The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass

 

This and the companion pieces are less reviews than they are a sort of reader's diary of my experiences encountering Stephen King's monumental fantasy/western/science fiction tale The Dark Tower. It's made up of seven books, each of which I read at different times in my life. These are some reflections on the separate volumes, and I will be assuming that the reader has already read them or does not care if what he or she reads spoils the books or their endings. That is, of course, assuming that these little exercises have readers to begin with ;-) 

Again, and I will stress this so that no one may find the experience of learning Roland's story and reading The Dark Tower lessened by knowing what comes next, THERE BE SPOILERS HERE.

You've been alerted.

In any series of seven items, the fourth item is the middle. Three precede, three follow. And for Stephen King's The Dark Tower series, this fourth novel is easily the nadir of the seven -- a sprawling rotten scrambled egg of a book that runs more than 260,000 words and spends nearly 175,000 of them on a flashback.

King published Wizard and Glass in 1997, well after any editor stopped imposing any storytelling discipline on him. By contrast, the third volume of the series, 1991's The Waste Lands runs nearly 90,000 words less. The first two volumes, published in the 1980s, total 55,000 and 128,000 words respectively.

We begin where we left The Waste Lands, with Roland, the last gunslinger, trapped inside a speeding monorail controlled by an ancient artificial intelligence that has gone insane. Roland and his companions, Eddie, Susannah and Jake, must pose riddles that the AI, named Blaine, can't solve, or else their train will crash full-speed into the endpoint of its track and kill them all.

King's ability to build tension is on fine display in this scene. Roland tries riddle after riddle, but Blaine knows them all. Jake's last-ditch use of a book of riddles is no good, and Susannah has no help to offer. Eventually Eddie is able to defeat the ruthlessly logical mind of Blaine by posing nonsense riddles that overload its circuitry. Its brain fried, the train stops at the town of Topeka, but it is not a place that any of the travelers know. Although Jake, Susannah and Eddie are all from a world like ours that has a Topeka, they don't recognize this one. It's empty, peopled only with desiccated corpses. Only from a newspaper do they realize that they're in a world where most people have died from a genetically enhanced flu virus and that world is headed for its own moment of truth.

Roland understands they've passed through a "thinny," or place where the barrier between alternate worlds has grown so thin no special effort is needed to move from one to another. King readers know that Roland's group is in the world of his novel The Stand. The problem is that in this world, they can no longer see the Beam that will lead them to the Dark Tower. They have to return to Roland's world or their quest for the tower is lost. Ahead is another thinny, as well as a strange glass building sitting on I-70 in eastern Kansas.

BUT...before we can get to that strange building, Roland's encounter with this thinny has reminded him of the first one he ever saw, back when he was just 14. Those events form a large part of beginning Roland's quest for the Tower, and the reader will spend the next 175,000-plus words learning about it.

Roland learns, after having passed his trial of manhood and earned the right to a gunslinger's weapons, that he has been manipulated by those who want to bring down his family. His father sends him away to the Barony of Meijis to keep him out of harm's way and to learn what he can about Meijis' connection to John Farson, a man trying to overthrow The Affiliation, the loose group of governments the gunslingers serve. Roland's friends Alain and Cuthbert accompany him. At Hambry, a town in Meijis, Roland meets Susan Delgado, a 16-year-old girl engaged to be the consort of Hambry's mayor.

The three young men learn that Farson is indeed connected to Hambry, which intends to supply his war machines with the oil they need to attack the gunslingers. Roland, Alain and Cuthbert have been framed for the murder of Hambry's mayor and are in jail, but Susan helps them escape, as she and Roland have fallen in love. The trio destroys the oil supplies and lures many of Farson's forces to their deaths when they ride into a thinny near Hambry. But Susan's role is discovered and she is burned at the stake.

Roland discovers this when he sees it in a Wizard's Glass known as Maerlyn's Grapefruit he captured from Farson -- and he realizes that when he chose a path that would take him towards the Dark Tower he abandoned Susan to her death. Like J.R.R. Tolkien's palantíri seeing stones that it closely resembles, this wizard's glass exacts a price for its visions and Roland is comatose. Alain and Cuthbert have to carry him back to his home in Gilead.

