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.
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