poster of Mr. King.

Later that week, on beaches in Monte Carlo, Nice and elsewhere in the south of France, I saw Stephen King’s novels, translated into French, German and Spanish, most frequently in the hands of passers-by or those reading in the sun.

When asked to comment on the phenomenon that is King, Constance Hunting, poet and publisher of Orono’s Puckerbrush Press, wrote that “it is not so much that Stephen King’s writing has taken a certain direction, but that the direction has taken him. So powerful, so compelling is this direction — toward the discovery of belief in real evil — that he has followed after it with a conviction driven by his brilliant and unceasing imagination. No reader or critic should regret this.”

What critics have been regretting, even condemning, is King’s recent decision to leave his longtime publisher, Penguin Putnam, and launch into an unusual — and highly public — search to find a new publisher for his recently completed manuscript, “Bag of Bones.” It was an event that created such a stir in the media and prompted so much complaining in the publishing industry that it overshadowed the eagerly awaited release of “Wizard & Glass,” which has a built-in audience of millions and hit bookstores in trade paperback on Nov. 4.

The uproar began when King and his agent, Arthur Green, decided to forgo the industry tradition of meeting secretly with a potential new publisher by instead sending a select list of publishers a formal letter of intent. According to the New York Times on Oct. 27, the letter read: “After being published for more than 20 years by one company, Stephen King has decided to make a change. We’re contacting a small group of publishers and are indicating to them that Mr. King is looking to establish another longstanding relationship, which will be artistically and financially beneficial to all parties.”

Unfortunately, the letter was leaked to the press, which immediately began touting that King wanted $17 million for the 1,000-page manuscript, which is about a novelist who develops writer’s block after the death of his wife. At that moment, the backlash began, with many in publishing turning the tables on King by publicly scrutinizing his sales and by stating that no publisher could make a profit if King received such a large advance.

Given that King is the world’s best-selling novelist and that his novels routinely sell over a million in hardback, that statement seems a little far-reaching.

Still, King himself came forward to say that he agreed with the criticism surrounding the sale of “Bag of Bones.” “We could have been smoother,” he said in a telephone interview with the Times on Nov. 5. “I know we did it the wrong way. Hopefully, in the end, the talk will be about the book and not about the negotiations.”

But on Nov. 7, the talk was indeed about the negotiations when King made headlines again by signing a lucrative contract with Simon & Schuster. In the new contract, which covers “Bones,” a collection of short stories and a work on the craft of writing, King will take a relatively small advance of $2 million for each book, but, according to the Times on Nov. 7, he also will receive an astonishing — and unheard of — 50 percent cut of the profits.

Through all of this, “Wizard & Glass” has been a quiet hit. The novel, which is King’s first installment in the Dark Tower series since 1989’s “The Waste Lands,” is now sitting high atop nationwide best-seller lists.

Beginning where “The Wastelands” left off, “Wizard & Glass” opens with the Gunslinger, Roland of Gilead, and his ka-tet — ex-junkie Eddie Dean, paraplegic Odetta Susannah Holmes, 11-year-old Jake Chambers and the “billybumbler” Oy — still locked within Blaine the Mono, which is a crazed, suicidal monorail that could easily give Donald Trump a run as the world’s reigning megalomaniac.

Blaine, who thrives on riddles, has threatened to smash the group into bloody bits unless they can stump him with a riddle — which won’t be easy, as Blaine somehow seems to know the answer to all riddles. “If I solve all the riddles you ask me,” he states, “I will take you with me to the place where the path ends in the clearing. [But] if one of you tells a riddle I cannot solve, I will spare your lives and leave you in Topeka, whence you may continue your quest for the Dark Tower.”

Of course, someone in the group ingeniously manages to stump Blaine, but the harrowing trip is thrilling nonetheless, offering perhaps the best opening in the series.

With Blaine out of commission, Roland and his ka-tet find themselves in a version of Topeka, Kan. — where the presence of a warbling “thinny” has ripped “the fabric of existence … almost entirely … away” and where everyone in Topeka seems to have fallen victim to a superflu (think “The Stand”).

As they travel into town and come upon a train station, they are faced with the scattered remains of the dead — whom King describes in wonderfully grisly detail:

“At the foot of the stairs leading down to the commuter parking lot at the side of the station, half a dozen corpses lay together like a collapsed cornshock. Two were women, three were men. The sixth was a child in a stroller. A summer spent dead in the sun and rain and heat (not to mention at the mercy of any stray cats, coons, or woodchucks that might be passing) had given the toddler a look of ancient wisdom and mystery, like a child mummy discovered in an Incan pyramid. Jake supposed from the faded blue outfit it was wearing that it had been a boy, but it was impossible to tell for sure. Eyeless, lipless, its skin faded to dusky gray, it made a joke of gender …”

Anne Rice and Dean Koontz should be as talented as King when it comes to describing the dead as richly as he does here.

As the group follows the Path of the Beam — which ultimately will lead them to the elusive Dark Tower — Roland increasingly lapses into moments of his past, which heretofore have been only glimpsed, never fully explored. But before his past can truly be realized, King surprises us — and them — with “some kind of building … sprawled across all four lanes of highway. [It] looked like an airy Arabian Nights confection of blue and gold … . The thinny lay close around it, but the palace rose serenely above all, its turrets trying for the sky … .”

It isn’t the Dark Tower that Roland and the others have come upon, but something made of glass, something glowing green and seething with certain danger, something shining and radiant with the fires of the Old Star … something strangely reminiscent of the Emerald palace in “The Wizard of Oz.” Indeed, what King has thrown dead in the center of the Path of the Beam is yet another obstacle for Roland and his ka-tet to overcome.

But before readers can enter the palace and push forward to the Dark Tower, they first must overcome a 500-page digression as King stops the present action cold and reaches back into Roland’s past, where we meet Susan Delgado, the love of his life whom he lost in ways that will not be revealed here. “I’m not sure you need to hear,” Roland says, which indeed might be King speaking directly to his readers, “But I think I need to tell. Our future is the Tower, and to go toward it with a whole heart, I must put my past to rest as best I may. There’s no way I could tell you all of it — in my world even the past is in motion, rearranging itself in many vital ways — but this one story may stand for all the rest.”

This digression is a big gamble that might disappoint readers who had hoped King would move them further along the path to the Dark Tower, where Roland himself “hopes the quickening destruction of Mid-World may be halted, perhaps even reversed.” To others, necessary information is given about Roland’s past, who is demystified as a result.

Inspired by Robert Browning’s narrative poem “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” the Dark Tower series clearly is important to King, who writes in the novel’s afterword that “I have written enough novels and short stories to fill a solar system of the imagination, but Roland’s story is my Jupiter — a planet that dwarfs all the others — a place of strange atmosphere, crazy landscape, and savage gravitation.”

Written with heart and, at times, with an unceasing bravado, all four books showcase an imagination that inspires with its breadth, dazzles with its daring, and somehow exposes our own fears in characters we sometimes recognize as ourselves.

Christopher Smith, a writer and critic who lives in Brewer, reviews films each Monday in the NEWS.