And then finally we return to Roland, Susannah, Eddie and Jake outside a dead Topeka. As they approach the glass building, which resembles the wizard's palace in The Wizard of Oz movie, they find blood-red shoes for each of them, including the billy-bumbler animal Oy that has attached itself to Jake. Tapping them together as Dorothy did in the movie, they are taken inside the palace, where they confront what at first appears to be a resurrected Blaine but turns out to be a disfigured Tick-Tock Man, rescued from death by Roland's nemesis Marten Broadcloak. Broadcloak is also The Ageless Stranger, Richard Fannin, and at his roots he is none other other than Randall Flagg, a villain not only from The Stand, but from a number of King's other books.

The Tick-Tock Man is killed and Flagg flees when Roland confronts him, not with his own guns that Flagg can enchant, but with a gun from Eddie's world that is beyond the wizard's power. The group leaves the glass palace and finds themselves back in a world with a visible Beam, able to continue their quest for the Tower. But as they go, Roland reveals that, deceived by another vision he saw in the Wizard's Glass, he shot and killed his mother. Flagg taunts Eddie, Susannah and Jake that everyone who befriends or tries to help Roland has died in the gunslinger's quest for the Tower. Despite this, the others choose not to leave Roland but now consider his quest theirs as well.

I came to Wizard and Glass a Kingophile and a devoted Tower-head. I even ordered the Donald M. Grant limited edition through Amazon, the first Amazon order I'd ever placed and the second of the Dark Tower books I owned in Grant editions. I'd waited for six years for King to move this fascinating story along, six years with the cliffhanger of Roland's group stuck inside the insane and suicidal Blaine the monorail.

I left Wizard and Glass completely disinterested in the story and feeling a real disenchantment with King's work that's had only intermittent lulls. Yes, we do meet some of the people arrayed against Roland's quest for the Tower when the quartet encounters Broadcloak/Flagg. Yes, we do get a hint that the Tower is a sort of axis of many parallel worlds, not only those of Roland and of Jake, Susannah and Eddie. And yes, we do learn that Roland's single-minded quest will cause him to sacrifice much and that he will not be the only one to pay the price for it.

But it takes so frickin' long, much longer than it needs to. Is the story of Roland and Susan a necessary one to show us something about the gunslinger? Perhaps, but essentially it's a kind of love/adventure story that writers like L'Amour, Burroughs or Sabatini did many times over. Those old adventure writers, though, had a  focus that kept the story on a laser-straight line from "Once upon a time" to "The End" and kept their readers hooked. King drags the story of Roland and Susan everywhere he can think of it going and doesn't hurry on the way.

Maybe it is important to learn about the Baronies of Mid-World and Farson's rebellion against them. Maybe it is important to learn about Susan Delgado as Roland's "one true love" and his scary willingness to sacrifice anything and maybe even anyone in his quest for the Tower. But it's almost impossible to justify the effort expended on them here. A six-year wait to learn how the ka-tet escaped Blaine's insane suicide run and renewed its search for the tower, and almost immediately that story grinds to a halt for a flashback that all by itself is as long as the first two books of the series.

The resolution to the quartet being stranded in The Stand's world feels rushed and cramped. It's almost as if it's tacked on to prevent the reader mutiny that might have followed if the immense detour to Hambry kept us from learning whether or not the ka-tet escaped that world and returned to Roland's. During the six years it took before Wolves of the Calla, the next volume of the series, was published, most of the charity this reader extended towards someone who was once one of his favorite authors dried up and blew away.

Wizard and Glass made me unwilling to indulge King's indulgences. Editors had long since stopped reining him in, apparently careful to avoid a potentially publisher-changing dispute by telling their cash machine to spend some more time mining for the storytelling diamonds in the dust. Publishers make more money selling immense books than they do small ones. An author like King, whose hardcore fan base seemed never to balk at his longer and longer books, will find no enemies among them.

There was It: Long, as well as a little creepy in the not-good way. Then a second edition of The Stand, restoring thousands of words edited out of the original. It was about as necessary as sunblock for Noah, but it did offer a broader view of King's vision of that novel. The Desperation/Regulators two-fer, with one book published under King's Richard Bachman pseudonym, was pretty clearly a case of a publisher stroking its cash cow. But at least gave us one good novel (Desperation) and some interesting meditations on God from an author who's never been shy about taking religion seriously.

Wizard and Glass, though, did me in. It came to my house sometime in late November of 1997 and I finished it in early December of that year. It took King six years to return to the world of the Dark Tower; it would take me a dozen.

