A Novel Critique: 2003 Version

The Gunslinger [Revised and Expanded], by Stephen King

When I was fifteen years old (over a decade ago now, how the world does move on), I received The Gunslinger as a Christmas gift. Fifteen was my King turning point, the year I graduated from fan to fanatic. That Christmas also brought in The Stand and Four Past Midnight – my first two hardcover books – plus Christine, and Danse Macabre in paperback. During that tender age, I was progressing out of the concept that I would only read the King books whose subject matters appealed to me via a quick glance at the blurb on the back. No, I wanted to read everything by King, and right now, please.

So it was with great aplomb and anticipation that I picked up The Gunslinger (after, of course, reading those two hardcovers and tumbling deeper into my King obsession.) I’d been reading King with increasing excitement for three years, and here was yet another world I was going to get lost in, another world I was going to fall in love with.

Can you guess what happened?

That’s right, I couldn’t get into it.

Now, let’s just review my King history a moment. I read Cycle of the Werewolf and Creepshow when I was nine. Progressed to Pet Sematary and Night Shift and Rage and actually journeyed into the lands of It before I was fourteen. I read The Stand – the big one! – and gulped up every page. And yet … and yet, the world of The Gunslinger eluded me.

Yes, I’m one of those people.

Because of my completist’s personality, the fact that I’d never finished The Gunslinger (I gave up halfway between The Way Station and the mountains) gnawed at me, in that tender squishy part in the back of my mind. Eventually, I broke down and went the business-traveler’s route: I bought the audio book. I saw an advantage here: one, it was King himself reading it, and at that point in my life, anything King said or did was gospel. Two, I was having a story read to me, and there’s always something comforting in that. Listening to a book taps into that small, tired child in all of us who want Mom to read us just one last story before heading into the Land of Nod.

Well, the ploy worked … but barely. The masterful tone King eventually took on when reading his stories on tape (the one he employs so well in Bag of Bones and the unexpurgated Desperation) had not yet been fully formed. King is certainly having fun with his reading, but he’s not quite an expert yet. Plus, the story remained (for me, at least), as dry and arid as the Mohaine Desert. I got through it, but I fought through it.

What amazements, then, when I tentatively put in the first cassette of The Drawing of the Three, expecting more of the same … and getting far, far better.

The story continues in more detail elsewhere: I listened to, then read, both The Drawing of the Three and The Wastelands, and was among the first in the world to get my hands on Wizard and Glass the day it came out. I thrilled at the Dark Tower connections I stumbled across in Insomnia and Hearts in Atlantis and Black House. I became the guy who, when getting Bag of Bones signed in Cambridge, asked Stephen King probably his most hated question: “When’s the next Dark Tower book coming out?”

And still. And still: The Gunslinger remained The Great Unloved. I’d listened to it. Liked it to the degree that it started a story I was enthralled by. When I tell people about The Dark Tower series, I always urge them to start with Drawing. The gaps will fill in themselves.

Yeah. I’m one of those people.

So when King announced that, in anticipation of Wolves of the Calla, he would be re-releasing The Gunslinger in a revised, expanded version … well, my heart kind of leapt, fannish as that sounds. He explained in interviews that he was doing this, actually, for people like me: to give folks more of an easy in. There were a lot of people – fan people – who had not read the Tower books specifically because the first book was so obtuse. King was going to help us out in that respect. Not only that, but he was going to expand the text. Not as extensively as he’d done in The Stand, of course, but he’d definitely be doing some retouching: lengthening some scenes, trimming others, and then glossing it all over by connecting it more fully with the remainder of the series. No longer would The Gunslinger be the odd man out, so to speak. It would be a fully integrated, fully functioning member of the Dark Tower family.

Now the big question is: does the book itself live up to the hype? Gods, yes.

The second I opened the book, I became that scared fifteen-year-old again: a little frightened that I would again be unable to delve into a book by my favorite writer (when you’re a book nerd like me, this is an actual fear.) King assuaged that fear right off the bat, by doing one of the things King does best: talking about his own work. Whether it’s the afterward to Different Seasons or “Why I Was Bachman” or the book-length look into the life of the mind, On Writing, King has never been short of fascinating when discussing the whys and hows of his fiction. (To those asking that oft-repeated dullard’s question “Where do you get your ideas?” look no further than here.) At the opening of The Gunslinger, King has inserted both an introduction (“On Being Nineteen”), explaining his influences and thought processes surrounding the initial set of stories involving our favorite gunslinger, and a Foreword, discussing why he’s decided to “fix” The Gunslinger. To read these short essays is to remember why you came to King in the first place: entertainment of the highest order. Turn to chapter one, and you’re faced with that epic first sentence: The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.

From there: well, magic.

