The gunslinger’s, Roland Deschain’s, world has “moved on” and has been transformed into a post-apocalyptic wasteland crossed with a parallel dimension. The titular gunslinger, a dusty knight errant by way of Clint Eastwood (an image immortalized by the always awesome art of Michael Whelan), wanders across a dusty landscape both eerily similar and frighteningly different from our own world.

The Gunslinger is at its heart a tale of one man’s quest for revenge. Which is all fascinating, if slightly confusing, but perhaps more fascinating is that The Gunslinger, and the rest of the novels in the series, create something of a unifying mythology for most of Stephen King’s novels.īut that is perhaps getting a bit ahead of myself. The Gunslinger is based loosely off of the Robert Browning poem “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” a poem based off of a line from Shakespeare’s King Lear, a line itself referencing a traditional fairy tale, a fairy tale which may have been inspired by an old Scottish ballad. Reading: Wizard and Glass (The Dark Tower #4) by S.First Line: The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.ĭespite being the book that kicked off Stephen King’s Dark Tower series I originally read it third, during the long wait between The Waste Lands and Wizard and Glass, oddly enough I never felt that this spoiled my reading of the series it marks the only time I know of that I’ve managed to read a series out of order.Freebie Friday: Free Books and Giveaways.Blog Hop: Most Anticipated Book of 2011.Book Review | The Gunslinger (The Dark Tower #1) b.Book Review | The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins.Reading: Wizard and Glass (The Dark Tower #4) by Stephen King Have you read any of King's Dark Tower books? I'd love to hear from you! The artwork for this book was done by one of my favorite artists: Michael Whelan Someone suggested to me that The Gunslinger would be a good read at the end of the series rather than the beginning.

My honest recommendation would be to read The Gunslinger's wikipedia page and start with book 2. Book 2 begins with an 'argument' containing the only information you need to draw from book 1. That's sounds kind of crazy, but it's actually not crucial that you read it. If you would like to give this series a try, but you find you are just not getting in to or enjoying The Gunslinger - skip it. I'll talk more about the second book in the series this week, but I will say I was glad to pick the series up again. I read this book about 10 years or so ago, and I didn't give it another try until just a few months ago. This book seems to be either the start or the end of most readers' Dark Tower journey. I felt disappointed by acts I did not know would serve a purpose later in the series. I have no other way to say it, but I didn't particularly like this book.

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