Quest for the Tower

Every now and again a book comes along that becomes so completely ingrained in your consciousness that you look at everything you read afterwards through the lens of that great book.  For me, that book was Stephen King’s The Gunslinger, which is the first in his epic series known as The Dark Tower.  With this novel, King seems to blend genre, so that we find the hero, a gunslinger named Roland, is a blend of a knight errant from the mythical days of King Arthur and a Clint Eastwood style sheriff, complete with six-shooters and rawhide accouterments.

The world of the gunslinger at first appears to be much like our own, only a hundred or a hundred and fifty years ago, with oil lamps lighting the streets and horse-drawn carriages.  There is a saloon, honky-tonk piano, and a group of men playing a game of cards called “watch me.”  But then the world shifts, and we see references to “ancient” technologies left by the “great old ones” that consist of gasoline pumps and fabled “fuel-less lights.”  The world is stunningly real, and very easy to become immersed in, especially if you have a taste for post-apocalyptic setting. 

The Gunslinger himself seems to be a part of a world that is gone by the time we enter the story.  He comes from a land called Gilead, and we see flashes of his boyhood that convey the harsh conditions under which Roland was forged.  Beaten by their harsh teacher Cort, an enigmatic character that is part mentor and part rival, Roland and his friends endure extreme instruction methods that are supposed to help them achieve the rank of Gunslinger.  As the final part of this education, Roland must best his teacher in single combat, which provides a maddening view into the calculating and deadly mind of the one who will become the last of his kind.

King seems to have a gift for writing believable characters.  Roland is every bit as darkly romantic and doggedly tenacious as one might expect from a gun-slinging knight, and his adversary is just as enigmatic.  The first line of the novel reads, “The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.” The man in black is the gunslinger’s archetypal adversary, at least for this book.  He is devious, evil, and capable, making him a dangerous and deadly enemy for the Gunslinger to face.  I won’t tell you how things turn out, but suffice to say that not even a gun-slinging knight could survive an encounter with the man in black unscathed.

Pick up this book this summer and you’ll be will launched, along with Roland, upon the quest for the dark tower, one that will leave the kind of impression that only excellent storytelling can.  Through startlingly rich imagery, intense character development, and suspense at all turns, Stephen King entices the reader to fall in love with this dark and fatalistic world that has “moved on.” 

--Bobby White