3/20/21: 5-stars yet again!!! Who's surprised?Now the question is, do I continue to read the entire series and actually read the final book this time? If ka says it is so, it will be.3/15/21: It's been almost a year. I guess I should pick up The Gunslinger again. Why not!?I only have 1,100 other books I want to read. Picking up for the 4th time! 🖤6/3/2020: ALL HAIL THE KING!!!Five mind-blowing stars, again.In contrast to the rest of the books in this series, The Gunslinger, is like the black and...

All I could think throughout this book was… what the hell am I reading?!This western fantasy has to be the most confusing book I’ve read in a long time. Some parts were more interesting than others but overall I was very disappointed. After hearing everyone rave about this series I have a hard time understanding why. I don’t believe it would be this popular if it wasn’t for Stephen King’s name on it. There I said it!I didn’t like the story very much nor the writing.I had been warned that the fir...

INTRODUCTION : A few things you should know before deciding how helpful this review will be for you.………….………….………….*** I think the Dark Tower series as a whole is a staggering achievement and belongs in any discussion without qualification of the “Greatest Fantasy Series of All Time.” *** There are no spoilers in this review but I have read the series twice all the way through and am doing a third reading as part of a group read this month. Therefore, my review is colored by my knowledge

Please don't hate me. I know it seems sacrilegious to give a Stephen King anything less than 4 stars, but this one was SLOOOOWWWW for the first 75%. That's not to say I didn't enjoy it, but I did find this was an easy book to put down and not feel an urgency to jump back into for days at a time. I've heard many folks describe this as a nice prologue to the series and that, in a sense, the action and story doesn't become investment worthy until book 2. That, coupled with the fact that I did becom...

The Gunslinger (The Dark Tower, #1), Stephen KingThe Gunslinger is a novel by American author Stephen King and is the first volume in the Dark Tower series. As Roland travels across the desert in search of the man in black, whom he knows as Walter, he encounters a farmer named Brown and Zoltan, Brown's crow. Roland spends the night there and recalls his time spent in Tull, a small town Roland passed through not long before the start of the novel. The man in black had also stayed in the town; he

صدرت بالعربية اخيرا بعنوان الرجل المسلح Beaware that the movie's following the Ending of the Last Book!!!But in the first book, I suffered the Hard, Dry, Boring read of following a Man in Black you don't know, in a weird hot dry desert in hot August for one reason,To reach a Dark Tower you don't know where..or why..detailed in too much adverbs and ambiguity.That didn't help much to start the following 2 books I already bought...Book one was a true disappointment for me, I never thought it'd b...

My third time reading! I have also read this same part of the story in graphic novels and remember references to it through the rest of the Dark Tower saga. I am definitely looking at this much differently knowing more about what happened before and after this book. I think back to the first time I read it and how I struggled some trying to imagine this fitting into a bigger mythology. Now it all flows much smoother.This is also a part of my rereading all of King’s books in chronological order.

Nothing beats the real Wild West, except a dark fantasy infested badass Kingian character exposition starting one of the best fantasy horror hybrid series of all times. It reminds me of the style of some of his short stories, in fact, it are 5 short stories put together to a short novel and young Kings´ writing was darker, more direct, and epic, different than during his drug years and again different than in the period after when he kind of calmed down (not got old, because he is the King!). On...

ENGLISH (The Gunslinger) / ITALIANOWhen I read this novel more than twenty years ago, I did not appreciate it. Clearly, Roland's story did not charmed enough my distracted and teenage mind. Therefore, I decided to prematurely stop the "The Black Tower" series. A few days ago in a bookstore I stumbled on a copy of the new edition of "The Gunslinger", and reading the preface I understood a couple of things. FIRST: not just myself, but also Stephen King was young when he wrote the same edition of "...

The man in black fled across the desert and the Gunslinger followed. Roland Deschain, the last of the Gunslingers, is on a quest for the Dark Tower, a mysterious edifice that is the axle of worlds and holds all existence together. In this, the first volume, Roland pursues his nemesis across the Mohaine Desert. He follows the man in black's trail to a little town called Tull, then through more desert, encountering a boy named Jake from our world, and then into the mountains. Will Roland finally c...

The best opening line in literature? For me that’s simple. Repeat after me — “The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”When it was first written by a very young Stephen King five decades ago (1970-1982), it was a niche story, a strange vision of harsh postapocalyptic spaghetti Western in the world that has “moved on”, the world that once upon a time was just like ours, but now sandalwood guns and echos of remnants of technology coexist in this world through which a s...

“I don’t like people. They fuck me up.”Roland Deschain, the last of the Gunslingers, is after the Man in Black. Along the way he meets a young boy named Jake, who appears to be from a world that is different to Roland’s.Ah, Roland. I had forgotten how difficult it was to like you in The Gunslinger. Some of your decisions are questionable, but that is the price of obsession.The Gunslinger is so unlike King’s usual style of writing; the prose is beautifully poetic as we are introduced to a world t...

Twelve years in the making, and kicking off the story that would envelop King's career, this was finally released in 1992. When I first read it, I thought it was OK, but had zero interest in the Dark Tower or the following books. It was only on reading it a second time, having now read some of the subsequent books, that I could appreciate this scene setting foundation of this series. On this, my third reading (second reading of this revised version), this book is more like a marker to outline th...

An intriguing book, it draws the reader in little by little. It is fantastic, imaginative ... but inconsistent. Amid moments of brilliance there are also islands of abstraction so murky, almost Kafkaesque in absurdity, that I could not follow. But it is interesting enough that I will probably read the sequels. Of course that is another detraction, this book does not stand alone but leaves the reader with many questions unanswered. Fun questions that lead the reader to seek further, but a work of...

Great world building and atmosphere. Definitely different from anything I've read before. It felt very scattered, like King didn't really have any idea what the next paragraph would hold. I'm sure that probably made it a blast to write, but it could've been better if it wasn't quite so disjointed. The dialogue between characters is Star Wars Episode II level bad, unfortunately. I really enjoyed the world building though, which makes me think that the series may be worth continuing.

The man in black fled across the desert and the Gunslinger followed. That is the line I remembered for years and years that made me think that someday I would revisit THE GUNSLINGER...As a young teenage girl I read THE GUNSLINGER and really didn't like it that much. I didn't hate it- it just confuuuuuused me. And to review this I will have to take you back to when I first read it as a teen...Stephen King is special to me. Special because when I first discovered him- it was the first time I went

My father is currently reading 11/22/63 which I gifted to him on Christmas since he is an admirer of JFK and he once told me he wanted to try King. He is completely mesmerized by King’s writing (rightly so) and I thought it will be a nice idea to tell him about the King’s novel I’ve been reading in the same time. My tentative to explain the plot of Gunslinger went kinda like this: a guy, a Gunslinger, travels through a desolated desert to catch a Man in Black, who is a sort of a sorcerer. The fo...