Tag Archives: books: the gunslinger

2018: The Year of Stephen King (Part I)

fantasy, fiction September 15, 2019 1 Comment

I did a lot of Stephen King in 2018 – so much that I’m going to split him up into two posts, because it feels pretty unruly not to.

My big achievement is that (after a several year break) I finally finished King’s self-proclaimed magnum opus: The Dark Tower series. I had already read The Gunslinger and The Drawing of the Three, so I listened to the following last year:

The Waste Lands
Wizard and Glass
Wolves of the Calla
Song of Susannah
The Dark Tower

Of these seven books, I think I liked Wizard and Glass the most, followed closely by Wolves of the Calla. Overall, I loved the series. At first, I didn’t think I would.

Roland Deschain – the last gunslinger and, arguably, our main protagonist – is not, at first, a very likable hero. He is singularly focused on his quest for the Dark Tower (it’s a place that holds all the worlds of the universe together), and it doesn’t matter who gets hurt on the way as long as Roland is successful in his quest. It was going to be a very long series if Roland was going to be a dick the whole time.

Roland is in a different world than ours, but he can travel to ours. In his quest for the tower, he pulls Eddie, Susannah, and Jake from different times in New York into his own world and timeline. Eddie is from the 1980s, Susannah is from the 1960s, and Jake is from the 1970s. Together, along with the billybumbler Oy, the ka-tet travels through MidWorld towards the Dark Tower. The Tower is the center of all creation, and Roland wants to question whatever god or being is there. So, the ka-tet tries to prevent it from being destroyed by The Crimson King.

It’s not a simple story, but it is a compelling one. There’s also plenty of room to add to it, should King so choose.

By the end, as Roland comes to care more and more about the members of his ka-tet rather than just his quest, he is quite the lovable hero – at least to me. His capacity to change was his best quality.

The only part of this series I was less than floored by was the part where King inserted a fictionalized version of himself as a plot element. Yes. He. Did. King had been in a near fatal accident not long before writing the events of the final two (three?) books and the series takes a couple of weird twists (I think) because of it.

For those who don’t know where to start with Stephen King, this series is probably the best place. There are references to this series in King’s other works (including IT, Salem’s Lot, and Hearts in Atlantis among others) and the series serves as the pinnacle of his multiverse.

In spite of some twists I didn’t particularly like, including the self-insert, the series was a great way to spend the summer. I listened to a lot of this series during marathon efforts at the gym. The only book of this series I didn’t do in 2018 was Wind Through the Keyhole, but I’ll listen that one eventually too.

“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”

The Gunslinger

fiction July 5, 2013 Leave a comment

Two of my friends and my mother have read ‘The Dark Tower’ series by Stephen King and loved it, and since I needed a break between ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ books, I started The Gunslinger, the first book of the series.

Now, I was in a beach house for four days about two weeks ago, and I have to say I blew through The Gunslinger in record time. Even for me. I don’t know how I got through it so fast, although it’s not very long.

The one thing everyone did tell me about The Gunslinger is that I should be patient. It doesn’t make a ton of sense in the beginning. There are more questions than answers, but what is made very clear is that there is one guy, the Gunslinger, chasing another guy, the Man in Black, who seems always to be one step ahead.

We get some of the Gunslinger’s history, as well as some of the history between him and The Man in Black. I found the whole thing very compelling, particularly his relationship Jake (and how he ultimately betrays Jake to catch the Man in Black).

You begin to realize that the Gunslinger is in a universe other than our own. It’s similar, but not exactly the same, and that there are other universes out there that can be traveled between (and dying in one doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve died in all of them).

How to travel between said universes isn’t made clear, but that’s part of why the Gunslinger is chasing the Man in Black and has something to do with The Dark Tower, which seems to be the point at which all the universes are connected.

Right now, the genre of the series seems unclear. It seems a dark sci-fi/fantasy/horror series, and I can’t wait to see how the series continues. Since King considers ‘The Dark Tower’ series his magnum opus, I expect big things.

So far, beyond this book, I’ve read It and some short stories by King, and my mom says a lot of his books borrow from this series. I don’t consider King an incredible writer, per se. His writing is average in terms of expression and beauty of prose; however, he’s a hell of a storyteller. I got sucked into The Gunslinger within the first few pages and read the whole thing in three days. I would have finished It much faster, but that book involved my two biggest fears – spiders and clowns – so I had to keep putting it down and kept having nightmares about a clown with pointed teeth that was out to kill me.

I’ve bought the next book, called The Drawing of the Three, which is supposedly more like a regular book than like reading a comic book, at least according to my friend.

But The Drawing of the Three will have to wait, at least until I’m done with one of the two books I started. I’m currently in the middle of both A Storm of Swords (the next book in the ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ series) and Blue Magic, the sequel to Indigo Springs, by A.M. Dellamonica.