Well, we’re off to a great start. (see Has Stephen King Lost It?) The Gunslinger certainly ranks with Stephen King’s best even though it is completely unlike anything else he has written. But let’s put it into the context of the experiment.

This book was published in 1982 (though it was begun 12 years earlier), right around the time when Stephen King was pumping out killer books (ha!) like Firestarter and Christine. It’s brief (300 pages paperback) and though it's the first book of a series, it can stand alone on its own merits even if King had decided not to continue the story.

King notes in his pithy introduction (written in 2003) that he had always wanted to write an epic story along the lines of The Lord of the Rings but he had to wait for some sort of inspiration to come that would make the story his own and not a retread of Tolkien’s. That inspiration came when he saw the Clint Eastwood film, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Here was a setting – an Italian director’s dislocated take on the American West – that he felt would be perfect for an epic tale. He was right.

The Gunslinger follows the enigmatic Roland as he pursues “the man in black” across the desert, under the mountains, and finally to a meeting place littered with bleached bones. Roland has all of the appearances of an epic hero, wearing worn-out blue jeans, an open shirt (the “no-color of rain or dust”), and deeply oiled leather holsters for his sandalwood guns. Along the way King gives a few clues about who this “Gunslinger” is through flashbacks to earlier times; we learn of his premature coming-of-age rite many years before and his recent showdown with an entire town. Both episodes establish Roland as a man who has seen much, one who has accepted his fate even as he realizes all of the pain and damage to himself and others that will come of it. I won’t spoil the story but one of the sacrifices he makes involves a boy from our own world that he has met as he crosses the desert, and when the time comes for Roland to choose between his quest and the boy, his decision tells us much about who he is.

His quest is to seek the Dark Tower, the “nexus of all worlds.” Though it is unclear exactly what this is, we do know that it will be a long journey through many different worlds. As the book reaches its conclusion, Roland is given a view of what his future holds: he must journey to the sea where he will “draw three.” I cheated a little bit and read the blurb for Book II of the series, and found this means there he will find three doors through which he must go.

What makes this a good fiction – not just good Stephen King fiction – are three things: the story, the setting, and the overall mood. I’ve given you a little idea of the story. As for the setting, it’s like a crooked view of a western, sprinkled with bits of our own culture (‘Hey Jude’ appears as a song the townsfolk know), with a hint of sorcery. The best description in the author’s: This world has moved on.

But what really gets me is the mood. This really is unlike anything else King has written; there’s a great loneliness throughout the book that perfectly mirrors Roland and his quest. Even though there are plenty of other minor characters I couldn’t shake this feeling that everything seemed so deserted. And though I’m not a writer I would imagine that’s quite a tough thing to pull off, especially throughout a 300-page book.

So this is definitely a great start and I’m very eager to start the next book, The Drawing of the Three. Stay tuned.