The Gunslinger

Stephen King’s Dark Tower series might be uneven at the end, but the beginning is masterful.

Roland, a dusty old cowboy on the edge of reality, is the prototypical antihero. He doesn’t care much for other people, he’s got a dark past, and I wanted to follow every dusty step of his journey. The broken pieces of Roland are what make The Dark Tower series unique—that and some astral plane travelling shenanigans. With each dark deed or questionable decision, I wanted to know more about Roland and what led him to that point.

It’s difficult to stay grounded in a… show more.

This giant series was my summer project. I taught myself how to run this summer by going for long runs and listening to this series. It was perfect for running because it was so other-worldly that it completely took me out of the moment and into the story.

I’ve never read any Stephen King before, and I’m a total convert now. I want to read everything he has done.

The Gunslinger is the first of seven in King’s acclaimed Dark Tower fantasy series, and it was also the first book of King’s that I had ever read at the time.

It is the story of the gunslinger and his mythic quest to catch the man in black. Of course, the series gets way more complex, but the Gunslinger is a short novel with wide ideas, morally complex characters and is a great beginning for a stellar series.

I picked it up as a freshman in college at the urging of a friend at a time when I was alone… show more.

The first thing to come to mind when you hear “Stephen King” is probably “horror,” and that’s well deserved. For those who like their fantasy gritty and sweeping, however, The Dark Tower is not to be missed. The Gunslinger, the first volume, introduces Roland Deschain, a knight-like figure from Mid-World who seeks the Dark Tower, the imperiled axis upon which all worlds turn. While Roland hunts the mysterious Man in Black across the desert, he meets Jake Chambers, a boy from another world who may have just died. Part Western, part epic fantasy (and with an eventual appearance by… show more.

I had been reading Stephen King along with all my other junior high classmates for some time. It felt like a rite of passage for boys my age. A rite that my mother frowned upon, but, I was reading, and that was to be extolled. So, imagine my surprise when I had blown through the usual suspects of King’s novels and somewhere in high school landed on The Gunslinger. It’s like Lord of the Rings through a spaghetti western filter. It was, and might still be, one of the greatest series of books I have ever read. As a… show more.

This book and the entire Dark Tower series spurred my interest in fiction. Stephen King is a master storyteller, yet this novel is exceptional in its simplicity. The first line is as gripping as any I've ever read, and it also summarizes the core of the plot: "The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed." The Gunslinger stands alone, both the character as well as the book. The way the story grows from a simple get from A to B plot line into an exponentially grander web of mind-bending As and Bs and Xs and Os… show more.

A series I read over more than a decade, King’s self-described fantasy series is so much more. It combines Western, Lovecraftian horror, Medieval fantasy, apocalyptic science fiction, portal fiction, alternate history, Groundhog Day, and even King’s own autobiography! A small clutch of diverse POV characters keeps the impossible scope of the series grounded—sometimes from beyond the grave!—and the genres collide in an organic way that drives the action and feels really unique. I’d recommend disregarding the movie and starting with The Gunslinger, a short entry we’d probably describe as a weird western, these days. But don’t let the… show more.

A seeming tangent, I know, but bear with me…if you haven’t read King’s Dark Tower books, you are missing out on one of the most amazing works in modern literature. Just read the Foreword to The Gunslinger and you’ll get some idea of why I treasure the concept here—King left Roland of Gilead, in a world blending Tolkien and Clint Eastwood westerns, for many years before returning to the Dark Tower, but so much of his work continued to feature references to the Dark Tower universe. If you’ve seen the terrible movie that sacrilegiously condensed King’s magnum opus into… show more.

Dark americana fantasy at its finest—even though the book worked hard to win me over, that memorable line, “There are more worlds than these,” sunk its teeth in me. It promised a wild west unknown at the time where gunslingers were heroic knights, and a black-robed magician created chaos across the realms. I devoured the series on my lunch breaks in the summer, enraptured with a gritty western that folded like a Doctor Strange multiverse, opening my eyes to that the “wild west” could be so much more when asked, “But what if…?” 

The undisputed horror master recasts Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name in the mode of an errant Arthurian knight questing a strange post-apocalyptic landscape in search of his arch-nemesis, The Man In Black, at the beginning of his epic Dark Tower series. Roland is both Blondie-Joe-Manco of the Dollars Trilogy and El Topo wandering a surreal Alejandro Jodorowsky backdrop. This is the most western of the bunch (and, in its basic plot of the last of a special breed of gunfighters seeking the man who betrayed his order, influenced my own books), with Roland bringing his polished six-shooters to bear… show more.