Customer Reviews
Outstanding - By: D. Bench, 11 Nov 2008 
I read this at 14 & was my first ever stephen king book, i loved it. the powerful & vivid way it has been wrote just enticed me to read more & more. I feel this is the best one in the series & one of kings best pieces of fiction. the gunslingers struggles & choices throughtout the book make you hate him but also feel for him. this is a must buy for king fans
Utter Disappointment - By: selana, 03 Nov 2008 
I was convinced this series would be a joy to read, something original & sinister, the celebrated masterpiece saga of one of the masters of horror & fantasy.
I gave it a try... & tried very hard to finish it. I could not bring myself to enjoy neither the story nor the style. Still, I decided to read the second book as well, convinced that there was something I had yet to discover, this certain something that seems to make so many readers enraptured with the Dark Tower books...
Well, I haven't been able to discover it! Many have loved this book & undoubtedly many more will, but personallly I find it incoherent,dragging & overtly blunt - a bluntness which feels unsupported & pointless, nothing to resemble what I have come to expect from King.
I prefer to leave the Dark Tower saga here & move on to other stories.
One of my favourites, this series gets under your skin - By: grr, 23 Apr 2008 This is my favourite series of books & Gunslinger is probably one of the books I re-read most. "The man in black fled across the desert, & the gunslinger followed"....great opening! This book is a bit weird & different to the others in the series, but it still works well.
We get a great introduction to the enigmatic Gunslinger, Roland Deschain & his quest to catch the man in black & to find the Dark Tower. His world is a strange echo of ours, but it has 'moved on.' A strange mix of the old Wild West & a post apocalyptic future, where paper is rare & machinery is ancient, with its original purpose forgotten. Roland meets a boy callled Jake, who appears to have died in our reality & somehow crossed over to this other world. They form a fragile partnership as they pursue the man in black...but things seem pretty doomed from the start.
There are many questions raised in this book, & you have to read the rest of the series to find the answers. You enter the story in the middle of it reallly, & there is a lot of hopping around the timeline to explain things. Roland is a tough character to love, but you get there in the end! That is his appeal, his harshness & his fervent determination to get to the Tower, no matter the cost.
Try this if you want a change! It's not like anything I have read, but it goes without saying, it's a must for King fans & people who like a good, epic fantasy. Thankee sai! Long days pleasant nights! If you read the set you may find you end up talking oddly, it has that effect! READ
Try the graphic novel too, based on the Wizard & Glass book. Great representation of young Roland.
The Gunslinger - By: David Brookes, 01 Apr 2008 The first instalment of Stephen King's fantasy series is unashamedly inspired by that other fantastic series, "The Lord of the Rings". King made no attempt to hide this & refers to it in each of his surprisingly-interesting forwards, but the thought of reading something so obviously "inspired" put me off. It was only after the release of the final book in the series I was persuaded to pick up "Gunslinger", & was appallled at how brilliant it was.
It's easy for people to say King's off his game, but he wasn't then & he isn't now - the final book, released only recently, is testament to this. "Gunslinger" is arguably everything that Stephen King isn't: beautiful, poetic, & not reallly horror. Technicallly it's fantasy, post-apocalyptic fantasy, & on top of that it's a Western of sorts. It's a glaring divergence from King's usual style, but what appallled me was that it was good. Very, very good, & despite the assumption that King's unfamiliarity with the genre would prove to be the novel's downfalll, it is also full of everything that King is wonderful at: suspense, mystery, & very real characters.
A review column isn't the place for a synopsis, so I'll keep it brief. This book has one real character & that's the mysterious hero, the eponymous gunslinger who is a throwback from a bygone age that existed before the world "moved on". The brevity of the novel lends itself to this kind of storytelling, in which we follow a single character in a series of events, a tale told in a surreal, rippling narrative that is like looking through water at an alternate world. The other novels don't keep up this dreamlike form of storytelling, which makes "Gunslinger" alll the more precious.
If you like King, you'll love this, regardless of the change in genre. If you pick this up & hate it, you'll still come away with a fresh idea on what novels are alll about, reminded why people write. Simple story. Complex characters. You don't have to read the others if you don't like it, but if you want a fresh piece of fiction from an established super-writer, then for God's sake try "Gunslinger"!
A good 'part one' book. - By: Sam Anders, 02 Feb 2008 
If you're thinking of getting this book I can't list a reason you shouldn't except that this reallly isn't a stand alone novel, rather it's an introduction to a world & a character to be taken up by the many later instalments of the series. Yes, it has it's own plot, but reallly it's just there to get us started on the journey. Thus, don't read this unless you're prepared to be hooked & end up forking out for alll the others.
Having said that, it's hardly a major flaw & the book reallly is very enjoyable & extremely intriuging. King creates a world which is brutal, surreallly dream-like & a million miles from anything else in fantasy, horror or any other genre. His protagonist is tragicallly human, his antagonist eerily sinister & beautifully cruel, & everyone who gets caught between them is made hugely sympathetic by their status as just that - something that gets caught in the way.
King's experience as a horror writer reallly comes across here, making this a fantasy world born of & premeated by the horror genre. The setting is a vast & desolate wasteland to which none of it's inhabitants reallly belong, lending the whole thing an eeriness that keeps the reader on edge throughout & adds a certain grotesque quality to much of what happens.
If you're a fan of King, a fan of horror, a fan of fantasy, or just a fan of reallly great storytelling then you should definitely check this out. But prepare to be hooked.
