What I’m Reading: The Gunslinger by Stephen King

I hate being scared. The genre of horror has never appealed to me, not in books and certainly not in movies; so I had always dismissed Stephen King as an author I could never enjoy, despite his successful and prolific career.

That was until a friend recommended The Dark Tower series. They assured me it was more fantasy than anything else, and that I should give it a go.

Not knowing what to expect, I started reading The Gunslinger, the first book in the series. To be honest, after the first chapter, I wasn’t sure if the book was for me. It felt somewhat… masculine, and foreign. As a reader of more “traditional” fantasy, the sparseness of the western setting felt jarring at first, and I thought there was too much description of setting and not enough plot at the beginning.

But then I found myself getting intrigued as the story progressed. The gunslinger, an elite kind of soldier from a bygone era and the last of his kind, is pursuing ‘the man in black’, who is a sorcerer, across the desert, as part of his quest to find the Dark Tower. Who the man in black is and what the Dark Tower is are the obvious questions baiting the reader to continue on, but I found myself increasingly curious about the world itself. Was it a dystopian version of our own world, set in a future where the past is forgotten? Or is it a separate world entirely, but with links to ours? Clues to this are scattered throughout the book.

What an opening line!

The way King kept slowly feeding information and backstory throughout the story was enough to satisfy my cravings for answers as to what was actually going on, but also kept me thinking and having to put the pieces of the puzzle together myself. I’ve never been a fan of flashbacks – I find they’re often not done well and interrupt the flow of the story – but they really worked in The Gunslinger, and I found myself as interested in them as I was in the current timeline. They give a great insight into Roland (the gunslinger himself), whose character is rather mysterious to start with – we know his goal, but not his motivations.

The overall feel of the book wasn’t quite fantasy – I’d almost say magical realism, with some fantasy, supernatural and a bit of sci-fi thrown in at the end. It’s definitely different to other books I’ve read in the fantasy genre and feels quite unique.  

Was it enough for me to continue with the eight-book series? …yes.