March 14, 2015
Since the last couple of books I read were stinkers, in my opinion, I decided to return to a favorite author. The Gunslinger is the first of King's famous series, The Dark Tower, which took him over 30 years to complete. I read the "revised" version of this book, published like two decades after the original. From what I read from skimming the intro, King did this to make the book more cohesive with the rest of the series. Having only read this book, not the original or any of the following ones (yet), I can't judge how necessary it was.
This book presents more questions than answers, which is a good thing for starting off a series, I suppose. I know it makes me want to read more. The setting itself is a fascination and a mystery. It kinda seems like the Old West in some ways. Is it the very distant future? Another universe that has some loose connections to our own?
Jake, a young boy who came from our time/place (NYC circa 1980 to be exact), is a mystery alone. Why was he meant to cross Roland's path? Why did he need to be "sacrificed"? I sincerely hope we find out more about Jake, and why the man in black killed him (twice!), or I'm going to be seriously pissed off.
What happened to Roland's home town? What happened to his world in general? What's up with the "muties"? Why is Roland seeking the Dark Tower? Like I said, so many fucking questions and not enough answers. If a writer without King's skill tried to pull this, there would be a lot of confused, frustrated readers, who would not pick up the next book at all.
King crosses a lot of lines in this work: incest and child sex, lots and lots of violence, the forced abortion of a (false?) priestess. It wouldn't surprise me if this book were banned many times over. Roland's world is grotesque, but also fascinating. His childhood home sounds a bit like a futuristic Camelot, with brutal and high stakes for boys like young Roland who train for the honor of being gunslingers. Another question: what's the purpose of a gunslinger, anyway?
I probably won't jump into the next book immediately. But if I read too many mediocre (or worse) books, I'll go for the next one. Only the first three or four are available through my library's eBook borrowing service, so I may make reading the whole series a mission for this summer.
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