King’s ‘Gunslinger’ Lacks a Punch

By Michael Malone

I picked up Stephen King’s The Gunslinger after hearing raves about it on an episode of “The New York Times Book Review” podcast celebrating 50 years of King novels. The book is Part I of the King series The Dark Tower. It was published in 1982, then republished in 2003.

It is now 35 pages longer, King shares in his foreword, with a few new scenes. He had three main issues with the original Gunslinger. It “had been written by a very young man, and had all the problems of a very young man’s book,” he writes. “The second was that it contained a great many errors and false starts, particularly in light of the volumes that followed. The third was that The Gunslinger did not even sound like the later books–it was, frankly, rather difficult to read.”

What, you might be thinking, did I think of the new and, apparently, improved Gunslinger?

I can’t say I enjoyed it. It tells the story of, yes, the gunslinger, chasing the man in black (no, not Johnny Cash) across the miserable desert landscape, trying to find the Tower. The characters are not all that fleshed out. The landscape is dismal. Not a whole lot happens.

As one might expect from the first part of a long series, interesting stuff will likely happen later, after the gunslinger presumably finds the Tower and passes through.

It all makes for a fairly dour story within The Gunslinger.

The man in black has some special powers. He can bring people back to life. He proves adept at staying a few steps ahead of the gunslinger.

The story picks up a wee bit when Gunslinger Guy finds a partner out in the desert, a New York kid named Jake who is orphaned, and comes along for the hike across the desert. Jake, unlike the gunslinger, has a bit of personality.

The Gunslinger is not a horror novel, as one might expect from Stephen King. It’s more of a fantasy western. The closest thing it has to horror is an attack from Slow Mutants, which King describes as having “a rotten jack-o’lantern greenness.”

They may be rotten but they are not scary.

The Slow Mutants surface when the gunslinger and Jake are schlepping across railroad tracks in a handcar. “One of the thing’s tentacle arms pawed across the flat platform of the handcar,” King writes. “It reeked of the wet and the dark. The gunslinger let loose of the handle and drew. He put a bullet through the forehead of the starving idiot face. It fell away, its faint swamp-fire glow fading, an eclipsed moon.”

Boring characters. Meh monsters. Dull setting. Tedious plot.

The Gunslinger did not work for me.

There are eight novels in The Dark Tower, including The Drawing of the Three, The Waste Lands, Wizard and Glass and Song of Susannah.

I remember reading The Drawing of the Three in college. Someone left it behind in our rental house. It sees Roland encounter three mysterious doorways on a beach, each one leading to a different person in New York. I picked it up, read a few pages, and ended up devouring the thing, even though I’d not read the first part in the Dark Tower series. I remember it being terrifically catchy.

The Gunslinger, for its part, has a solid 3.92 on GoodReads, with over 600,000 readers weighing in.

A review in The Guardian sees the critic give up on the book years ago, then revisit it.

“It was, I decided, after 20 pages of weird-speak and dusty places and a man called Roland, not for me,” James Smythe writes.

A friend pushes him to give it another try, many years later, and it clicks the second time. “The Gunslinger is a quiet, meditative novel; as inauspicious a way to start a sprawling epic fantasy series as I’ve ever encountered,” continues Smythe. “In Roland Deschain, the titular Gunslinger, there’s a superb, violent, powerful and thoughtful protagonist – Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name by way of Robert Browning’s poem, Childe Rolande to the Dark Tower Came. He’s cold and dark, and we see him wander through dusty western towns, shooting and fucking his way towards his nemesis, The Man in Black.”

I won’t be giving the book a second chance years later.

I’m not a King superfan. I’ve not read a dozen King novels. I liked most of them (The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, The Institute). I loved a couple of them (The Shining, The Drawing of the Three). Some I barely remember (Desperation, The Dead Zone).

The Gunslinger is only 251 pages, so you don’t have to invest a lot of time in it if you want to give it a shot.

Then again, it was Carrie that King first published 50 years ago, back in 1974. I never did read that one, about a bullied girl in high school growing up in a hardcore religious home who learns she can pull off some telekinetic tricks.

Maybe we’ll give Carrie a try the next time we decide to take on a Stephen King novel.

Journalist Michael Malone lives in Hawthorne with his wife and two children.