The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger

Stephen King gets rave reviews, and sells books by the truck load, but I just don't get his works. I thought at first it was because he's mostly famous for horror (not a favourite genre of mine), but even reading his works outside of that fall flat for me.

This is the first Stephen King story I've ever tried to read, so I don't know if that was a mistake or not, but I found the narrative somewhat messy until the later half of the book. This may or may not have been intentional, but it does seem worth mentioning.

My real issue though is the degree to which misogynistic descriptions and uses of women are so prevalent throughout the story. Product of its time and whatever, but it was still an unexpected and rather unwelcome surprise. I commented about this elsewhere, but this book has really strong "the woman's boobs boobed boobily" energy in addition to lesions of sexual assault, etc. Not great honestly.

That being said, the last third of the book kept me interested enough that I do want to keep reading and find out where Roland goes next. Less misogyny would be great, but I'm not keeping my hopes up.

I definitely enjoyed this book, but it is also definitely the start of a saga. Throughout the whole novel there's so, so many hints of a larger world, and bursts of rapid-fire world building. The world King is creating is strange and intriguing enough that I want to continue with this series just to see how deep the rabbit hole goes. There are also a fair few Stephen King-isms in here, to be sure, though I'm told not as many as the later entries. Really, it's a matter of how much you can tolerate the particular style. I'm writing this a long time after I read it so I apologize for the vagueness.

People say this is a good book and series but I can't agree to that. It's just chaotic and doesn't make any sense, the writing seems overly dramatic and "flowery", meaning he describes things so weird, with weird details and weird metaphors. I couldn't even read it to the end and stopped at like 80 or 90%. I have no interest in reading the other novels in the series, it's just not my type of writing I guess. I never liked any Stephen King books until this one and I read a bunch now. It's not getting any better, maybe I should just give up on trying to like his writing.

well... as much as i usually enjoy the way king can tell a story... i am totally disappointed by the gunslinger: the world just did not come alive. it's like several well-formed characters just occupied part of some formless void. so unlike king =( most probably i'll just skip the series to save time for something more interesting.