I decided to take a crack at reading the Dark Tower before the movies hit. I’m a slow reader and used to enjoy Stephen King quite a bit. I’m about 40 pages in to The Gunslinger and I gotta admit, it’s struggling to grab me. I used to love SK excessive descriptions of each setting but for some reason in this one it feels like they are slowing the story to a crawl. One person says something and then there are 3-4 paragraphs of description before another person responds. Repeat. It gets to where I loose the forest for the trees as I can’t picture two people talking because I spend all of my imagination visualizing the setting.
I don’t remember his writing being quite this thick. I really want to get into this series and I know 40 pages isn’t much for most people but I’m struggling.
Any words of encouragement?
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
I read the original, non-padded “Gunslinger” and enjoyed it. I also liked Books 2 and 3 because, while they are very stupid in a number of ways, they have a lot of King’s strengths, notably his ability to create remarkably vivid characters, and they’re just fun. It feels as if he is building a remarkable fantasy world.
After that the series is a disaster and not worth reading. Don’t bother. King packs one, maybe two bood books into four books. Books 4 through 7 are sort of the book version of the “Hobbit” movies, but more boring and stupid. and the quality of his writing is the worst it’s been in his entire career.
I read the first part of The Gunslinger when it was serialized in one of the magazines (Fantasy ads Science Fiction maybe, I don’t have enough interest to look it up right now) back in the day.
This might be heresy, but skip “The Gunslinger” for now, and dive right into book 2, “The Drawing of The Three.” The tone is much different between The Gunslinger and the books that follow it, and I found the narrative of Drawing to be much more accessible. If, like me, you find the characters in Drawing to be engaging and interesting, then go back and re-read Gunslinger and see if your interest perks back up.
That said, I agree with the substance of RickJay’s comment, only I’d keep the fourth book, Wizard and Glass, too. IMHO, the series really starts to go off the rails about midway through the lengthy fifth book, “Wolves of the Calla.”
But plenty of people love all eight books that (so far) comprise the series. Also, many of his other books loosely tie into the Dark Tower series, like “Eyes of The Dragon,” “Insomnia”, and many others as well.
So go read Drawing of the Three and then decide if you still don’t care for the series.
I agree with all of this - Books 2 and 3 are excellent and decently paced and Book 4 was a good read (although potentially frustrating if you’re keen for the main storyline to progress as it’s mostly flashback), but Book 5 goes off the rails in a big way and Book 6 is a mess. Book 7 starts to pull it back - a lot of it is still a mess (and King’s “Sophie’s World” shtick isn’t very clever IMO) but there are some gems buried in there (the walk and then pursuit through the tunnel is pretty scary) and of course the final fate of Roland is about as good as one could expect.
The Gunslinger is pretty thick in setting up the tone and scenery, and honestly didn’t grab me until close to the end of the book. I think King was still trying to find the narrative for his “opus” here.
Then I started reading The Drawing of the Three, and got sucked into it like the best of SK novels.
Agree that books 2–4 were the best in the series. 5–7 had its moments of awesome, and WTF? But I think if you like SK, this series is a must read.
Agreed with the gist of the above. The Gunslinger itself is a bit stylized, it feels (to me) like SK set out to deliberately write something with the tone of a parable or a myth. I, personally, like it a a lot, but the writing is obviously crafted in a specific way.
The rest of the books, though, are in more of a straight up “this is SK telling a SK story” with fun characters and snappy dialogue, and they are much more in keeping with his usual narrative style.
I wouldn’t even say to skip the first book, because I think it does a great job of setting the scene for the series and providing some important foundation knowledge, but it’s not that long of a book and if it’s the somewhat rigid tone that you’re reacting to, you’ll be done with that after this first one.
I am a huge Stephen King fan and I never loved the Dark Tower series. I read all of them and liked most of them them to various degrees but never loved them. I will say the Drawing of the Three is the best of them in my opinion and it is worth reading even if you have a hard time with The Gunslinger although I could imagine it may seem very dated now (I haven’t read it in maybe two decades).
It’s hard to say. When I started originally reading the books, I was in middle school and really into “classic” Stephen King like It and Skeleton Crew. Then I had to wait 3-6 years between books before he finally decided to blast out the last 3 in my mid 30s. (So suck it A Song of Ice and Fire fans).
IMHO, you either get sucked into the stylized Outlaw Josie Wales meets King Arthur and the Holy Grail meets Lord of the Rings world King created or you don’t.
In many ways, it’s kind of like Lost or X-Files or their many clones over the years. It starts out with a simple enough premise that hints at a much larger and more complex mystery (“The man in Black fled across the Desert, and the Gunslinger followed…"). And King paints an interesting picture of a “world that has moved on” that oddly juxtaposes with our own. But like Lost, as it starts delving into the specifics of those mysteries, it kind of starts to get bogged down by the weight of its own complex narrative.
Well, Gunslinger was originally not meant to be part of a series, more of an atmospheric, surreal mind trip.
In book 2 it becomes more of an adventure book, a sort of epic fantasy with Sergio Leone cowboys and time travel instead of knights. So there’s a shift in tone.
To me, books 2 and 3 are the ones I’d gladly recommend. I do think that after that the series start declining until they become a confusing mess, but that’s me.
I only assume I read them in order; but I don’t really remember as it’s been so long. I do remember getting 3 or 4 books into the series and then thinking the story was going nowhere; and I just kind of gave up on it.
I thought The Gunslinger was quite good, and that’s why I continued reading. My advice would be that if you aren’t enjoying The Gunslinger, don’t read any more of the series. The gunslinger sets the groundwork for what follows, I wouldn’t advise skipping over it to read the rest.
The first book is really different. It didn’t really grab me either, but I soldiered through and then loved books 2, 3, and 4. There is a great short story about Roland in the Gunslinger era called “Little Sisters of Eluria”. If you could read that first, you might get more attached to the character and then find The Gunslinger more involving.
I tried to read The Gunslinger, and managed to slog my way through it, but I did not enjoy it and I don’t remember much about it. It put me off the series for quite some time, but I eventually got around to picking up Book 2 and found it to be a big improvement.
So far I’ve read through Book 4, so I can’t comment on anything after that, but books 2–4 at least are well worth reading. Some people say that #4 is the best of the series and one of the best things King ever wrote; and while I’m not sure whether or not I agree, I can at least see where they’re coming from.