Summary:
We meet Roland, the last of the gunslingers, in an Old Western type of reality that parallels other realms and harbors magic. Roland is on a quest to find the Dark Tower and can let nothing stand in his way, including the people he meets and, sometimes, comes to like. Roland stops at a town and has an affair with a girl named Allie, but only bad magic awaits him and he is forced to move on, assuming that the town was a trap laid for him by the mysterious man in black. Soon, he meets a boy named Jake who was killed in his world and is stuck in this one. As Roland and Jake continue on Roland’s journey together, we learn more about Roland through flashbacks.
Comments:
I gave it a shot. I really wanted to get into a series at the time and I figured Stephen King was a safe bet, but the book did not impress me. I liked its tone (dark but realistic, haunting but not overly creepy) but the story couldn’t hold my interest. I liked Roland but I was distracted by constantly wondering about his world and his quest. In my opinion, King reveals necessary information too slowly, dragging out an already dry story.
The Point:
I liked it barely enough to check out the second book, The Drawing of Three.
Tags: Books, Fiction, Horror, Science Fiction, Series, Stephen King, The Dark Tower, The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger, The Drawing of Three, The Gunslinger, Western
I never finished it (and I’ve enjoyed some other things by King quite a lot). I had the same problems with it that you did. Too slow, not enough indication that it would ever pay off. I think it didn’t really play to King’s great strength, which is his ability to root the supernatural in the very ordinary day-to-day world.
I’m glad I read what I did for one reason, though, which is that it helped me clarify something about one of my characters. I’d thought of her as a gunslinger of a sort (this is evident in the early descriptions of her), but she’s not. She’s a killer, and there’s a difference.
That’s always good: when a book can lend insight into our own writing. I think King created a good gunslinger character in Roland, but maybe that was the problem. Roland seemed so detached, so calculated all the time that it was difficult to relate to him. I’m not saying he should have been emotional (that would have been a turn-off) but he could have been more… anything. More something.
The only other book I’ve read by King (other than this one and the next one, The Drawing of Three) is Lisey’s Story, which I loved.
For more King (and I have really read very little), I would recommend the collection Different Seasons (four novellas), and The Green Mile (it is actually very different from the movie, though the plot is the same). Unfortunately, you won’t have the experience of reading The Green Mile the way it was intended to be read (in monthly installments), but it’s still really good.
I talked about it here:
http://u-town.com/collins/?p=94
Thanks! I’ll add them to the list. I also have Skeleton Crew sitting on my shelf, never cracked, but I have to wait until I’m in the mood for short stories… which is rare.