I was in the middle of yet another 900+ page Wheel Of Time book when my wife and I went on vacation last week. Not wanting to lug around a 3 inch deep tome, I decided to bring something more portable. The Gunslinger. This is my FIRST book by Stephen King that I have ever read.
In the afterward, King says he wrote the book over the span of several years and you can kinda tell in how different it feels at the beginning versus the end. The weariness and depressing persistence of the "chase" brings you well into the head of the man you find out a couple hundred pages later is named Roland. He coldly recounts how the town of Tull went from a frontier town to a ghost town to a lone settler who is equally as unaffected by the horrible tale as he is in telling it. It partly feels like a confession, but without the seeking of absolution. Just an admittance, rather..
Then the boy, Jake, comes into his life. Jake's sorry is odd and sad and depressing. It feels like he was there to serve a purpose, but it didn't really fell like he did... other than to briefly show the Gunslingers capacity for humanity and compassion- at least a remembrance of it anyway.
Meeting the MIB was really an anticlimax. The resolution of that interaction even more so.
Maybe those turn out to be NOT yet totally resolved in the next books.
All in all, parts of the writing were very good, but the overall story is not great. Not yet anyway.
p37
He suddenly became aware that the room had gone silent again, and he tasted thick tension in the air. He turned around and stared into the face of the man who had been asleep by the door when he entered. It was a terrible face. The odor of the devil-grass was a rank miasma. The eyes were damned, the staring, glaring eyes of those who see but do not see, eyes ever turned inward to the sterile hell of dreams beyond control, dreams unleashed, risen out of the stinking swamps of the unconscious.
