The Gunslinger

This year I began reading Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series, a fantasy and western epic.  King has described the series as his magnum opus or masterpiece.   It is comprised of eight novels and draws inspiration from many sources including The Lord of the Rings, Sergio Leone’s westerns, and Arthurian legend.  The first book in the series is called The Gunslinger and the tag line of the book is “The Man in Black fled across the desert and the Gunslinger followed.”  The Gunslinger is the main character of the series his name is Roland.  Clint Eastwood’s character “the man with no name” in Sergio Leone’s “Dollars Trilogy”, A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, was the main inspiration for Roland and that is how I pictured him in my head as I read the book.  Roland is a complex character and King does his best to reveal more and more of him as the story progresses.  In the beginning the only thing the reader knows about Roland is that he is chasing the Man in Black, you also know very little about why he is doing this.  The interactions he has with other characters and flashbacks he has allow the reader to learn more about his intentions.  King also reveals the world in the same way, you start of reading the book thinking that it is set in the Old West, which it is, but and more events occur you can see how different this world is to our own.  The world that King created exists almost parallel to our own, and throughout the story there are remnants of our world that appear in Roland’s.  This first story features magic, gunfights, monsters, and mysteries and it is easy to read and easy to get sucked into the rest of the books in the series.