The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger

The Back-Blogged community fled through the entire Dark Tower series, and the blog creator followed...

Yes, at long last, I've begun Stephen King's magnum opus of a series, the one responsible for more than a dozen Back-Blogged posts, the one that took the guy nearly forty years to write. I'd been warned before I started The Gunslinger that it wasn't a great book and that the series that would follow was so much better. "You can't just skip the first book," I was told (I'm paraphrasing), "but no matter how little you enjoy it, you need to keep going. If you hate the second book too, well, maybe this isn't the series for you." I will indeed keep going - I've got six more Dark Tower books in my backlog, after all - but I've got to thank all those who came before me and gave me the heads up that this book would be a chore to get through.

Because, holy shit, The Gunslinger is awful. There are elements of a story in there somewhere, and I'm sure the rest of the series sort of depends on some of the pieces set in motion here at the beginning, but as a unified stand-alone piece this book just contains so many examples of bad, bad writing. I've got a lot of complaints to get through, and I'm hoping that anyone who has read the series in its entirety - Sween, Marissa, and Trevor - can weigh in and either alleviate my concerns with the way this series has been written (so far) or at least give me a disclaimer that certain areas won't get much better. As I said, I'm committed to this series for the long haul, so there's no need to "sell" the rest of it to me; the more accurately I can adjust my own expectations going forward, the better.

Spoilers will of course follow in the bullet points below.

