Book Bearings
The Gunslinger
Book 1 of The Dark Tower
- 256 pages · about 4 hours
- First published 1978
- 95 editions
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1 About this book
Roland Deschain, the last gunslinger, is crossing a vast desert in pursuit of a figure he knows only as the man in black, whom he has been chasing for many years. His world resembles the American West but is plainly not ours, or no longer ours, and the story fuses the western with fantasy, science fiction and horror. On his way Roland passes through a doomed town, and at a way station he meets Jake Chambers, a boy who travels on with him for part of the journey. The Gunslinger is the first volume of Stephen King's Dark Tower series. It was first published in 1982, made from five linked stories that had appeared in a magazine, and King revised it substantially in 2003.
- Adventure
- Science fiction
- Horror
- Fantasy, epic
- Magic
- Demons
- Fantastic fiction
- Good and evil
2 What to expect
The short, strange opening volume of the Dark Tower series: a lone gunslinger pursues a man in black across a desert in a world that is running down. It blends western, fantasy and horror, and it is spare, dreamlike and often cryptic, explaining little about its world or its hero's quest. Made from five linked stories, it is quite unlike the longer books that follow, and it has some brutal scenes.
Good for readers who want: dark fantasy with a western feel, the start of an epic series, and a short, moody read.
3 About Stephen King
Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
4 More by Stephen King
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