WeaveReads

Stephen King’s The Gunslinger is such a strange little book, and I mean that in the best way possible. It’s often called the roughest of the Dark Tower series, even skippable, but I’m glad I didn’t listen to that advice. While it’s true that the style feels different from King’s usual work — more dreamlike, more biblical in tone — it serves as an important introduction to Roland, the man in black, and the world they inhabit. Without this entry point, the bigger themes that appear in the later books wouldn’t carry the same weight.

What struck me first was how disorienting the setting was. On the surface, it feels like a classic Western: dusty towns, lonely deserts, and a stoic gunslinger chasing down an elusive enemy. But then you notice the speech patterns, which feel older, almost medieval, and out of nowhere someone mentions “Hey Jude.” That was the moment I realized this wasn’t just a simple frontier story, it’s an inter-dimensional place, something close to Earth but not quite. It took me maybe fifty pages before it clicked — their world seems to be stitched together from other worlds and time periods — but once I did, the book started to make sense.

The structure itself is another level of strangeness. King uses stories within stories, characters retelling things that others told them, and it can get convoluted. Roland telling Brown a story about Alice, who had told him a story about herself, for example — it can be a little confusing to track who knows what and when, especially with multiple dimensions involved. But at the same time, it adds this mythical quality to the narrative, like you’re listening to a legend passed down, being reshaped with every retelling.

Roland himself is fascinating, partly because of the little details King gives us. The moment he situates himself so perfectly by a campfire that the smoke never blows in his face — it’s a small thing, but it says everything about who he is. A man of control, precision, and survival. And then there’s Jake, a boy Roland finds along the way, who immediately feels too pure for such a harsh world. I had a bad feeling about him as soon as he appeared, and King never makes it easy. The line Jake speaks — “Go then, there are other worlds than these.” — is one of the best in the whole book, devastating in its simplicity, and it hits all the harder because you know what’s coming.

The man in black, too, is an ominous presence throughout that when Roland finally catches up to him and their palaver ends with his death, it almost feels anticlimactic. Can a character that important, that evil, really be gone just like that? Somehow I doubt it. His shadow feels too big to vanish after one conversation.

In the end, The Gunslinger feels less like a complete story and more like a fever dream of one, laying the groundwork for something much bigger. It’s confusing, yes, and not always as polished as King’s later writing, but it’s atmospheric and haunting in a way that stuck with me. It’s a short, strange book that hints at vast things to come, and even if it isn’t my favorite King, it makes me want to follow Roland further toward the Tower.