The Gunslinger

Last week I needed to buy some new tires, and while I waited for them to put on the car I wandered over to the mall, a Barnes and Noble gift card burning a hole in my wallet. I ended up getting a boxed set of the first four books of Stephen King's The Dark Tower, and immediately started reading the first book, The Gunslinger.

I've read a good deal of Stephen King, and have almost always enjoyed what I've read. He straddles the line between genre writing and literature, and manages to create vivid word pictures that are genuinely frightening. But I have to say that this book left me cold. I understand that he started the book in 1970 (it was published in book form in 1982), and it has a certain collegiate aspect to it.

Inspired by Robert Browning's poem "The Song of Roland," The Gunslinger is a mash-up of The Lord of the Rings, tales of King Arthur, and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Set in an old West that is presumably far in the future, the "gunslinger" Roland has tracked for years the mysterious Man in Black, with the end game finding The Dark Tower. We don't why he's doing this. Along the way his quarry sets traps for him, such as a town where Roland must kill every individual. Roland also befriends a young boy, who seems to come from the world we know, but he doesn't know he got where he is.

The description of the book sounded better to me than the actual book itself (which is a common occurrence with me and sci-fi/fantasy). I liked the description of the action, notably a flashback to Roland doing battle with his teacher, using a falcon as a weapon, but overall I found it ponderous and humorless. King usually peppers his works with zippy use of pop-culture references, and he even manages to here (a clue that Roland is on the Earth we know), such as mentions of "Hey, Jude." But the text takes itself so seriously that I was given to a little eye-rolling. When Roland and the Man in Black finally meet, the latter even explains the universe to him like Donald Sutherland did to Tom Hulce in Animal House.

I have the next three books to read, so I'll give them a chance. Maybe things will pick up as King matured as a writer.