The Dark Tower, Book I

Everyone should read the greats, right?


Perhaps my first experience with Stephen King should not have been the plodding, meandering, anti-chronology that is The Gunslinger. Not that flashbacks don't have a purpose; in fact, had the book been written without its hoop-jumping through time, I would have liked it less. For me, what the story lacked was the big, fat WHY. I understand what the Gunslinger's immediate goals are, but never why.

Image from BN.com

It's exactly as King intended, of course. The Gunslinger himself hardly knows WHY he slaughters an entire village with his six-shooters or travels across a phantasmal Sahara desert with a boy who's been sucked into his universe by the book's anti-hero. He only knows that he must, and he capitulates to the will of the author as every character, good and bad, must always do.

Ok, now I have to ask myself... did Mr. King know what his character's motivation was? I doubt it. The fact that he revised the book in 2003 says much of the book's seat-of-the-pants origin. So much of the story was yet unimagined at the initial 1982 (drafting began in 1970) publishing that later books ended up contradicting it, and the revision altered some details so that the first book fell in line with the others. In a way, I admire King for making this revision... it shows he was willing to admit that he'd made some mistakes.

Yet no matter how much I may decry those things that I perceive as shortcomings within The Gunslinger, Mr. King cannot be mocked. His work stands alone, his legacy already established.

I still think The Gunslinger is a terrible read. King's Colorful language does not fulfill the woeful gap left by my incapacity to feel any empathy at all for the 'slinger, and while I've heard and read that the first book is a joy to read once it can be placed within the context of the multi-book story-arc, I have this lively suspicion that King's brilliance is probably little more than building the rest of the story off the things he arbitrarily imagined in 1970-1982.