The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger - Stephen King

The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger (King, 1982, revised 2003)

The Gunslinger marks the beginning of one of Stephen King's most ambitious works - a modern fantasy epic called The Dark Tower which spans seven books and interacts with several other King novels, novellas, and short stories.  Now that I'm well into Book III of the series, I can appreciate this book more, but I'm still of the opinion that it is a very rough beginning to an increasingly complex and impressive story - and even this revised version seems a little out of place.

The book succeeds in cultivating a mood of desolation and an aura of mystery.  A gunslinger named Roland Deschain pursues someone known as "the man in black" through dying towns, wilderness, and desert. The world he moves through is not ours, but it has bizarre similarities to ours. The recurring lament in Roland's mind is that "the world has moved on." The dryness of the land, the emptiness (and cheapness) of people's lives, and Roland's moral dilemma as he fears he is becoming the thing he hunts - all of these combine successfully to make a dark chase story.

Where the book falters for me is in its unevenness. Some scenes are fully fleshed out - the attack of the Slow Mutants under the mountains, or the bizarre ritual used by the man in black to resurrect the dead man in Tull - while others just sit there without a driving force or purpose. Roland's prolonged stay in Tull seems pointless and ends in a bloodbath that makes me question whether Roland is someone worth caring about. The next to last scene, where Roland must make a heartbreaking choice in order to catch the man in black, also rings false. It's not clear why he must make the sacrifice he does, other than he feels he must.

Another bone of contention: the imagery throughout conflicts. I know this was intentional, but it's definitely confusing and, in my opinion, not entirely successful. We have a Clint Eastwood-style gunslinger in an Old West setting, yet he has flashbacks that involve castles and falconry. Strange half-human creatures lurk in the dark spots of the world, and demons haunt stone circles. Meanwhile at the saloon, they're playing an old folk song called "Hey Jude", and the ancient remains of a subway system crumble under the mountains... These disparate elements come together more comfortably in later books, but it takes a bit of stretching to swallow them the first time.

My final quibble: the language of the book is very crude.  I don't need to know every sensation experienced by Roland's crotch, nor do I need to see the arc of his urine splashing in the desert dust. Roland wants almost every woman he meets, or they want him, but the idea of love is about as far removed as the idea of water in this dead place. This scatological focus makes Roland seem more like an animal than a man - yet another fault fixed in the next book.

Arbitrary rating - 3.5 out of 5 dark chase stories