Nothing Like Bustin' Some Caps: The Gunslinger by Stephen King.
Written: Aug 06 '03
Product Rating:
Pros: Dark, brooding main character. Mix of sci-fi, fantasy, and western.
Cons: Terse and abrupt writing style. Shallow storyline. Too many stereotypical characters.
The Bottom Line: The first in Stephen King's fantasy cycle, The Dark Tower. A cold, dismal desert world wrought with perilous magic, mutated life, and restless death. Shallow with room to grow.
avepythagoras's Full Review: Stephen King and Michael Whelan - Gunslinger
I've never been a fan of Stephen King, and my reservations toward his work impeded me from actually reading this novel for about six or seven years. Sadly, I just never got around to it. I have a friend who won't shut up about this book and the rest of the series. "God, that Gunslinger is cool, he gunned down an entire town...with two six-shooters. Awesome." "I think the Gunslinger is the best idea for a fantasy novel, ever. He's mystical, cold as ice, and has a quick trigger finger." And this would go on and on, every time we talked about novels we liked, or our favorite science-fiction stories. So I figured, I'd give this series a chance, and see if it lived up to the expectations.
The man in black began to speak:
A dusty figure riding a mule, with cold urgency and determination, travels through a mysterious desert in search of a man in black. For the man in black carries his destiny: word of the Dark Tower, the ultimate goal of his dreams and duty. He is the last Gunslinger, Roland of Gilead, and the man in black, his betrayer. As he travels further into the desert he meets odd, misplaced people. A hermit-farmer and his talking crow, a young boy from New York City, a mysterious oracle with a penchant for sex. We learn of his past, violence, youth and love. His fortune is cast and his true journey begins.
I was mildly impressed with this book. Stephen King creates a brutal world populated by odd sorts of humans and mutant creatures, a world of death and decay, a post-apocalyptic reality falling apart in disrepair and misuse with each passing moment. There is something fresh and foreign, yet oddly old and similar, about King's fantasy world: a cheap honky-tonk saloon plays 'Hey Jude' in ragtime to weary travelers and card sharks, preachers talk endless of fire, brimstone and eternal damnation as a town listens in awe and fright, a kid from New York tells a sad tale of his death and experiences of life in the Big Apple. It's as if we know this world, or at least should, but we only find ourselves lost in its brutality, pushed away by its barren and forlorn landscape--something radically inhuman, monstrous.
Stephen King knows his strengths and weaknesses. He writes a novel of pure strength, characters he's able to control, able to leave shallow and remorseless. His characters are dying, like his world, and have given up searching for answers; they have given up growth and personality. For in Stephen King¡¦s bleak world, life is in the process of passing on. Life has been rendered absurd; it has mutated and become tainted by death, by age, and by betrayal. The only thing that seems to make sense is the Gunslinger, and even he has begun to succumb. For even he is mostly remorseless and cold-hearted, almost as dead as the world around him.
This way King doesn't have to fret too much over characters, he doesn't have to worry about the various dimensions of thought and growth one would want to find in any such novel. I've never thought King had the power to do so. But, instead, he makes a world of dead, dimensionless characters and thus regains control. His characters are shadows populating an illusory world, a world gone wrong, a world of shear unadulterated madness. And rightly so, his characters are a little mad, a little off, not quite what we would want, but what, in the end, we would expect. With which King intentionally makes a shallow beginning. In such a world, the only reasonable rebellion is growth.
In the End:
And that's why I liked this book. As a book, its only average. Yet, it was never intended to stand alone, but open us to the greater world to come, like the Gunslinger, our fortune is cast, and it requires further reading. Even though it is shallow, rather terse and unrefined, there is much room for growth, much more room than probably even I expect. And while the novel isn't the best, it provides a worthy beginning for what I hope to be a different, creative, and fresh series. I will definitely read the rest of the cycle, and am glad to hear that King has finally finished the story in its entirety. Something to look forward to...
In the first book of this brilliant series, Stephen King introduces readers to one of his most enigmatic heroes, Roland of Gilead, The Last Gunslinger...More at HotBookSale
King s fantastical and allegorical Dark Tower series commenced in 1982 with the publication of The Gunslinger which introduces protagonist Roland as h...More at Buy.com
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