Devil-grass, Revolvers, and the Dark Tower: “The Gunslinger” by Stephen King: Review

A mix of fantasy and western motifs, The Gunslinger is set in Mid-World, a future dystopia which vaguely resembles the Old American West, except that technology has largely been forgotten. A rusted gas pump bearing the name Amoco is worshipped as a totem of a thunder-god. Highways and train tracks lay in disuse, obscured by devil-grass, sand, and the ruin of time. Guns are rare weapons.

The story begins with the last gunslinger Roland of Gilead following the Man in Black into the Mohaine Desert. It is just the first of many lush passages which make this book such an enjoyable read.

Stare Down the Barrel: “The Gunslinger” by Stephen King: Preview

The Gunslinger is a remarkable story for many reasons. Not only is it one of King’s earliest works, begun in 1970 when he was a 19 year-old sophomore at University of Maine, it is one of only two that he would revise later in his career — The Stand is the other.

Originally serialized as five short stories in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction from 1978 to 1981, The Gunslinger was finally published as a book in 1982, the first of seven in the Dark Tower cycle. Twenty-one years later, King substantially revised it, adding about 35 pages, an introduction and foreword.

Feeling that it suffered from an overuse of adverbs and was a difficult start for new readers, King worked to improve the storytelling and resolve continuity errors introduced in later books. “The Gunslinger had been written by a very young man,” King remarks in the foreword, “and had all the problems of a very young man’s book.” You can find a list of the revisions here.