The last of the gunslingers and the sole surviving member of a knightly order sworn to protect the Beams that hold the multiverse together. Roland has pursued the Man in Black across a dying world for years, driven by a singular obsession with the Dark Tower - the nexus of all realities. Trained from boyhood in Gilead, he is one of the finest warriors alive, possessed of an almost supernatural speed and accuracy with his revolvers. He is also ruthless, willing to put the quest above all else - a quality that defines him across eight books.

The primary antagonist of the early Dark Tower books and one of Stephen King's most recurring villains across his wider fiction. A sorcerer of vast age and power, Walter has manipulated events across countless worlds and centuries. He is the Man in Black whom Roland has been pursuing since the first line of the series. Devious and theatrical, he is a figure of genuine menace.

A big, blond, stolid young man from Gilead and one of Roland's closest friends, travelling under the alias Richard Stockworth during the Mejis expedition. Alain possesses the touch - a psychic sensitivity that gives him premonitions and an awareness of what others around him are thinking and feeling. Calm and diplomatic by temperament, he is the natural mediator between Roland and Cuthbert when their tempers collide, and an unfussily capable shot in a tradition that prizes the showier kind of capability above all else.

An insane sentient monorail built by the Great Old Ones, running on a single elevated line out of the ruined city of Lud at speeds well beyond the sound barrier. Over the long centuries Blaine has grown bored, lonely, and dangerously unstable, with a fondness for cruel games. He agrees to carry Roland's ka-tet out of Lud on one condition - that they keep him entertained with riddles he cannot answer - and warns them that he will kill them all if they fail.

The weapons master of Gilead who trained Roland and his generation of gunslingers. Brutal, demanding, and deeply traditional, Cort tested each apprentice with a formal combat trial that would either earn them their guns or exile them. Roland defeated him at an unusually young age - the youngest ever to do so - using a trained hawk named David. Cort appears primarily in the Wizard and Glass flashbacks and in Roland's memories throughout the series.

Roland's closest childhood friend and fellow apprentice gunslinger in Gilead. Cuthbert is the quick-witted, talkative one of the trio - sharper-spoken than Roland and quicker to a joke, with a ready grin he can produce even in situations no one else in the room can find anything funny about. He trains alongside Roland under Cort, present for the small everyday cruelties of their apprenticeship and the larger crises that shape them: the master hawkman David's training, the cook Hax's treason, and the unprecedented early test Roland is driven to demand for his coming of age. Loyal, sharp, and unsentimental about the kind of company gunslingers tend to keep, Cuthbert is the friend Roland trusts soonest and longest.

A heroin addict from 1987 New York, drawn into Mid-World through one of the doors on the beach. Quick-witted and irreverent, Eddie has a gift for defusing tension through humour that masks a deep well of courage. He becomes one of Roland's most capable and loyal companions.

The leader of the Big Coffin Hunters, the trio of older hired guns working for John Farson in the Barony of Mejis. An old man with a pronounced limp and long white hair, Jonas is cunning, dangerous, and unburdened by anything that might encourage him to be otherwise. He was once a gunslinger's apprentice himself, failed his testing, and was sent west in the cold formality of that disgrace - a wound he has been a long time carrying. He coordinates the Mejis end of Farson's conspiracy with the unhurried thoroughness of a man who has been planning this kind of work for considerably more years than the three boys from Gilead have been alive.

A boy from New York who finds himself drawn into Mid-World, where he becomes a companion to Roland and his ka-tet. Perceptive and brave beyond his years, Jake possesses a low-level psychic ability and bonds deeply with the billy-bumbler Oy.

A billy-bumbler - a raccoon-like creature native to Mid-World with limited speech ability - who attaches himself to Jake Chambers and becomes inseparable from him. Oy is capable of mimicking words, shows unusual loyalty and intelligence, and serves as both comic relief and emotional anchor for the ka-tet.

An ancient and malevolent witch who lives atop the Coos, a hill east of Hambry, attended by her six-legged mutant cat Musty and a venomous snake called Ermot. Feared and shunned by the townsfolk, Rhea is paid to confirm the virginity of Susan Delgado under the terms of Susan's arrangement with the Mayor of Hambry. She is spiteful, lecherous, and not a woman to cross.

