Rating: 2 out of 5 haunted jawbones

Buy The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger from Amazon here.

Buy The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger from Bookshop.org here.

That’s not to say it’s a bad book at all… it just feels a little confused in terms of knowing what it is. There’s a strong plot and line of thought flowing through it, it’s just that what it’s flowing through is a hall of mirrors that distorts your view of what it’s trying to achieve.

However, if you’re going to embark upon the Dark Tower series, and by all accounts you should, it seems clear that you should start here, at book I – and it’s easy-going enough to read. Just think of it as the free amuse bouche to the main meal you’re actually shelling out for.

Review (i.e. I would give 500 spoilers and I would give 500 more)

I haven’t yet read the Dark Tower series, beyond this and (some years ago), The Drawing of the Three. This is as it should be when you read the first novel in a series, but it is also, to some extent, The Gunslinger’s downfall. Why? Because it seems to function as a sort of overture to the series.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m very, very cultured. I’m as cultured as a Petri dish in a sewer. But I fucking hate overtures. An overture is just choppy bits of all the great songs you’re about to hear, out of context and before you’ve been able to like that. They hang together badly; a sagging wardrobe of cheap suits on gelatinous coat-hangers. You can only actually begin to enjoy an overture on the second listen-through, because now you know what all the little sections are referencing – and by that point, you either want to hear the proper song, because it’s good, or don’t want to hear any of it again, because it’s bad. Overtures are the worst kind of composerly self-indulgence.

And The Gunslinger, while not deserving of the ire I’ve just tossed out like yesterday’s pastries, does fall into some of those traps. While writing it, King didn’t even know where the story was going – but he laid some hints about plot-points ahead nonetheless. I’m all for foreshadowing – shadow as fore as you like – but the steady accumulation of opaque and currently-meaningless references to future Dark Tower instalments and plot-lines gets tiresome.

That said, the four stories themselves in this book are all, in themselves, really fun plots for the most part. Roland is a very morally ambiguous character – generally decent, on occasion awful – and yet somehow King does manage to get you rooting for him. The rules of his world aren’t clear, and aren’t fully explained, but once you get past some of the more purple prose, the plotlines are strong enough that you push through any initial confusion to accumulate understanding. I don’t know whether Roland is specifically based on Clint Eastwood (who do you think I am? Jimmy Research?) but he has more shades of Eastwood than a sunset by a copse, and the books follow a Western’s fast-and-bang-bang structure.

The book doesn’t really reach depth until dealing with Jake, though. Across multiple stories King really builds up Jake’s dependence on Roland and a strong parent-child love, while at the same time constantly reiterating that Roland would have to sacrifice Jake. The tension of this swells over time like a water-balloon in your gut, and even though you know it’s going to explode at some point, it’s still a shock when it does. It’s an incredibly effective way to underline Roland’s at-all-costs obsession, and is the best example of his ability to live in both the black and the white of the moral spectrum.

So I did enjoy The Gunslinger, but I feel very sure that the Dark Tower series is only going to get better. I just hope the overture was worth it, Steve.