The Gunslinger Series
The Gunslinger
The Drawing of the Three
The Waste LandsWizard and GlassThe Gunslinger SeriesThe GunslingerThe Drawing of the ThreeThe Waste LandsWizard and GlassThe Stand (The Long Version)
It
For some reason, I have always avoided Stephen
King - I think probably in large part due to the overwhelming popularity of
his books and also because I read one of King's other attempts at fantasy in
high school - The Eyes of the Dragon - and wasn't very enthused. I was
later encouraged to try a couple of his other, more famous books, and I thought
both It and The Stand were tremendous (and I by that I mean good
and not just large, although both are that as well). His characters are generally
very vivid, and the plots are interesting and generally highly engaging. The
Gunslinger books - a series he has added to over a span of decades - are all
extremely popular and, as it turns out, highly entertaining fantasy.
In this series, King uses his popular writing style to draw together two of my favorite forms of light entertainment: fantasy and westerns. The title character of the series - The Gunslinger - is a man Roland, and is one of the last remnants of a culture that is a blending of an Arthurian medieval world with the wild west. The world that Roland inhabits is seemingly on the fringes of reality, and there are bleeds from our world into his and vice versa. This series also draws in a lot of what has come to be identified as "The Steven King Mythos", with the occasional wandering into another of his worlds, and appearances from a character that may or not be another face of The Walkin' Dude, of great import in The Stand. The books themselves are King's telling of the backstory to Robert Browning's poem "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" (here is a site with the text of that poem, if you're interested...).
The first book is of a very different style than the later three - much more surreal in some ways, where the other three are more traditional adventure stories. I found it a bit difficult to get into the first time I read it - it is very different from King's normal style of writing - but it was still an excellent book. I'd like to go back and reread it, as I think I would enjoy it more now that I know what to expect. It tells the early story of Roland, and his encounter with the boy Jake, as he pursues The Man in Black - a foe from his past - and the mysterious Dark Tower. This book feels like a book that was written such that it might not have a sequel, and is much more self-contained than the other three books, which are all obviously part of a series.
The Drawing of the Three picks up immediately after the The Gunslinger (although it was written years later) and tells the tale of Roland's retrieval of companions from our world to help him in his pursuit of the Dark Tower. This book has a lot of switching between our world (or at least King's version of it) and Roland's world, which yields an odd pacing to the book, but it makes for quite a driving story overall (with King's typically strong characters). The Waste Lands is mostly the story of the companions moving on in their quest for the Dark Tower, and is largely an adventure story set in the apocalyptic world that Roland inhabits - a world that is seemingly on the edge of reality and slowly falling apart. This book was probably my favorite of the series so far, particularly towards the end of the book. The interplay between the characters was good, and there are some really creepy moments towards the end.
Wizard and Glass is kind of a departure (for reasons other than being the only book not to start with the word "the") - the first part of the book is the resolution of book three, while the second part is mostly a telling of some of Roland's back story. This is a much more traditional story - almost more of a western with surreal overtones than a fantasy book. I enjoyed it quite a bit, but not as much as either The Waste Lands or The Drawing of the Three, at least once the trademarked Bjron-euphoria wore off.
These aren't particularly deep books, but they do make for a very enjoyable adventure story. The mix of science fiction and fantasy lends a nice surreal feeling to the story, and there are some genuinely frightening moments in the traditional King style. In some ways, these books have the same appeal to me that the Split Infinity books did, but are much better written. A good read, and a good introduction to Stephen King from the fantasy direction rather than the horror direction.