The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands

This and the companion pieces are less reviews than they are a sort of reader's diary of my experiences encountering Stephen King's monumental fantasy/western/science fiction tale The Dark Tower. It's made up of seven books, each of which I read at different times in my life. These are some reflections on the separate volumes, and I will be assuming that the reader has already read them or does not care if what he or she reads spoils the books or their endings. That is, of course, assuming that these little exercises have readers to begin with ;-) 

Again, and I will stress this so that no one may find the experience of learning Roland's story and reading The Dark Tower lessened by knowing what comes next, THERE BE SPOILERS HERE.

You've been alerted. 

A few weeks after the end of Drawing of the Three, Roland, Eddie and Susannah move inland from the Western Sea where Roland first met the pair from our world and drew them to his. They meet a great cyborg bear called Shardik, which has deteriorated and gone mad over the course of its long life. Roland tells Eddie and Susan that the bear was one of the twelve animal totems that guarded the ends of the mystical Beams that hold the world together. Hax the cook had told him that he thought the Beams, Guardians and even the Tower itself had been made by people, specifically the Great Old Ones. Later we will learn that the Guardians, at least, had their origins as supernatural beings even though the Old Ones had later created mechanical replicas of them.

They begin to follow the Beam, visible as a sort of loose but definite ordered pattern in the sky, clouds and tree leaves. Where the six Beams converge, Roland knows he will find the Dark Tower itself. During their journey, Eddie and Susannah train as gunslingers, honing their skills with Roland's guns and with the one Roland took from the other world. Although they don't go through the entire training sequence that helped shape Roland himself, they do learn that being a gunslinger is more than simply pointing and pulling the trigger. Lessons like the "Gunslinger's Litany" impress on them some of the worldview that Roland has. King concludes this litany with the sentences: "I do not kill with my gun; he who kills with his gun has forgotten the face of his father. I kill with my heart." It's an interesting echo of Jesus' words in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5, in which he contrasts the observance of the letter of the law with a failure to observe its spirit by equating even anger against someone with murder. King grew up a regular church attender with his mother and evidence of that background shows up more than once in his work.

Unfortunately, even as they start this new phase of their quest for the Tower, Roland is steadily losing his mind. When he entered the body of Jack Mort, the man who had pushed Jake Chambers in front of a car in our New York City in 1977, Roland prevented the murder and kept Jake from crossing into his world and dying beneath the mountains as described in The Gunslinger. But Roland's encounter with Jake happened in the gunslinger's past, meaning that Jake had died and he had entered Roland's world. The dual timelines Roland's action creates are destroying his mind. In the 1977 New York City, the same thing is happening to Jake's mind. The only way to save both Roland and Jake from complete insanity is to draw Jake into the Roland's world and fuse the two timelines. Jake's portal is in a haunted house in New York City; the exit portal is a speaking ring in Roland's world. The demon that haunts this speaking ring must be held captive during the ritual that will bring Jake across, and like a similar demon in The Gunslinger, the way to do this is through a mortal human being having sex with it. This time, Susannah couples with the demon and keeps both Eddie and Jake safe while Roland brings Jake across. At the time no one knows that this is actually the same demon, and that by having sex with it, Susannah has actually been impregnated with a child that is part human, from Roland, and part demon as well.

The group also gains Oy the "billy-bumbler," a kind of semi-intelligent dog-raccoon-badger cross that attaches itself to Jake. Now whole, the ka-tet of Roland sets out again to follow the Path of the Beam that will lead them to the Tower. They pass through River Crossing, the first village or town we've come to in Roland's world since he killed everyone in Tull in The Gunslinger. The elderly people of River Crossing remember gunslingers, although such a great length of time has passed that we realize Roland's meeting with The Man in Black may have taken many many years, and that his world has been moving on even faster than it had when first we met him. Talitha Unwin gives Roland a cross to be taken to the Tower and laid there while her name is spoken. King also begins to outline connections between the deteriorated Shardik and the moving on of Roland's world.

The group next reaches the great city of Lud, mostly abandoned and nearly destroyed many centuries ago. A bridge, which the visitors from our world note looks a lot like New York City's George Washington Bridge, reaches across a great river canyon to it, and the Path of the Beam follows that way. But as they cross the bridge, a near disaster gives Gasher, one of the remaining people living in Lud, the chance to capture Jake. Lud's residents have been so physically damaged, probably by radiation, that they have very few children and they hope to bring new blood to their tribe with the boy. Roland and Oy track Jake through Lud to free him from Gasher's tribe of Grays, led by Andrew Quick, the Tick-Tock Man.

