The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger

The Gunslinger

Paperback, 288 pages

English language

Published June 13, 2017 by Scribner.

ISBN:
978-1-5011-6836-9
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OCLC Number:
1023775649

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3 stars (2 reviews)

OVER THREE DECADES AGO, Stephen King introduced readers to the extraordinarily compelling and mysterious Roland Deschain. Roland is a haunting figure, a loner on a spellbinding journey into good and evil. In his desolate world, a landscape strewn with the wreckage of civility, he tracks the man in black, encounters an enticing woman named Alice, and begins a friendship with a boy from New York named Jake. Both fiercely realistic and eerily dreamlike, The Gunslinger is the first book in what is perhaps the greatest odyssey Stephen King has ever written. --back cover

63 editions

Review of 'The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

I definitely enjoyed this book, but it is also definitely the start of a saga. Throughout the whole novel there's so, so many hints of a larger world, and bursts of rapid-fire world building. The world King is creating is strange and intriguing enough that I want to continue with this series just to see how deep the rabbit hole goes. There are also a fair few Stephen King-isms in here, to be sure, though I'm told not as many as the later entries. Really, it's a matter of how much you can tolerate the particular style. I'm writing this a long time after I read it so I apologize for the vagueness.

I don't get why people like this

2 stars

People say this is a good book and series but I can't agree to that. It's just chaotic and doesn't make any sense, the writing seems overly dramatic and "flowery", meaning he describes things so weird, with weird details and weird metaphors. I couldn't even read it to the end and stopped at like 80 or 90%. I have no interest in reading the other novels in the series, it's just not my type of writing I guess. I never liked any Stephen King books until this one and I read a bunch now. It's not getting any better, maybe I should just give up on trying to like his writing.