The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger

This heroic fantasy, set in a world of ominous landscape and macabre menace, features one of Stephen King's most powerful creations-The Gunslinger.

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This installment tells the story of Roland's search for a mysterious stranger who may be able to help Roland find the Dark Tower. It is long on atmosphere and short on action. Therefore, fans of Steven King's horror works will find this book a distinct change of pace. However, the book will not disappoint you if you try it, especially if you are a fan of fantasy series such as the Lord of the Rings. Furthermore, you will find in later books that elements of King's horror world also exist in Roland's world, and therefore, to have a full understanding of King's horror villains, you have to read this series.

The Gunslinger offers several intriguing views of Roland's dying world. The book is not devoid of action; there is a dramatic shoot out for shadowy reasons which one hopes will be better explained in the concluding volumes of the work. There is a lost child who provides the first direct evidence that Roland's world is connected to our own, and there is the introduction to Roland himself, a man who is capable of fantastic violence but still comes across as human and quite possibly kind (a fact which becomes more clear in later books).

I recommend this book most highly to anyone who enjoys stories involving quests such as Arthurian legends, the Chronicles of Prydain and the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings.

61 of 64 found the following review helpful:

Start of the series and writing seminarsApr 28, 2004
By Neil Goldsmith
I've read a number of reviews of the series and have been told by friends how great it is, so I decided to check it out. Reading and understanding the intro/forward King has written in this revised edition helped a great deal. King wrote this book early in his career with the intention of writing a grand epic. He explains the author of this book at the time had not really found his groove so to speak and had spent a little too much time in writing seminars. One particularly revealing comment King makes about himself was that the seminars taught him to favor ambiguity over clarity and simplicity. He also goes on to mention when he revised the book he found many areas for improvement, but was able to leave the writing alone in places where he was seduced into forgetting the writing seminars by a particulary entrancing piece of story.

I find this captures the book well. Reading it, the book shifts from a very interesting tangible plot to the Gunslinger slipping into ambiguous dreaming and past thoughts within the same page. You can almost tell where King has gone back and done revisions as you can see his 30+ years of experience fixing his amateur mistakes.

Taken by itself, I didn't find the book that intriguing. Just average. Taken as a series I will definitely trek on to the future volumes as a number of people have told me the first one is sort of one you just have to get through. It's good it is a quick read and sets up alot of what will be revealed later.

132 of 150 found the following review helpful:

Imagination to paper takes timeMay 03, 2000

At under 300 pages, "The Gunslinger" - the first book from Stephen King's "The Dark Tower" series - may seem oddly short, especially when compared to the latest volume from the epic, weighing in at around 700 pages. And still, Constant Reader, there are thousands more to go!

According to the afterword from this book, it took King twelve years to complete the writings. He wrote the opening line, "The Man in Black fled across the desert, and the Gunslinger followed" while an undergraduate, the middle portions when "`Salem's Lot" was going bad, and was inspired with another concurrent writing: "The Stand." For King to have kept the Gunslinger, the Man in Black, Jake, and the other characters - and really the entire world of the Dark Tower - alive for so long in his mind is a testament to not only the power that this held over the author, but holds over us - his Constant Readers. Moreover, since the first publishing of "The Gunslinger," around twenty years have passed, a number of newer volumes in this series have come and gone - yet with this first, partially inspired by Robert Browning's poem, "Childe Roland," and partially inspired by reams of green paper (read the afterword to the book), you know that this was a very special creation indeed.

I am not a fan of King's horror fiction. But when he gets down to writing about "other worlds than these," such as "The Stand," "Insomnia," "The Green Mile," and "The Talisman" (co-authored with Peter Straub) - there is no one better. His is an imagination to be jealous of. There is always a feeling that alternate universes exist, next to our own. King imbues his other worlds with just enough of our own so that we feel a tantalizing connection between our own perceptions of reality, and those that King entertains us (Constant Readers) with.

At any rate, "The Gunslinger," at under 300 pages, is just right to introduce us to the world of The Dark Tower, and keep us on course, with a desire to continue (and to wait, ever so patiently for the next volume in the series) the journey the Gunslinger started many years ago.

32 of 34 found the following review helpful:

So many questions, so few answersSep 12, 2003
By Andrew J. Platt
The hype surrounding the Dark Tower series finally got to me and I picked up The Gunslinger, unsure of what I would find. What I found was a stark, fresh, somewhat surreal and demanding (yet light!) experience that left me wanting more, much more.

This first novel in the series finds the hero (for wont of a better word!), The Gunslinger, slugging across the desert in search of the mysterious Man in Black. The desert is bleak and so our the words - yet they have a definite beauty. Along the way The Gunslinger meets a couple of people (are they alive or dead?) and reveals some of his back history - a strange massacre in a town, his childhood friends and mentors and hints at a Dark Tower.

Death permeates this book. We're not sure who's dead or alive. Something strange has happened with time - the main search right now is for this cause - and strange fragments of the "real" world appear through the fog - Hey Jude playing in a Western Saloon is one of the strange and wonderful images we encounter. Time itself is an illusion it seems and still the Man in Black is ahead of us.

My one reservation about the book is that the final meeting with the Man in Black is a little anticlimactic. Perhaps that's because it's been building up but after the meeting we wonder why he was running at all. However, there is a lot of backstory missing in the book - obviously slated for the later books - so perhaps issues like this will be resolved. All in all a most strange but powerful book - well worth reading.

20 of 21 found the following review helpful:

Challenge YourselfAug 29, 1999

Lots of five stars here. Lots of one stars, too. Comments like "hard to follow". "Boring." "No plot." I would argue that the plot is so big, some are not seeing the forest for the trees. The books of the Dark Tower cycle are King's most important, not because they are the easiest to follow, not because they are quick reads, but because with these novels not only is the author is tapping into a collective mythology, but is tying all of his works (see "Insomnia", "It", "Eyes of the Dragon", "The Stand", and many others) together. In other words, these novels stand at the center of King's entire body of work, connecting them to itself and one another, and thereby lending deeper meaning to the whole (kind of like the Dark Tower itself, no?). This is an ambitious attempt, and one in which I believe that King is unique. And the guy is pulling it off.

Now, as for "The Gunslinger." If you are one of those that were unimpressed by this offering, please follow this advice: Read the whole thing. All of it. That includes the "tributary" books like "Insomnia" and especially "The Stand." Get a feel for what King is trying to do. Then go back for a re-read. You'll be amazed. Admittedly the pace is disjointed, and if you have read King's other stuff, you won't be prepared for this. But realize that the sparseness of the prose, the disjointedness and abjectness and disaffection of the novel mirrors the desolation and madness of Roland's soul (which is in turn reflected by the desolation of the desert and the madness of the man he chases). Realize that in this novel, King is setting up payoffs that don't come until years down the road, that won't hit you until the second reading (and if that isn't the mark of a great story, what is?). Just to take one example out of many: Roland's massacre of the shanty-town of Tull seems excessive, until the end of Book IV, when we get the payoff: Tull is the remnant of the village that burned Roland's love, Susan Delgado, at the stake. The massacre can be read as Roland's revenge on the town. "The Gunslinger" is a book of subtle shades and undertones, and is not the best of the bunch (that would be "The Drawing of the Three"), but it is a perfect and impressive foundation to an ambitious and excellent tale.

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