Jake shoots Quick, leaving him for dead. But the Ageless Stranger, who may very well be Randall Flagg, finds him, saves him and uses him to prepare a trap for Roland. The ka-tet is reunited at the Cradle of Lud, a sort of train station where they find the city's working artificial intelligence, Blaine. They learn that Lud is surrounded by impassible, deadly country that becomes the Waste Lands of the title. They can't cross on their own, but there is a way out. They use Blaine to escape Lud via a monorail train, even though the intelligent train reminds Jake of a weird kids' book he read in which a live train was said to carry children around in play but which looked like it was actually holding them as terrified prisoners in the illustrations. These fears prove out, as Blaine challenges the group to a riddle contest -- if they can tell a riddle he has never heard or can't answer, then he will stop at the train's last station and let them off. If they can't, he will crash the train into the end of the track at top speed -- apparently near 900 miles an hour -- and kill them all. The Waste Lands ends with the ka-tet ready to begin to riddle the deranged artificial mind.

And that's where King would leave The Dark Tower fans for six years; wondering what would happen to the group trapped aboard a sentient but suicidally insane train. Five years and four years, respectively, had passed between the earlier installments of the story, but neither the first nor the second books ended with this kind of cliffhanger. King didn't earn a lot of brownie points with his fans; having delved deeper into the history of Roland's world and what was actually happening there than he ever had before he had whetted their appetites for the real meat of the Dark Tower tale to begin. Gunslinger set the stage, Drawing cast the characters and now the curtain had gone up, only to drop again and stay down for a very long time.

As far as we can tell, the Great Old Ones were people who lived in a world not very different from ours but with technology somewhat advanced over our own in some areas, especially robotics. They also had a great deal of mystical knowledge, understanding not simply science but also the magical forces behind the Beams and the Dark Tower itself. In later volumes, we will see how their knowledge led them to arrogantly try to use their technology to harness the forces of the Beams to cross between worlds. Some kind of conflict arose that devastated much of Roland's world and left behind the Baronies of Mid-World -- the nations of his youth -- as well as wrecked cities like Lud and the Waste Lands themselves.

King sets Roland in a post-apocalyptic land, but the apocalypse he creates is not simply a nuclear war or other natural conflict -- supernatural forces and supernatural damage have also been at work here. Some earlier interviews suggest that King first thought of Roland's world as one that had survived some kind of nuclear holocaust when he first began it, but his vision broadens considerably over time. The danger of a direct missile-for-missile conflict between superpowers had lessened considerably since he started the series. He also explored how technology and spirituality or faith can relate to one another, and how if the former replaces the latter, the people who depend on it may find themselves seriously adrift if it ever fails them as the Great Old Ones' technology failed them and is now failing their descendants.

The Waste Lands is probably the first of the Dark Tower series to suffer from the bloating that was affecting much of King's other work. It's minor at this point. Waste Lands is long, but things still happen and it's not nearly as much of a puffed-up wheel-spinning session as some later books will be. The main problem it presents isn't its fault, because that major problem is the six-year gap between it and Wizard and Glass. And Wizard and Glass will go wrong in enough ways to make the six-year gap seem not nearly long enough.

The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three

 This and the companion pieces are less reviews than they are a sort of reader's diary of my experiences encountering Stephen King's monumental fantasy/western/science fiction tale The Dark Tower. It's made up of seven books, each of which I read at different times in my life. These are some reflections on the separate volumes, and I will be assuming that the reader has already read them or does not care if what he or she reads spoils the books or their endings. That is, of course, assuming that these little exercises have readers to begin with ;-) 

Again, and I will stress this so that no one may find the experience of learning Roland's story and reading The Dark Tower lessened by knowing what comes next, THERE BE SPOILERS HERE.

You've been alerted. 

By the time The Drawing of the Three was published in 1987, the reputation of the Dark Tower series had grown among Stephen King fans. Since The Gunslinger was, at that point, available only in the limited-edition Donald M. Grant edition or as serial chapters in nine-year-old copies of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, its scarcity prompted a hunger for subsequent chapters of Roland's story. I found Three on sale at a modeling/collectibles/hobby shop in the now mostly-abandoned Crossroads Mall. I happened to visit that mall about a year ago when one of its last anchor stores closed, looking for some shirt bargains, and the nearly empty mall can give a very good impression of being a place that's "moved on," like the world in which we first meet Roland. I paid about $40 for it; not overwhelming in today's market (King's most recent, Under the Dome, runs $35 retail) but a very good chunk of change for a book in 1987.

