Before this book, I had read two other Stephen King novels. One was The Eyes of the Dragon which was written for his thirteen year old daughter, and it was engaging and amazing. The other one I read was The Shining. Because Stephen King is so popular, I felt that only reading two of his books, one being vastly different than most of his other works, wasn’t enough and that I should give him another try.
I picked up The Gunslinger because I had heard that the Dark Tower series was awesome. The new edition that I read started with a forward that explained about where the novel came from and how King fell victim to Tolkien’s beautiful Middle Earth and was trying his hand at an epic fantasy. Geared up for all of this, I hit The Gunslinger with running expectation of an engaging, descriptive, enthralling, fantasy story. It wasn’t any of these things.
Call me a traditional fantasy fan, but there just simply wasn’t enough detail about Roland’s world. The reader is thrown in this odd, dreamlike chase of a man dressed in black. Along the way we get flashbacks of Roland’s life and how he came to be where he is but I couldn’t place whether this world was post-apocalyptic of our current world or just a different type of world in another dimension altogether. I couldn’t get a very strong feel of the culture and these are very important things to know when the author is mixing fantasy and western genres together. I want to know how much of each is involved here.
It actually hurt the novel for me to have read about the origin of it and where King’s ideas came from and how old he was when he wrote it. All I kept thinking over and over was how this was supposed to be a 19 year old kid writing his epic novel and it’s a dude, without a name for a good chunk of the novel, with awesome guns chasing a bad dude across the desert, finding lots of women to sleep around with and lots of people to shoot. This novel is completely sexual like a horny teenager would write and while I can appreciate it in moderation, it was way too much.
One thing I was impressed with was his vocabulary. I know King went back and added some things and changed some things so it easily could have been in his now older man repoitorie to add all those awesome huge words and strong descriptions, but I like to think at least some of it was provided by his 19 year old self.
Oh, and also, I found the foreshadowing too be way too heavy.
Overall, there is a small chance I will read the second one in the series just because I want to really make sure I don’t like it. I guess I have a hard time believing that this series is so popular and I want to figure out why
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