Your journey towards the Dark Tower begins here (The Gunslinger: The Dark Tower - Stephen King)

Member Name: DaveAshton

Product:	The Gunslinger: The Dark Tower - Stephen King
Date:	09/10/09 (30 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Solid storyline, well written, a great introduction to the Dark Tower series

Disadvantages: A bit slow in places, you'll need to buy the rest of the series to see how it ends

The Gunslinger is book one of the seven-book series known as the Dark Tower series, written by Stephen King.

The book, and indeed the series, revolves around a cowboy/nomad type named Roland Deschain who is on a kind of pilgrimage to the Dark Tower, which is basically a huge building that holds the world (and possibly even the universe) together. It is set both in a different world to ours, and the same one. That is to say, it's our world, but it has "moved on". There are many similarities between our present day world and Roland's world, not least a lot of the technology being the same, such as fuel pumps, train tracks etc (although, pretty much anything electronic no longer works) and there being a lot of pop culture references (Hey Jude, the hit for the Beatles is mentioned quite a lot in this book, and also throughout the series).

Throughout this book, Roland is chasing "the man in black" across a desert, and as the story goes on you really feel the urgency with which Roland is persuing him. I also think that Stephen King did a good job of describing how difficult Roland's task is on a physical and mental level. You can really believe they've been walking through the desert for a long time just from the way Roland reacts to certain things.

I found that it is a great introduction to the character of Roland, with quite a lot of things from his past mentioned, and also a good beginning to the series.

The story (both the Gunslinger, and the Dark Tower as a whole) can be a bit slow in places, but it's well worth persevering with it, and you will be wll rewarded when you reach the end.

The Dark Tower continues in The Drawing of the Three.

Summary: A good opening book to a very good series