Search - The Gunslinger (The Dark Tower, Book 1)

The first novel of the series, now expanded and revised by the author. Roland Filead is the last gunslinger, a haunting figure, a loner on a spellbinding journey into good and evil. His desolate world frighteningly mirrors our own, and the novel is both grippingly realistic and eerily dreamlike.
-from back cover

An entirely different style than King's other novels. He wrote this series over decades and I consider it to be one of his greatest works.

The first book in stephen kings best series!

Although I'm a Stephen King fan, I didn't like this book at all. Admittedly, I'm not keen on either fantasy or western genres and The Gunslinger is both, but a friend recommended it and I thought I'd like it anyway.

The book is an early Stephen King work, and though he did some rewriting before this publication, it doesn't have the literary mastery of many of his later novels. I also found it hard to get past some of the language used, words and phrases indicative of a world different than our own. They only distracted me from the story. Roland was mostly an unsympathetic protagonist and I found him difficult to relate to or care about. He and the other characters fell flat.

Reading The Gunslinger felt like the title character's quest across the desert - slow, dry, and without much to sustain my interest. I collapsed, parched and exhausted, halfway through and didn't make it the rest of the way.