“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”
Thus begins Stephen King’s epic seven-book odyssey of the gunslinger Roland and his quest for the Dark Tower.
The Gunslinger, and The Dark Tower series that follows, deftly crosses genres; parts classic western, science fiction, fantasy, horror and Arthurian legend, The Dark Tower series travels through wastelands filled with the decrepit remains of civilization, in and out of time and dimensions, and ultimately serves as meta therapy for an author devastated by a terrible accident.
The Gunslinger begins in the middle. We are introduced to the gunslinger Roland (think classic Clint Eastwood’s The Man with No Name), the last of his kind and the remaining hope for a world that has moved on, in pursuit of the Man in Black. As the story progresses, we discover that this chase has been one that has obsessed Roland since his childhood, consuming him beyond reason. In his tracks, Roland has lost his mother, father, close friends, and lovers along with most of mankind. He is a man with a morality served in the moment, one that functions to serve his driving need to capture the Man in Black and ultimately reach the Dark Tower in his quest to save the world. We are introduced to a colorful cast of characters along the way in the form of an isolated hermit with a talking crow, a weathered bar-maid ensnared in a deadly trap, zombified “weed-eaters”, a lost boy from New York City and a host of slow mutants trapped underground.
The writing here paints a sparse picture of a wasteland. The gunslinger spends the greater part of the story traveling across a barren desert, with a few intermittent stops at isolated hovels or near vacant ghost towns. The novel is driven by the gunslinger’s internal drama and insatiable need to reach the Man in Black who is the key to ultimately reaching The Dark Tower itself. For this reason, action is relegated to the background, with a few hard-hitting encounters as well as flashbacks that establish Roland’s gunslinger training. King prefers to set up the core drama/conflict of the story and leaves the larger details for the subsequent novels. In fact, several of the series key players are not introduced until the second book. The Gunslinger is concerned entirely with the quest of Roland and firmly establishing who he is as a character. King infuses a dialogue laced with language and slang common to readers of today, though spoken in an archaic tongue with elements of both western and fantasy. That said, there remain scenes filled with classic King horror and violence, all interlaced with a heady amount of magic and prophecy.
As a stand-alone book, The Gunslinger represents the beginning efforts of a young writer. It is clear that a great deal of thought went into each word and sentence, and that King was working hard at developing his world. As the series progresses however, the pacing quickly increases and the story drives forward. One of the great joys in reading The Dark Tower is not only traveling with Roland and his Ka-tet, but with the journey of King as he develops as a writer. King goes so far as to make himself a character in the later novels using his real life brush with death (a devastating car accident that nearly killed him crushing his pelvis and braking multiple bones) as a basis for the story and clearly as a form of therapy for his own demons. It’s a personal story that allows readers access into the author’s psyche. In addition to the author himself, King often uses characters and settings from his large collection of other novels as if every novel he has published filters through The Dark Tower.
King is typically boxed into the category as a pure horror writer. Sadly, for those who have not read the greater body of his work, this label is a misrepresentation of his style. While he prefers to reside in the supernatural, King’s great strength is in his characters who are often flawed, fighting against a supernatural force. He developed the idea for this series as a 19 year old fascinated with the Lord of the Rings and other such epic tales and inspired by the poem “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”, by Robert Browning. The Gunslinger took him 12 years to finish, and The Dark Tower series as a whole has taken him over 30 years to write, with a new installment to be released in 2012. In addition to the novels, several graphic novels have emerged, and it was recently announced that a movie/television series staring Javier Bardem as Roland is in the works.
The Dark Tower showcases what I believe to be one of the best examples of a crossover series. In many years of reading sci-fi, fantasy, and horror, I’ve never encountered a series that so successfully straddles multiple genres. If you are a reader who revels in the epic journey, but tired of the over-saturated two-bit rip offs of The Lord of the Rings or the over-bloated fantasy tales that permeate the fantasy market, then this is the series for you. The Gunslinger is fresh and unique while still working within the framework of the hero’s quest; however, instead of swords and armor the reader is treated to a hero who wields two six-shooters, a deadly aim and a bit of magic of his own.