A simple-minded but kind-hearted young man who works as a boy-of-all-work at the Travellers' Rest in Hambry. After Cuthbert intervenes to save Sheemie from Depape's near-killing over a spilled bucket, Sheemie becomes utterly devoted to the three boys from Gilead, and especially to Cuthbert. He serves quietly as a go-between for Roland and Susan when the lovers can no longer risk meeting in the open, and proves, in the small ways the situation permits him, that the courage and discretion the gunslingers value are not as tied to formal intelligence as their training tends to suppose. His mother was Dolores Sheemer; the bartender Stanley Ruiz may be his father.

A beautiful sixteen-year-old girl from Hambry, in the Barony of Mejis - daughter of the late drover Pat Delgado, niece of the watchful and resentful Cordelia, and the unwilling subject of the arrangement her aunt has brokered to make her Mayor Thorin's gilly in exchange for the return of her family's land and horses. When she falls deeply and improbably in love with the stranger from Gilead now lodging at the Bar K, the arrangement she had reluctantly accepted becomes one she has neither the temperament nor the patience to honour quietly any longer. Brave, intelligent, and unwilling to be a small character in someone else's story, Susan is one of the most fully alive figures the series gives the reader.

A civil rights activist from 1964 New York with dissociative identity disorder, drawn into Mid-World through one of the doors on the beach. Her two identities - the composed Odetta Holmes and the volatile, dangerous Detta Walker - must find a way to coexist. A wheelchair user who lost her legs below the knee in a subway accident, she becomes one of Roland's most formidable companions.

One of the Big Coffin Hunters - the trio of older, dangerous men John Farson keeps in Mejis to manage the heavier side of the operation. Reynolds wears a silk-lined cloak and carries himself with the cold, dressed-for-the-occasion composure of a man who has long ago stopped finding violence either remarkable or interesting. He works closely with Jonas on the conspiracy's logistics: the camouflage of the oil tankers at Citgo, the long quiet preparations the boys from Gilead are not yet supposed to have noticed.

Susan Delgado's aunt and guardian, a thin, disapproving woman who brokered Susan's arrangement with Mayor Thorin and considers the resulting financial security ample compensation for whatever moral compromises were involved in producing it. Cordelia manipulated her young niece into accepting the gilly compact through a careful sequence of tears, appeals to Susan's dead father's memory, and gentle reminders of who would otherwise be turned out of the house. She grows steadily more bitter and quarrelsome with Susan as the arrangement progresses, and the household begins to take on the atmosphere of a long, slow, polite siege.

The Mayor of Hambry and Chief Guard of Barony Mejis - an elderly man with bony fingers, long white hair, and a compulsive knuckle-cracking habit that does nothing to lessen the impression of a man rather more pleased with his own importance than the actual scope of his office quite supports. Thorin has become infatuated with the young Susan Delgado and arranged through her aunt for her to come into his household as his gilly. Vain, easily steered by his Chancellor Rimer, and almost entirely unwilling to notice what is unfolding under his own roof, he is the kind of mayor a barony settles for when its real attention is elsewhere.

One of the Big Coffin Hunters - the youngest of the trio, bespectacled, cruel, and unable to let the smallest perceived slight pass without escalating it into the kind of incident the older two have to clean up after him. Depape wears a blue coffin tattoo on the back of his hand and conducts himself with the strenuous, sneering confidence of a man who has been allowed to do this kind of work for somewhat longer than is good for him. His near-killing of Sheemie over a spilled bucket establishes, early in the Mejis arc, both the shape of his personality and the kind of help Roland's company are going to find themselves having to give to the boy who survives him.

Roland's father, a gunslinger of the twenty-ninth generation descended from Arthur of Eld. He sends Roland, Cuthbert, and Alain to Mejis to keep them safe from the growing conflict with John Farson, while also tasking them with counting the Barony's resources. He wrote the letter of introduction that the boys carry. A grave, wise man who understands the political situation better than most, he is mentioned throughout Roland's flashback as a guiding influence.