Road to the Dark Tower: The Gunslinger

In anticipation of the upcoming release of the movie The Dark Tower on August 4, I have been re-reading the books in The Dark Tower series by Stephen King. I'll be posting reviews of each one here.

The Gunslinger

This is where it all began, with the man in black fleeing across the desert – and the gunslinger following. There are a lot of things I like about this book, but the inexorability of that chase is for me the most intriguing. The in medias res introduction to Roland, his world, his purpose, and his primary antagonist can't help but draw you in like a thinny calling your name. (Okay, we don't learn about thinnies until three books later, but nonetheless, the analogy holds.)

Not only was The Gunslinger my introduction to the world of The Dark Tower, but it was my introduction to Stephen King's writing. I first read it in the mid-1990s in college, and while at that point I was familiar with various the Stephen King stories that had been adapted for film and television, I had never actually read any of his books. Honestly, I just wasn't into the whole horror genre, but my friend @dmaddock1 prompted me to read The Gunslinger, and in doing so, it opened me up to a whole new world – or rather, a whole new network of worlds – that I have since come to enjoy quite a lot.

Put simply, The Gunslinger tells the story of Roland Deschain, the eponymous gunslinger, as he pursues Walter Padick, an evil magician. I won't give away details about why Roland is chasing Walter, but much of the story is given through flashbacks to Roland's childhood as he finished his training and took his final test to become a gunslinger. It also offers insights about the types of men Roland and Walter are, as Roland remembers the most recent town through which he had traveled, the end result of it being that he kills everyone in the town after they turn on him and try to kill him.

It is also the story of Roland's meeting Jake, a boy from New York City who is magically transported to an old, abandoned gas station (called a "way station" in Roland's parlance) in the middle of the desert after being run over by a car in his own world. Roland and Jake become traveling companions, and the two grow fond of each other, but in his relentless pursuit of Walter, Roland has to make a decision that ultimately costs Jake's life. It is a decision that haunts him, and one which Roland has had to make over and over again in his pursuit of the Dark Tower, as we come to learn later in the series.

Speaking of which…

Introducing the Dark Tower

Stephen King has written that the idea for The Gunslinger came from his love for the poem "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" written by Robert Browning. In some sense, the series as a whole is an adaptation of that poem. Later books expand quite a bit on the various connections to the poem (as well as connections to many other stories), but the imagery and focus of the poem are infused in The Gunslinger in a way that they never really are again in the rest of the series. From a metatextual level, that is likely due to the The Gunslinger being the most faithful to King's original vision of Roland's story as an adaptation of Browning's poem, given that it was written at an early stage of his career when the idea was still relatively fresh. But there might also be a diegetic explanation: that the decaying nature of the Dark Tower, and the slow thinning and blurring of the lines between the different worlds through which Roland travels, is causing Roland's world (and all worlds) to "move on" from their former glory days. In a sense, they are all becoming the same, devolving to the lowest common denominator.

The Gunslinger acts as a short, sweet introduction to these ideas – of the Dark Tower itself, Roland's pursuit of it, and the protection it offers to his world and others – without offering too much explanation. We only really learn that Roland is on a mission to find this Dark Tower, and that in order to achieve his goal he must do some terrible things. I won't get into what the Dark Tower itself symbolizes, since there is plenty of time to perform such speculation in reviews of the other books in the series.

In a sense, the lack of explanation is one of the things I like about this book compared to the other books in the series (and other books by King overall). Stephen King has a tendency to over-explain things, which I think can be a huge detriment to his stories. He is at his best when he focuses on the characters, their situations, and actions they take based on those situations. But when he gets into providing reasons about why things happen, it tends to become less believable (in a secondary world sense) and pulls the reader away from the story. The Gunslinger is a short and tightly written story, which means there isn't a lot of time for explanation. The reader just has to take the things that happen in the world for granted and hope they get answers later (if that's what they're looking for).

Ultimately, The Gunslinger is little more than a chapter in Roland's pursuit of the Dark Tower – neither the first nor the last, but somewhere in the middle (or perhaps the latter 2/3) of his story. It's full of promise and aspiration and hope and fear that the gunslinger's audacious goal may, in the long run, be entirely unreachable. And I like it for all those things that it is.

The Dark Tower Movie

I hope that the upcoming Dark Tower movie will pull a lot of Roland's characterization from The Gunslinger. Without doubt, Roland changes throughout the series, but this first book sets the tone of what he is at heart when pursuing his ultimate goal on his own. While the Dark Tower series ends up becoming a story about the other characters that Roland meets along the way (as well as Roland himself), this story is primarily about him and the loneliness of his mission. For the movie, I really hope they can capture that aspect of who he is.

Anyway, here's the second official trailer for the film. I'm getting excited for it!

Stay tuned for my review of the next book, The Drawing of the Three, shortly.

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