• The biggest problem with the book, and one that I'll explore in detail here, is that King keeps everything shrouded in way too many layers of mystery. Holding back some key information from the reader for a period of time is fine, but when your story's environment, protagonist, and antagonist are all incredibly vaguely defined, there's nothing left for the reader to latch onto. About a hundred pages into the book, for instance, Roland meets a young boy named Jake, who immediately recounts his own gruesome death as he was run over by a car in the middle of a city. [Record scratch!] What? To this point in the story, there'd been no indication that this was a world in which people who had "already died" could come to exist. What's more, Roland isn't taken aback at all by this, and just seems to accept both the idea that Jake has already died and the story that comes with it. As a reader, I just felt the rug being completely yanked out from underneath me here; this world had been presented as sort of a run-down dystopian version of our own, but suddenly it was brought to my attention that A) dead people reappear here and B) other people here just kind of accept that. I want to be clear here; I'm not upset that King is using elements of fantasy here, and I'm not merely saying that this death-and-afterlife thing doesn't make sense. What I'm saying is that this shit happens without any prior indication that this shit was capable of happening. Because of this, I've lost any possible "human" connection to Roland and Jake and anyone else going forward (for the time being). If Jake has already died, why can't he die again? Why can't Roland? What are the fucking stakes here, if the ultimate fate for real human beings - death - is no longer on the table?
• As a rule of thumb, when you're writing a story, you're supposed to "show; don't tell." Don't just "tell" me that Roland suddenly comes to love the young boy Jake; "show" me why. Develop their relationship beyond a series of strained silences as they trek through the desert together. King opts not to do this at all, and instead just kind of drops it in at some point that the gunslinger realizes he loves Jake. This is lazy writing, period.
• Furthermore, don't just tell me that Roland is pursuing a "man in black." Tell me why. It's not enough to just keep Roland's motivations hidden and chalk it up to mystery. Roland is the protagonist, after all, and King is constantly giving us information from his perspective along the lines of "Roland knew the man wasn't lying" or "Roland realized he loved the boy." If you're going to give readers access to a character's thoughts, you have to also give them access to his motivations. For reasons already mentioned, I found it tough to connect with Roland as a human character, and I sure as hell found it tough to care about his quest to find the man in black based solely on the limited information given to me: that Roland was pursuing the man in black.
• It is foreshadowed by an oracle/succubus that Jake will have to die in order for Roland to catch the man in black. Later on, Jake himself seems to somehow come to understand that Roland intends to betray him. Yet the two press onward, as if on some kind of rail shooter, seemingly incapable of second-guessing what might happen. When Jake finally does die, there's no emotional eight to it; it's been foretold, it's been accepted by Jake himself, and, again, Jake has already died once. If King had removed the bit about Jake's first death and the part where the oracle specifically spoils this plot piece, then perhaps Jake's death - which should have been the emotional climax of the book - would have resonated somewhere in my soul. Instead, my reaction was more like, "Good. Now we can move on to components of the story I don't already know will happen.
• Let's go back to Jake just kind of understanding, implicitly, that he's going to die. This is one example of a pattern King would revisit dozens of times that absolutely infuriated me as a reader and made me assume he was just disrespecting the intelligence of me and everybody else. Throughout this book, characters just say, do, or come to understand things for no discernible reason. The number of sentences that began with phrases like, "Something outside of Roland compelled him to..." or, "It was unclear to Roland why he knew..." was mind-bogglingly high. Just awful, awful writing here; King's characters are doing what King wants them to do rather than what they themselves as decision-making human beings with distinct personalities would do. King's characters are also capable of knowing things - and being certain about these things - just out of the fucking blue. It's one thing to be vague about character behavior, and it's another thing entirely to explicitly call out that the characters in your story are doing and realizing things for no fucking reason. (Please tell me this much gets better in the later stories, guys.)
• Actually, let's go back to the very first chapter in the story, before Roland meets Jake. We're told via flashback about Roland's time in a town called "Tull," and how the man in black laid a trap for him there in the form of brainwashing dozens of the town's residents into attacking Roland. Roland proceeds to gun every last person down, massacring the entire town's population. This is not, generally speaking, what "good guys" do. Already, just a few dozen pages into the book, I'm beginning to think I have no reason to root for Roland. And that'd be fine if he was a well-defined character, perhaps an anti-hero, a man who did what he did for his own reasons, but he isn't. He's a husk of a character, emptier than an ill-defined background character in most novels, simply shrouded in mystery because King thought that'd be such a cool way to make his lead character a badass. Worst of all, the reader clearly isn't meant to question Roland's actions because the man in black is described as things like "pure evil in its simplest form." (Again highlighting King's propensity here to "tell" and not to "show.")
• These flashbacks in general destroyed what little semblance of flow The Gunslinger had. King would frequently spend a chapter section or two revealing an episode from earlier in Roland's life, like when he watched a man get hanged, or when he passed his trials and became a certified gunslinger. I'll admit these flashbacks offered character insight that simply wasn't going to be given in the present tense, but they also left me confused at times about what was going on, particularly because King had a fetish for replacing character names with improper nouns throughout the book; Jake was simply "the boy" for the most part, and Roland "the gunslinger," but during various flashbacks to Roland's youth, there were other "boys" and "gunslingers." Use the fucking names you've given your fucking characters!
• Lastly, the man in black and his motivations are just completely left unexplored. Early on, he's setting traps for Roland; later, he's slowing down on purpose to allow Roland to catch up with him; Jake seems to think he's the man who killed him the first time around; and when Roland finally catches up with the man in black, he just reads him a bunch of tarot cards, foreshadowing what I can only assume will be plot elements from the next several books. He then claims he is merely a pawn of Roland's true enemy, who resides in the Dark Tower. Oh, and he was also the guy seducing Roland's mother for a while. But Roland didn't know this! This therefore cannot explain what has led Roland to hunt down the man in black in the first place. God, no one in this shitty book does anything for any apparent reason, which is just as well since in the very world depicted in the book there's no such thing as death as we the readers know it.

Ultimately, more than anything else, after slogging through three-hundred pages of The Gunslinger, I'm left wondering what the hell the point of any of it was. None of the characters in it were interesting and none of their actions even felt like legitimate things real people would do. It wasn't entirely terrible; there were some interesting elements involved, particularly toward the end of the story, and I'll even give King credit for greatly illustrating how hard it would be for human beings with finite minds to comprehend infinity, or even worlds unlike our own. (Think of a fish in a lake, who knows nothing but the lake, suddenly being pulled out of the lake by a fisherman, right through the silvery threshold of the lake's surface. Suddenly everything he's experiencing is new, right down to the way air feels, and isn't his mind just blown?) And no one can argue that King doesn't know to write realistic dialogue. Unfortunately, nearly everything else here was a total mess, and I'm left wondering if I've ever read a novel as sloppy and amateurish as this one. Like, honestly, I'm not even being dramatic for the sake of it here; this book was just awful for so many reasons, and I can only hope people aren't exaggerating how much better The Dark Tower gets going forward.