Three picks up just a few hours after the apocalyptic "palaver" between Roland and the Man in Black at the shores of the Western Sea that closed out Gunslinger. Before he has much time to consider what he has learned or what may have been the fate of the Man in Black, Roland is attacked by the creatures of the sea that he calls "lobstrosities." His hand and foot are maimed, leaving him able to use only one of his deadly guns and suffering from a potentially lethal infection.

As he heads north along the shore, he encounters a door, labeled "The Prisoner." Opening it, Roland finds himself in our world -- or one very much like it -- in 1987, somehow living in the body of Eddie Dean, a heroin addict who has agreed to mule drugs into New York City for a low-level mobster. Though he is still Roland in his mind, he has Eddie's body and can access some of Eddie's knowledge. Eddie and Roland use the dimension-crossing aspects of the door to allow Eddie to escape detection by the police, as Roland's odd actions draw the attention of the flight attendant and law enforcement. Seeing no alternative to either worse addiction, imprisonment by the law or death at the hands of the mob that is very curious about where its cocaine went, Eddie reluctantly crosses into Roland's world and joins him on his quest for the Tower. The relationship does not begin smoothly, as Roland is feverish from his infected wounds and Eddie suffers from heroin withdrawal. They manage to get antibiotics that begin to fight Roland's infection, but he is still weak.

The second door is called "Lady of the Shadows," and it leads into the mind of Odetta Holmes, a civil rights activist in 1964 New York City. Odetta is confined to a wheelchair, as she was attacked several years ago by a man named Jack Mort, who pushed her in front of a subway train and caused her to lose her legs. She also has an alter personality, a borderline psychotic who calls herself Detta Walker and who is nothing like the refined Odetta Holmes. Detta seems to be the result of a head injury that Odetta suffered when she was a child -- an injury again at the hands of Jack Mort. Roland and Eddie bring Odetta/Detta into Roland's world but have to deal with the evil and potentially harmful Detta instead.

The third door is labeled "The Pusher," and it is one that Roland has no desire to enter. He remembers that Jake, his companion from The Gunslinger, died when a man pushed him in front of a car and he knows exactly where this door will lead. And in fact it does enter the mind of the man who killed Jake, the same Jack Mort who caused Odetta so much harm and misery. Roland has to call upon the diplomacy he learned as the son of Gilead's leader in order to finesse Mort into playing his role in the quest while not allowing him to harm any of the members of the group. He even manages to save Jake, so that Mort never causes the boy's death and never sends him into Roland's world, exposing him to death under the mountains as Roland and Jake chase the Man in Black. The act will have dangerous consequences for Roland and Jake in The Waste Lands, the third book in the series.

By the end of the book, Roland has helped Eddie sweat out his addiction and has begun a full recovery from his injuries. Odetta successfully merges her personality with Detta and gives herself the name Susannah to signify she is a new person, and she and Eddie fall in love. Roland has drawn the "three" of his group (Susannah counts twice; as her original self of Odetta Holmes, and as her merged self of Susannah Dean), or ka-tet, which will help him quest for the tower.

Three is easily the strongest book of the seven that make up The Dark Tower. Written after King had several other books under his belt, it lacked some of the rough and raw edges that slowed The Gunslinger. But it comes early enough in his career that the bestseller's bloat which will plague most of his work past the middle 1980's isn't yet apparent. As we watch Roland try to interact with our world (a drink of Pepsi nearly sends him into a sugar euphoria that might almost usurp his quest for the Tower) we can get a much better sense of who he is than we were able to see through the haphazard flashbackery of Gunslinger. Although Eddie arrives as a whiny addict who seems far too weak to be of any help in Roland's quest, he starts to show hints of the substance that will later make Roland feel confident Eddie could continue the quest for the tower were Roland to die. Odetta is rather sketchy, as King spends a slightly uncomfortable amount of time detailing the dysfunctions, sexual and otherwise, of her alter-ego Detta. But the merged Susannah offers some interesting hints of her character as well, and considering that King used tween-aged group sex as an important plot point in 1986's It, Detta's quirks were hardly the queasiest thing he'd done in that realm by that point.