King has taken his own On Writing advice and removed many unnecessary adverbs (oh, how King hates adverbs. Recently, in a favorable review of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, King took JK Rowling to the woodshed for her adverb abuse.) He’s moved sentences around so that they flow better. Plotlines that never went anywhere are gone. And, best of all, there are some new scenes. One in particular, involving the town of Tull and the massacre that takes place there, not only manages to present Roland the gunslinger in a far more favorable light (trust me, it’s not a cop-out), but also deepens the mystery of The Dark Tower. Suddenly, there’s a new morsel to chew on; the mysterious appearance of the number nineteen (which also prefigures the text of The Gunslinger. After a new epigram from Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel, we turn the page to see the numeral 19; opposite is a single word: “RESUMPTION.” King seems to be continuing this trend with the remaining books in the series as well, with the re-release of Drawing of the Three featuring the 19 as well as the word “RENEWAL,” etc.) One can only wonder how this will work into the final three volumes, and if the title of King’s introduction, “On Being Nineteen,” might not just be a sly clue.

Some readers have taken to the re-release of The Gunslinger unfavorably. Dark Tower expert Anthony Schwethelm believes that the original was wonderful just as it was, and retooling the work was unnecessary. Undoubtedly, most Dark Tower purists will agree: the first incarnation of The Gunslinger was the one they fell in love with, and the one that they will continue to think of as the “true” version.

For the rest of us, there’s a brand-new Stephen King book out there for longtime fans and newcomers alike to get lost in; a door, if you will, into a brand-new landscape. My advice: shake a mile. That desert’s long … and you won’t believe what’s on the other side.

A Novel Critique: 1982 Version

The Gunslinger [Original Text]

Warning! Spoilers abound!

The first novel in a proposed series of six or seven, The Gunslinger starts off stark and desperate, immediately thrusting the reader into a world which is quite unrecognizble ... and oddly familiar. It begins with the simple, ominous sentance: "The man in black fled across the desrt, and the gunslinger followed." Who are these two creatures, the dark man and the gunslinger? What is their purpose?

So begins King's longest and most complex tale to date.

The gunslinger is named Roland, the last in a long line of noble gunslingers, whose purpose at the offset of this novel is only to catch the dark man. Roland's world has, as the ubiquitous saying goes, "moved on," and there is but a husk left of what was once a great world. We know very little of the wars and other circumstances which brought about this moving on, but for now it doesn't matter. Suffice it to say Roland's is a dead world, a bleak world, but a world with some beauty edging around the fringes.

As we live with the gunslinger, we learn about him. At first, he seems an unlovable man, a cold man. A sequence set in the city of Tull, where religious mania and cowardice preclude Roland's violent showdown, we begin to get a sense of the man. Nothing can stand between him and the man in black, who (we assume) is a key to Roland's larger quest, one for The Dark Tower.

But then, at a way station in the middle of a desert, Roland meets a young boy named Jake. He comes to love the boy, and make Jake his companion on the quest. He knows his love for the boy is a weakening device used by the dark man, but he isn't able to stop it from happening. Roland is a great believer in fate and destiny, and if his love for Jake bring them both ruin, than it must be fated.

Later, after a scary sequence involving creatures known as slow mutants, Jake and Roland find themselves on a train trestle, high above a black abyss. At a critical moment, the gunslinger must choose between letting the boy drop and finally catching the dark man. Though it agonizes him, he watches the boy fall, Jake's last words echoing in his ears: "Go, then. There are other worlds than these."

Roland finally reaches the dark man at the edge of a long beach. After giving Roland a vision that almost -- but not quite -- explains the cosmos, the dark man reads Roland's future with a deck of tarot cards. "Three is the number of your fate," he intones, and these three he draws:

a card showing a man with a baboon whipping his back: The Prisoner. A card showing a woman with two faces: The Lady of Shadows. And one showing Death: "But not for you, gunslinger."

The novel ends with Roland falling asleep by the edge of the water, awaiting his fate.

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Personal Observances

The only King novel I've ever had trouble getting into was The Gunslinger. I'm glad I kept trying, because the book itself is quite worthy, if not exactly to my liking. I found, upon reading of volumes two and three of the series, that so much depends upon this first book. The Oracle's prophecy, the dark man's vision, the sacrificial child who becomes increasingly important as the series grows. I guess I didn't like it at first because of the sparse writing, so different than the rich, textured feel of most of King's novels. I also wasn't too fond of the lone gunslinger, but (again) as the series goes on, it's so intriguing to watch this obsessed man change and develop further. One needs a starting point, and the cold, single-minded man that Roland is at the outset is a noble one. Still, we're glad when we watch him gradually change, and begin to love more than just his Dark Tower.

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Audio Adaption

Stephen King reads this adaption, and it's quite interesting. Before this, King had never done a spoken-word book in his life, so it's neat to see how he begins. It's a nervous start, a little shaky and a little unsure. But when King warms to his own story, it goes very smoothly. By The Drawing of the Three, King had perfected his reading voice, but this, like the novel itself, is an interesting starting point.

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Limited Edition Information

The Gunslinger was originally released by Donald M. Grant without any intention of publishing a trade copy. Then, when the harcover Pet Sematary, with The Gunslinger listed on the ALSO BY STEPHEN KING page, the fans clamored. They wanted this book. King reluctantly authorized a second printing, and then a trade paperback printing. First and second printings of The Gunslinger now command upward of $500 on the secondary market. It's one of the ones I don't have. :(

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