Summary: This is the story of Roland the last Gunslinger of his world and his quest for the Dark Tower. It starts with Roland chasing the man in black across the desert. He encounters Jake a young boy apparently from our contemporary earth and he joins Roland on the quest. It's interspersed with some of the things that have happened in the gunslinger's life before this: his destruction of the town of Tull, his trial to become a gunslinger, things like that.
My Thoughts: This is the start of Stephen King's grand epic 7 book Dark Tower series. It's by far the hardest to get into of all the books. If more readers could get past this one and into the second, The Drawing of the Tree, they would be hooked. It's just too disconnected. It's hard to feel much for Roland because you don't know his history. You don't really know why he's chasing the man or why he wants to get to the Tower so badly. It is made up of several shorter works that were published in various magazines back in the 70s. The edition I read was the one King updated in 2003 when he was publishing the last few books in the series. He tried to make it more coherent and to clean up some errors or confusing points, and he did accomplish some of that. There is some interesting foreshadowing that you can see if you know what is going to happen in the end. But it's hard to clean up the overall tone of the book. I recommend it only because it's short and you need to get past it to read the other 6 books which are great.
Links:
Amazon
The Gunslinger at Wikipedia
Review at sfsite.com
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