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Strange fantasy by Stephen King, one of his earlier books. He later revised it to correct some minor-sounding issues of consistency with later books in the series; I read the revised version, which has a fantastic short essay by King at the beginning. I love his nonfiction writing.
It has a justly famous first line: The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.
Like it says: a gunslinger relentlessly pursues a man in black who is very bad news. That’s not to say that the gunslinger has clean hands himself.
It’s a weird western, somewhere on the border between dark fantasy and horror, in an incredibly bleak, post-apocalyptic landscape. It has a lot of elements I like and does capture the epic, mythic, movie Old West atmosphere he was going for, but it’s also overly gloomy for my taste— the atmosphere felt very oppressive, which was clearly deliberate, but still— and, very unusually for King and me, I was not grabbed by the characters. He was clearly going for archetypal (the gunslinger’s name isn’t revealed till something like halfway through), but for me it just read as flat. His characterization tends to work via specific details and unique speech patterns, and this had few details and most people spoke more or less the same way. The characterization made sense given the overall conception, but it didn’t play to King's strengths as a writer.
However, I gather that the sequels go in very different directions. Should I read them? Am I more likely to like them? I also have a vague impression that the series ending was widely disliked. If you read it, without getting too spoilery, 1) did you hate it if you got that far, 2) did you hate it enough to retrospectively ruin the entire series, 3) if yes to both, is there a good pre-ending stopping point?
There have been rumors of a movie for forever, but it’s now actually happening and Idris Elba plays the gunslinger. This ups my interest in the series quite a bit. Of course I could just see the movies, but that’s a long wait for a lot of installments.
The Gunslinger (The Dark Tower)
It has a justly famous first line: The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.
Like it says: a gunslinger relentlessly pursues a man in black who is very bad news. That’s not to say that the gunslinger has clean hands himself.
It’s a weird western, somewhere on the border between dark fantasy and horror, in an incredibly bleak, post-apocalyptic landscape. It has a lot of elements I like and does capture the epic, mythic, movie Old West atmosphere he was going for, but it’s also overly gloomy for my taste— the atmosphere felt very oppressive, which was clearly deliberate, but still— and, very unusually for King and me, I was not grabbed by the characters. He was clearly going for archetypal (the gunslinger’s name isn’t revealed till something like halfway through), but for me it just read as flat. His characterization tends to work via specific details and unique speech patterns, and this had few details and most people spoke more or less the same way. The characterization made sense given the overall conception, but it didn’t play to King's strengths as a writer.
However, I gather that the sequels go in very different directions. Should I read them? Am I more likely to like them? I also have a vague impression that the series ending was widely disliked. If you read it, without getting too spoilery, 1) did you hate it if you got that far, 2) did you hate it enough to retrospectively ruin the entire series, 3) if yes to both, is there a good pre-ending stopping point?
There have been rumors of a movie for forever, but it’s now actually happening and Idris Elba plays the gunslinger. This ups my interest in the series quite a bit. Of course I could just see the movies, but that’s a long wait for a lot of installments.
The Gunslinger (The Dark Tower)
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I have never read the revised version of The Gunslinger because I don't think writers should go back and do that to their books, and also because the original has a very pure, mythic, archetypes-playing-out-but-with-real-people-who-are-also-three-dimensional-characters thing going on and I was very much afraid he'd fuck that up in revisions. I don't know whether he has or not, but I'm not prepared to risk it. The thing I mean, well, the characters in the first book all have similar voices, but the voice is so purely stripped down to the bone that at one point during high school I could probably have recited every word Roland says in the novel.
The others do not in any way resemble this. They change genres at the drop of a hat, and they change tones positively recklessly, and somehow it works-- for a while. I admire but do not often reread Book Two, which feels to me like a very specific kind of seventies movie, usually containing Pacino and/or De Niro, if you put that in a blender with high fantasy and hit frappe. Book Three is one of my favorite novels of all time, period, and I can't really give a genre description because it does not remotely resemble anything else I have ever read. There was a while when I reread the entire sequence every year specifically to get Book Three in context. Book Four is great but way more conventional. Book Five is a love-it-or-hate-it, and should not really be taken as separate from Book Six; I come down on the side of loving it, though with reservations.
And when I got to the bit in Book Seven where it said in letters of fire STOP READING HERE YOU IDIOT, I stopped. On account of I don't know why he bothered writing any further. I have not taken the bit of that book behind that page out and thrown it away, because I feel that all readers should have the chance to make this sort of decision for themselves, but the thought did cross my mind.
You should keep reading, IMO, but I am not unbiased, because there are bits from these books I not only can recite to myself, but do, on a regular basis, because they are useful to my life. Also, either I like Book One way more than you do or the revisions were destructive. So I cannot really say.
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I love those 70s Pacino/DeNiro movies and have seen most of them, even the terrible ones, so you are making that and the sequels sound very potentially appealing even if you do just like book one more than I did.