Welcome, once again, to the Book Bonfire! I am your Bonfire host, Tim Wright’s About Things, and today we will discuss the first book of Stephen King’s Dark Tower fantasy series The Gunslinger! I hope you’re ready to sling some guns with the best of ’em, because let me tell you, nobody slings guns quite like <MAIN CHARACTER>. Ol’ What’s-His-Name! Mr. Guns!
The story follows Roland the Gunslinger as he slings his guns across the desert of Gilead, presumably. Not the Handmaid’s Tale Gilead, but close enough. It’s still seems to be a horrible dystopia. Or maybe Roland is originally from Gilead and he’s no longer there? It’s hard to tell. The reader pretty much gets thrown into the world that King created, and it’s hard to trust that he had anything fully fleshed out yet. Or maybe he was too coked up to remember what he was writing about!
The book is broken up into several parts since the story was originally published in the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction over the course of three years. The resultant package is somewhat disjointed. We begin with Roland hunting down the “Man in Black” — Satan, basically — and then find this titular Dark Tower. What he intends to do when he gets to the Dark Tower is unclear at this juncture. It sounds like he sure doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do there either. Perhaps he was tasked with this quest by mysterious pixie elf leprechauns that will kill him if he doesn’t cooperate. From personal experience, I know you can’t kill a leprechaun with a gun.
The narrative is hazy, and, as mentioned, the worldbuilding is abstruse. Several references to “Hey Jude” by the Beatles is mentioned, for example, indicating that the story takes place in our reality. But when Roland meets a kid named Jake, his backstory of getting killed by car in Manhattan implies that perhaps the world is some sort of afterlife. Certainly, Jake doesn’t remember much about his life before getting creamed by a car in the middle of an intersection, but he’ll sometimes drop references and idioms from modern America that Roland doesn’t understand. It’s strange, but compelling enough all the same.
– Roland
Roland meets a man named Brown along his travels, and once Roland trusts that Brown isn’t going to kill him, he opens up about his encounter with the locals in a town called Tull. There was a man named Nort whom the Man in Black brought back to life zombie-style using various black magicks! All this residual magic eventually turns the whole town against him through the mouthpiece of a preacher, who convinces everyone that the Man in Black is an angel of God and Roland is the antichrist. As if they were puppets getting their strings pulled around, they begin to advance on Roland. Roland has no choice but to kill them all, which would be gruesome and emotional if I gave much of a shit.
As Roland plods along with his companion, Jake, he speaks of his past. All these flashbacks are the most interesting parts of the novel, wherein Roland spent his gunslingin’ training at a boarding school. There are stories of a cook named Hex who was hanged for conspiring to murder the children, and how he earned his guns by besting his trainer in a battle. All the stuff around this, such as Roland and Jake meandering around the desert speaking to Oracles and traversing bridges and avoiding “slow mutants”, that stuff is the chaff!
I like the ending, though. Roland does confront the Man in Black (Walter O’Dim, as he is called), which I didn’t expect at all. I thought he was going to be spending eight books walking around the middle of nowhere looking for him without much else going on! The egg is surely on my face today, friends. Roland and Walter have a rather friendly chat indeed! They talk about movies, their favorite sex positions, and Walter pulls out a deck of tarot cards to read Roland his future. Some pivotal stuff happens here that obviously sets up the future parts of the story, but it’s mostly items such as “go here next to meet this guy” and “go here after to meet this woman”. Roland is advised to quit his mission to find the Dark Tower, but Roland is stubborn and doesn’t wanna. That’s why there are 15,000 more pages of this spread across 86 more books! Look it up if you don’t believe me.
BOOK BONFIRE DISCUSSION QUESTIONS!
Is the Man in Black truly evil or is he simply a pawn that had to take part in Roland’s destiny, like Jake or Alice?
For context on this question, Jake sacrificed himself to further Roland’s journey, and Roland had to kill Alice in Tull after he fucked her for a few nights so that he didn’t get dead so that he could further his own journey. That being said, this IS the question, isn’t it? Yes, yes.
– Roland
Destiny is a shitty reason to do anything, in my opinion. There is no such as destiny, man. Destiny is flimsy excuse to act like an asshole and kill people in pursuit of what you think you need to do! Therefore, there’s ambiguity to the good guy/bad guy dichotomy. Is Roland actually good? Is the Man in Black actually evil? These ARE The questions, aren’t they? Yes, yes.
Nothing is ever black and white. Except the Man in Black. And is black evil? Hard to say. He brought a guy back to life in Tull, that was awfully kind of him! But, then again, he’s kind of a jerk!
Next question, please.
If you were Roland, would you have followed the Man in Black to get answers about the Tower and, in doing so, sacrificed Jake’s life? Would you have stayed and saved Jake from death? Explain your decision.
Are you kidding? I barely have motivation enough to get up for work in the morning, let alone be arsed to give two shits about something called the Tower that I know absolutely nothing about. This Roland cat spends, presumably, years tracking down this guy and for no other reason I can fathom than that there’s just nothing else to do. The blighted wastelands are, by all accounts, miserable. There’s barely anyone to talk to, and when you actually do come across somebody you get all worried that they’ll murder you for your pelts or your teeth or your wizard gold. There are no outlets to speak of where you can plug in your Nintendo Switch, and fancy aristocratic balls? Fuhgeddaboudit!
So, to answer this questions simply and pointedly: no. I would not have followed the Man in Black to get answers about the Tower, rendering the follow-up questions moot. It sounds like an awful lot of walking in pursuit of knowledge that doesn’t matter much to me at all! I would have stayed home and continued writing in my blog.
Next question, please.
What kind of a man is Cort? Discuss Roland’s ambivalent feelings about his boyhood teacher.
Aha, Cort. Cort was the man who trained all the young gunslingers at Gunslinger College. I pictured him looking like an old Stacy Keach, which had better not be far off from Stephen King’s vision EVEN THOUGH Stacy Keach wasn’t old yet in 1982!
– Roland
Cort, you see. Cort was an enigma. He was a man of many sides, of many facets. A complex man, that Cort. For example, he was mean and also he was a jerk. His character is limited to those two dispositions.
“DISCUSS ROLAND’S AMBIVALENT FEELINGS ABOUT HIS BOYHOOD TEACHER”? What are you, my boss? I’ll do no such thing, and instead talk about Roland’s ambivalent feelings toward cheating during his challenge against Cort! Break out your well-hated copies of The Gunslinger, friends, and turn to page whatever. Here, during the battle, Roland’s weapon of choice is a bird. A BIRD! He decides it to be a fair fight to sic his pet hawk at Cort’s eyeball, sending him into a coma. And he wins? This is considered a victory, this act of loopholing cowardice. If I were Cort’s direct supervisor, I’d be booting Roland out of school forthwith.
Apparently, Cort didn’t agree. He considered this tactic of slinging birds instead of slinging guns suitable and allowed Roland get his gunslinging diploma. I think it’s bullshit. Try navigating through a real gunslinging job after half-assing your way through college. We’ll see who has the last laugh.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Man, I sure hope that this is all going to be worth it. The Gunslinger is by far the shortest novel in the Dark Tower series and I found it to be a real grind. It’s not lost on me that this was a cobbling of five separate short stories, so King had to weave something coherent here and call it good. The following books shouldn’t suffer from the same problem.
But, pffft, I’m not particularly clamoring for more Dark Tower right now. The main question on my mind is a big, fat “WHO CARES”, which doesn’t bode well! I’ll come upon the next book eventually, but by then I’ll be too busy setting traps in the woods to catch my dinner after the polar ice caps have melted.
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