If what grabbed you was chasing the Beam toward the Dark Tower—surviving Shardik’s forest, crossing Lud, and matching wits with Blaine—then you’ll vibe with the steady, high-stakes march of The Fellowship of the Ring. Like Roland’s ka-tet, a small band pushes through haunted ruins and ancient waystations (think Moria’s deep roads echoing Blaine’s tunnels), every leg of the journey testing loyalty and will. You’ll get that same sense of movement, dread, and wonder as a world’s old powers wake around travelers who can’t turn back.

If you loved how Roland, Eddie, Susannah, Jake, and Oy coalesce into a ka-tet—bickering, joking, bleeding together from Dutch Hill to Lud—then the gritty camaraderie in The Black Company will hit home. Cook’s mercenaries survive on gallows humor, shared scars, and stubborn loyalty, just like Eddie cracking wise to steady Jake before the door opens. It’s that same forged-in-fire closeness, where the only way through a broken world is together.

If the deranged grandeur of Lud, the Beam-guarding bear, and a sentient monorail who demands riddles made you love the book’s off-kilter vibe, Perdido Street Station delivers that same dizzying weird. New Crobuzon is a labyrinth of mutated sciences, nightmare art, and back-alley wonders—every alleyway a new, unsettling revelation. Like Blaine’s impossible intelligence or the haunted house that draws Jake, Miéville keeps bending logic until it feels hypnotically inevitable.

If Blaine’s rails, Old World control rooms, and relic machines felt like arcana—mysterious powers no one fully grasps—then The Shadow of the Torturer is a perfect echo. Wolfe’s far-future Urth brims with artifacts that seem magical because their workings are forgotten, much like Mid-World’s shattered tech. As Roland reads the bones of a lost age to navigate forward, Severian wanders ruins where every device hints at buried histories and dangerous, godlike knowledge.

If slipping among Roland, Eddie, Susannah, and Jake—each carrying secrets, trauma, and purpose—made the trek to the Tower feel richer, Hyperion amplifies that with a pilgrimage where every traveler’s tale reframes the journey. The shifting perspectives generate the same mounting tension you felt from Dutch Hill’s possession to the riddle-standoff with Blaine: separate threads tightening into one ominous destination.