Jack Mort is somehow disappointing, as what seems to be a pivotal source of evil faced by the ka-tet gets relegated to a "thanks for playing, here are some lovely parting gifts" status by the time Three is finished. But in an intriguing development, we see King begin to draw connections between the Man in Black, who may not be as dead as Roland thought, and the evil Flagg of The Stand and Eyes of the Dragon. By today, of course, the idea that King was threading similar thoughts and ideas among several of his stories is common knowledge to Dark Tower readers, but in 1987 it was still a new concept for him.

Phil Hale's illustrations really cemented the visual aspects of the characters in my mind; Michael Whelan's version of Roland from The Gunslinger and The Dark Tower always seemed far too young and too much of a buff superhero; Ned Dameron's and Berni Wrightson's work from The Waste Lands and Wolves of the Calla, respectively, was not all that memorable;  Darrell Anderson did mostly landscapes and some murky, weird colorized sketches in Song of Susannah and Dave McKean's acid-trip/grunge-deconstruction photo illustrations are fit companions for the awfulness of Wizard and Glass. Whether Hale was simply better able to envision Roland's world or whether King's ability to focus and communicate that vision would never be better than it was in Drawing of the Three is hard to say.

Three remains the best of the seven books that make up The Dark Tower. It's imperfect, and there have been moments before it and there will be moments after it that when King matches or exceeds what he does here. But he will not string them together in such a consistent whole at any time while he explores Roland's world and follows his quest, and he will rarely do so again even outside of the Dark Tower arena.

The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger

This and the following pieces are less reviews than they are a sort of reader's diary of my experiences encountering Stephen King's monumental fantasy/western/science fiction tale The Dark Tower. It's made up of seven books, each of which I read at different times in my life. What follows will be some reflections on the separate volumes, and I will be assuming that the reader has already read them or does not care if what he or she reads spoils the books or their endings. That is, of course, assuming that these little exercises have readers to begin with ;-) 

Again, and I will stress this so that no one may find the experience of learning Roland's story and reading The Dark Tower lessened by knowing what comes next, THERE BE SPOILERS HERE.

You've been alerted. 

Three versions of this book exist. The earliest published format is five stories in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, beginning in February 1978 and running through November 1981. King polished them and stitched them together for a limited edition printed by Donald M. Grant in 1982. Slightly worn copies of this edition on the ABE Books website start at $100; good condition signed copies will go for as much as $5,000. Plume published a trade paperback of this edition in 1988. When King finished the entire Dark Tower series, he revised The Gunslinger and published that edition in 2003. He wanted to correct some continuity errors and help this volume mesh better with the others of the series. His vision of Roland the gunslinger's world had developed over the course of the thirty-plus years he had been writing it and he wanted the reader's first meeting with Roland to better match his later ones.

King also said he intended to polish the writing and tighten the story; only Stephen King could set out to tighten a story and wind up with one 9,000 words longer.

I read the Plume edition, which would technically be the middle version of the story. It opens with its iconic sentence: "The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed." We learn a little about Roland's world, which resembles ours but has significant differences, and we gain some background on his quest. Roland's ultimate goal is to reach The Dark Tower, a kind of world-nexus he has seen in visions, and to "question whatever gods might dwell there." He journeys into the desert and stops at a hut, where he tells a man who lives there about the last place he stopped, the town of Tull. The man in black had stopped in Tull as well, and Roland learns about his visit through a woman named Allie, with whom he begins a relationship. But the town's preacher, a woman named Sylvia, has been affected by the Man in Black and stirs Tull's people against Roland. He is forced to kill all fifty-plus people in town, including Allie, whom he shoots while she is being used as human shield and begging for her life. King's revised Roland shoots an Allie who has been driven mad like her neighbors and who asks for death in her last lucid moments.

As Roland continues through the desert, he is nearly dead from thirst and exposure by the time he reaches a way station, where he is rescued by a boy named Jake. Jake is from our world, and he is in Roland's because he was pushed in front of a car and killed. Jake himself doesn't really know this, and Roland must learn it by hypnotizing him. The presence of the boy sparks some of Roland's own memories, such as his gunslinger training under the teacher Cort and his exposure of the poisoning plot hatched by the cook Hax. Under the way station, the pair encounter a demon that speaks to them from a hidden skeleton, and Roland takes the demon's jawbone with him when they leave to continue the journey.

