Bang. |
To summarize The Dark Tower in a post like this would be impossible. You'd need a massive project, kind of like the Sailor Moon one, to even scratch the surface of what King did with these. We're going to try to ignore all of that. The Gunslinger is a very special book to me, and I'm doing my absolute best to cast myself back to being 18 in that dorm room and devouring it, letting it all sink in. Like The Dead Zone, it's a series of disjointed and self-contained vignettes as the gunslinger travels across the desert, recanting hardships or encountering new and mysterious folks. This makes sense because each of the parts were put out in magazines as separate short stories. It's an anecdotal form of storytelling, but one that makes things interesting and incomplete. We don't know a lot, and we drift back and forth between perspective. Time is wonky here in the desert, because the world has moved on. What the hell does that mean? Entropy? Something like that. I think what most drew me to this was the prophetic sense of it. Its vagueness hints and teases at things and mysteries to come, and this is only emboldened by King actively going back and changing things to both mesh with the later books, and foreshadow them. The mystery of the number 19, for one, is added into the proceedings. The fact that he only revised this book, and the 19 thing only comes in the final three, means that the number's important at first before it fades away, only to come back up again. Similar are the prophecies given by the succubus at the mid-point of the book. "Three is the number of your fate" is a phrase that gave me chills in 2003, and it lit a fire inside of me. I wanted more. Needed more. I dove headlong into the Dark Tower series, then and there, and a year later in that dorm room I brought home the last two books. I finished the saga.
This post ended up being more of a biography of myself than any review. The Gunslinger is a very good book and you should check it out. Hell, the whole Dark Tower series is a bit of a master stroke for King. I had my tinkerings and my own ideas, of course. I got to work on this whole writing thing myself. My early fiction was clunky. Hell, I think my current fiction is kind of clunky... but I just adore expressing the ideas and making up wild shit. Making an epic that spans generations. Telling a story. You all reading this will know me more for the nonfiction blogging, of course, but that comes about from hacking away at fiction words. I've drawn the beam that led me to where I am. Magical girls. Psychic powers. Gunslingers following across endless desert. There's only one thing left to do. I need to go back to the Tower. Not to the whole series, as that's a project I don't feel qualified for, even now. Look at how I've avoided talking about the book, for instance. No. I need to go deeper.
I need to watch the movie.
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