The Gunslinger (review)

The dark came down on the world and world moved on. The gunslinger . . . dreamed his long dreams of the Dark Tower, to which he would some day come at dusk and approach, winding his horn, to do some unimaginable final battle.

• Title: The Gunslinger
• Author: Stephen King
• Genre: Dark Fantasy
• Year: 1982

“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed,” has to be among the immortal opening lines of speculative fiction, and with it Stephen King kicked off one of the longest epic quest stories of modern times, spanning some seven books and touching on many of King’s other novels. The Dark Tower series is King’s multiverse, a massive uber-narrative connecting many of the stories penned over his long career. But, like nearly anything of this scale, it was not an undertaking conceived and executed according to any master plan, rather it is the product of a lifetime of creative play, the accretion of stories and characters all commingling via the intuitive logic of the author’s craft.

Which is to say the whole thing must appear extremely daunting to any reader outside of Planet King, and even for those of us who have read the Dark Tower in its entirety, it can all get a bit confusing. However, it wasn’t always like that. When I first picked up The Gunslinger in my early teens, The Dark Tower series was still a mystery to the man writing it as much as it was to the rest of us. In those days the series only contained two books, and little did we suspect that it would only be until twenty years had passed, during which time King nearly died, that the whole enormous quest would reach its conclusion. But I don’t intend to talk about this slim, weird, stylish volume as some sort of gateway to all those 700 page monsters like Wizard and Glass and Wolves of the Calla that follow it. Instead I want to suggest why you should read it on its own, and enjoy it for what it is, and not worry about whether or not you want to get tied into a massive series.

So what is it? Well, for a start, there are two different versions of The Gunslinger. The links in this review take you to the new one — the one that was partially rewritten and edited to bring it more in line with the Dark Tower series. Don’t buy that version. The one I’m reviewing, the one I fell in love with twenty years ago, is the one pictured at the top of this review. It’s a gorgeously illustrated trade paperback (all the Dark Tower books are — a format I wish more series would follow) from Plume, first published in 1982. It contains the stories as they were originally written, complete with inconsistencies that would later crop up in the series. Even if you are certain you want to read the whole series, I still recommend reading the original stories first and perhaps getting the newer version for a quick reread when you want a break between the doorstops sometime later in the saga.

Well, that’s quite a lot about series lore and rewrites and all the rest, but not a whole lot about why someone with no interest in the series, or in King himself, should read The Gunslinger. The first and best reason is the sheer evocation of the vast and the strange in King’s world; a kind of timeless, multi-planar post-apocalyptic western. It is a world of mutants and old machines and dark miracles and demons, a world that has ‘moved on,’ coming apart not so much because of comprehensible causes such as man-made disasters or wars, but for reasons cosmic and unknowable. It is a world related to our world, where references to Joseph Conrad and The Beatles are weird touches of the familiar in an alien landscape — so much so that we are uncertain if this world is a dying version of our own or, if as the gunslinger himself suspects at one point, it is some sort of afterlife.

This evocation of mood is a primary reason to get the original version of the story, as this ambiguous world, that King is himself still discovering as he writes, has a daring, improvisational quality unlike much of today’s fantasy fiction, with its carefully mapped worlds and minutely furnished cultures. The Gunslinger’s world is schizophrenic, at once our own and yet removed from it by some unbridgeable distance, a stark western landscape permeated by the dark logic of a dream.

Stalking across this landscape is Roland, the last gunslinger, a remnant of another age and place. He is a kind of knight of the sixgun, trained in its use to superhuman ability, once part of an order that echoed Arthur’s Camelot. But all that is gone, the world has moved on, and Roland is left pursuing the Man in Black across the alkaline wastes of a vast desert and reserving his motives for himself. He is an immediately compelling character, comfortable as we are with the archetype of the steel-eyed stranger from Westerns and even action films, and over the course of the stories in The Gunslinger we experience episodes from his past, and share in his uncertainties and sorrows. Which makes it all the more interesting when Roland does something ruthless — real ruthlessness, actions against his own emotional preference in the service of his goal — for we are forced to examine our own admiration for the qualities he exhibits. Roland is carefully drawn, a fine balance between accessible and unknowable, a perfect counterpoint to a setting that exhibits those same characteristics.

The chapters in The Gunslinger originally appeared as separate publications in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. The opening chapter, a novella entitled “The Gunslinger,” is the earliest of the pieces, essentially King’s first foray into this world. The later chapters were written a few years later, all at the same time, and read more like a serial story than an episodic one, which makes the book more cohesive than it may appear at first glance. Each section features a nested narrative, in which events of the present are counter-pointed by flashbacks of Roland’s life. The quality of storytelling is languid and considered in places, investing the maximum in mood. When the action does happen it’s quick, brutal, and often unexpected.

Which is quite a bit like a Western film, actually. Calling The Gunslinger ‘Sergio Leone meets J. R. R. Tolkien’ is not a bad analogy, though I’d suggest the fantastic elements have more in common with someone like Zelazny than Tolkien. But the shadow of Leone is strong in this book, from the obvious inspiration for the protagonist to matters of scene setting and pacing — The Gunslinger makes excellent use of techniques borrowed from cinema to achieve a similar aesthetic to the films King was inspired by.

I have not mentioned the plot of The Gunslinger, or any of the events of the story. The plot can perhaps be summarized by the quotation in the first line of this review, “The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.” As for the events — I’d rather not spoil anything. I could speak of the trap left by the Man in Black in Tull, or who it was that Roland met at The Way Station, or of oracles, slow mutants, visions, and prophecies. But I don’t see the point, as it isn’t what The Gunslinger is about that will hook the reader, but how the story is told.

In King’s On Writing he talks about his favorite moment as a writer — that moment when everything comes together, and the mind makes the intuitive leap that connects the various threads of a story, be they plot threads or thematic ones. In The Gunslinger the reader can follow this process, as King’s ambiguity grows more concrete, and details are added that become major plot points in the books that follow. Already in the successor volume to The Gunslinger, The Drawing of the Three, King is following a much more certain path, but it is in this first book, a collection of mostly quiet incidents as Roland pursues his enemy across a bleak and mysterious world, that King is at his most visceral. Here is a document of imagination almost completely unfettered by design, a quest that is as much about the protagonist’s long walk through the waste as it is about the author’s voyage of discovery.

• The Gunslinger (new version) on Amazon
• Stephen King’s website