Finally they leave the desert for some hill country, but Jake is endangered by an Oracle, a kind of prophesying succubus that threatens to drain his life energy via sex. Although the revised edition makes Jake about 11, rather than the nine years old of the original, this is still a rather squicky scene, especially considering King's detailed description of the seduction and abuse of Jessie Burlingame by her father in Gerald's Game. In any event, Roland saves Jake and has sex with the Oracle demon himself. He learns he will gain allies in his quest, Eddie Dean and Odetta Holmes. But he does not know that this demon will later impregnate Odetta with seed it keeps from him and thus create his evil son Mordred. When they reach the mountains, they are taunted by the Man in Black, who says that he and Roland will have some things to discuss on the other side of the peaks. Roland asks Jake if he wants to keep going, since the Man in Black's words imply that the boy will not make it across the mountains. Jake agrees.

They enter the mountains through a mine shaft, in an atomic-powered mine car. Roland tells Jake some more about his earlier life; how his discovery of his mother's affair with a wizard named Marten Broadcloak (who might be the Man in Black) prompted him to take his test of manhood earlier than was planned. He survived this test, but found out he had been tricked by Marten as a part of a plot to discredit his family, have him sent away, and remove a problem for the rebel leader John Farson and the evil Beast to whom Broadcloak swore allegiance. The revised edition changes the Beast to the Crimson King, the villain against whom Roland must ultimately battle in the final volume. Roland and Jake, fleeing from an attack by Slow Mutants, run along a dangerous ledge and Jake slips. Though Roland catches him, he faces the choice of pulling Jake to safety or continuing his quest for the man in black and the Dark Tower. He chooses the quest and allows Jake to fall to his death, the boy himself saying, "Go, then. There are other worlds than these" and implying a future meeting of the two.

Through the mountains, Roland and the Man in Black have their palaver, or council. The Man in Black deals from a deck of Tarot-like cards to show Roland more about his future allies and to imply that the gift of death will not be given to Roland. He says he is a servant of Roland's true enemy, the one in control of the Dark Tower, and shows Roland a representation of the entire universe and of Roland's insignificance within it. Roland refuses the suggestion that he abandon his quest and falls into a deep sleep. Years have passed by the time he awakes, and next to him is a skeleton he presumes is the Man in Black. We will later learn it isn't, though. The Gunslinger closes with Roland meditating on how he will bring his allies into his world from their own and on his quest for the Tower.

Gunslinger was actually the second book of the series that I read, even though it was the first written. I'd already read its sequel, The Drawing of the Three, so I more or less knew how some of its events turned out.

As mentioned above, King says he revised it to help smooth transitions and correct some discontinuity with later parts of the series. He also felt the tone of the book as a whole was dry and a hard way to really get into the story of Roland. He has a point; the five chapters were probably stronger separately than they are as a unit. Three of them center on flashbacks and another two on prophecies; combined they put a lot of the action in the rearview mirror or in strange visions.

The earlier version has a lot more of our world littering Roland's. He recalls people and places identical to some we know, but King revises those to distance Roland's world from ours. Interviews about the project earlier in his career seem to link the Dark Tower saga with a kind of post-apocalyptic world that followed a global war and a nuclear holocaust. King's vision of the story expanded over time, and the Cold War scenario that dominated people's thinking about the future when he began it was long gone by the time he finished.

And it's certainly more roughly written. To put it in perspective, the Stephen King who sold the Gunslinger stories to F&SF had published four books and a collection of short stories under his own name and one book under his pseudonym Richard Bachman. Although The Stand showed that he had found a good deal of his authorial voice, he had quite a few areas to work on and the individual chapters of The Gunslinger demonstrate that as well.

Even though it is rougher, less composed and a tougher read than some of what follows, The Gunslinger represents the work of a writer with a monumental story in mind. By the time we get to the more polished sections of that story, our writer has become a brand name and a cash machine for his publisher. His story will get buried in weird meta-statements about the process of creation and ridiculous plot turns like his appearance in his own novel both as a character and its writer. So it's hard to judge this first step on a long journey without being affected by knowing where things will come out.

But based on its own vision, as well as the depth of story and character it offers, The Gunslinger takes its place as one of the top books of the seven main novels in The Dark Tower sequence and certainly outranks the related novels like Hearts in Atlantis or Insomnia. It sets a reader up well for the next step, The Drawing of the Three, in which we'll meet the others of the ka-tet who will aid Roland on his quest and begin to understand how his world relates to ours, as well as others, and what kind of role the Tower itself plays in those connections.