(Heads up: there are going to be some spoilers in here for the ending of The Dark Tower series. It's been 22 years now, but I guess just, beware spoilers. I don't think I'm going to do a cut here.)
One day when I was 17, I went to get a haircut at my regular barbershop the next town over. My mom drove me, as I didn't get a license until the summer before college, and as was her wont, we hung out in the bookstore around the corner from the shop after I was shorn.
There, I found myself enticed by the cover of The Dark Tower's second volume, the Drawing of the Three, its mysterious standing doorways capturing my curiosity. I had never read any Stephen King before, but decided to pick up the first book, the Gunslinger, along with George Orwell's 1984, which seemed a book I ought to read but to this day have never gotten around to (sadly, if anything, it feels even more relevant today).
The beginning of this insane epic full of time travel and journeying between alternate universes, is narrower in focus and brutally dark. The darkness of its opening, of course, was profoundly compelling to a teenager, for whom darkness can often feel revelatory. King wrote this when he was quite young as well - he began writing it in 1970, though it would first see print as five separate stories published in the late 70s and early 80s, when King had already established himself with novels like Carrie, 'Salem's Lot, and The Shining.
The version I read was published in 2003, and was a revision of the original 1982 complete trade paperback version, adding in edits that linked more closely with the books that King had written since, including the as-yet-unpublished final three books. I think the intent had been to do revisions to books 2, 3, and 4, but I'm not aware of his actually doing this.
Having never read the 1982 version, I can't be sure which details changed, but I have strong suspicions, like the mention of a maddened Taheen trying to get back to Algul Siento, or the strange sense of deja vu that Roland experiences in these early moments of his tale (more on that in a bit).
I've been reading the now-yellowed pages of the very same book I read in high school, which, along with the others, has a proud place on my bookshelf (my copy of Wizard and Glass is on an extended stay at a friend's house; we'll see if she ever starts reading it again). Strange, of course, to think that the year I read it was closer to the book's original publication than it is now to the time I first read it. I remember finding yellow-paged books from the 60s and 70s as a kid, and now the very ones I bought new are aged in the same way.
Anyway, there's an odd kind of nested narrative in the early part of The Gunslinger. We begin with Roland (not yet named) chasing the Man in Black across the desert, alone in the wilderness, on his desperate, grim hunt.
Given where the final book of the series (not counting the Wind Through the Keyhole) ends, it would seem that any earlier events ought to exist prior to Roland's endless cycle. And yet, Roland seems to be experiencing deja vu in those prior events, before he even enters "the apotheosis of all deserts." I'm not sure if this is an error, or perhaps the subconscious knowledge of the loop entering even his reminiscences.
Anyway, the point is that we start off going backwards, an element that is present in this first part of book one but not really a thing at all until the very end of the saga.
Roland shares a meal with a man named Brown, a lonesome "dweller" out on the fringes of what little society is left in that part of the world, who seems to just be a kind guy willing to share his water and cook up a meal for a traveler. There, at Brown's coaxing (though Roland seems to need to tell his story anyway,) the Gunslinger tells him the story of how he killed off every man, woman, and child in the village of Tull.
Roland stops in this miserable little town - a misery that seems to be just about as good as one can get in the dreadful world he inhabits - and discovers that his quarry, the Man in Black, has passed through. Shacking up with the tavern keeper, a tragically trapped, aging woman named Alice, he finds out from her, in the inner-most Matryoshka doll of this story, that the local drunk and weed-addict (Devil's Grass, which sounds like just marijuana but seems like its effects are closer to crystal meth) died, only for the Man in Black to show up and resurrect him. But Nort, the dark Lazarus of Tull, is still an addict, lamenting that the man could have raised him free and clear of his addictions, but chose not to.
Because the Man in Black, Walter O'Dim, and as we'll learn later, also Randall Flagg (among myriad other names) is an absolute douchebag.
Out of either pure spite or just a desire to put another complication in Roland's way, he gives Alice a code-word (the word is Nineteen, a number that becomes a recurring sign whose meaning is still very much up to interpretation) that will cause Nort to tell her what he saw in the land of the dead, things so terrible that she will beg for death when she finds out (and, sadly, she does).
Reading this the first time, I had really imagined that Roland's world was truly separate from our own, and that its post-apocalypse was one of a separate history. Revisiting it, though, it seems clearly implied that All-World is a post-apocalyptic future of our own world, or at least one nearly indistinguishable from ours (later on, we'll discover that the world that Jake, Susannah, and Eddie are from is not technically ours/Stephen King's, because of a couple of differences, like Eddie's version of Co-Op City is in Brooklyn, rather than the Bronx. I think that King merely got the detail wrong, but ran with this idea). But I also think that trying to find where Tull would be found on a map is probably impossible, as the breakdown of reality is implied to also make consistent maps kind of impossible. I'd guess it's meant to be somewhere in the former United States, but that's so very long ago (Roland's fallen kingdom of Gilead itself rose from the ashes of the previous civilization).
Anyway, Roland is at his worst in this book - truly an antihero, dedicated to his quest above all else. He muses at murdering Brown merely because of the possibility that he's somehow some kind of trap laid for him by the Man in Black, though he at least catches himself and realizes that this would make him just as monstrous as his quarry.
But boy, this shit gets dark.
He comes to Tull following the Man in Black's trail, and while he gets the story about Nort, he also finds out that a charismatic fire-and-brimstone preacher named Sylvia Pittston took over the local church after the previous preacher left town. Notably, she seems to have come from the direction the Man in Black went, and though she preaches using Christian language, it's evident that she's an agent of the Crimson King, the supernatural tyrant who is the series' ultimate antagonist.
She convinces the townsfolk that Roland is "The Interloper," or in other words, the devil/antichrist.
Roland realizes, while she's giving her sermon, that she is touched by the Crimson King, and is convinced she's carrying one of his demons in her womb, which leads to a disturbing scene in which Roland (brace yourself) forcibly performs an abortion on her with his gun.
Now, reading it again, it even seems that this wasn't actually necessary - that his violation of her body reveals that she was never carrying anything in the first place.
It's a deeply uncomfortable scene, and really tests our ability to see Roland as anything even remotely heroic, even if in theory he's trying to purge some evil monster.
What follows is... well, to me it feels worse, but I'll acknowledge that there's a special horror to the kind of bodily violation that Roland performs that might hit a lot of readers harder than the massacre that comes next.
Roland finds the town seemingly locked down in anticipation of a massive storm, but it turns out it's all a trap laid for him, organized by the preacher-woman. Attackers burst out of the buildings, and hold Alice hostage. She begs for death, having been unable to resist the dark urge to say the word to Nort, the untold horror she has received making her prefer an end (we're left to wonder why death is preferable to living with the knowledge of death's true nature,) and Roland's violent skills go to work immediately.
The entire populace of Tull comes after him, whipped up into a frenzy. One is also left to wonder whether this is mere persuasion or if some kind of magic has set them to killing the Gunslinger - Roland sees that there are only 25 people in attendance at Pittison's sermon, and yet he winds up killing 58 people, including 5 children.
It demonstrates that Roland is a profoundly capable killer (it does help that he's one of the few people who actually has guns in this world, but even with a pair of six-guns, that means he had to reload both guns 4 times even assuming he kills every target with a single shot). He doesn't get out of the fight unscathed, but only one injury is actually serious, and that he's still able to dress and bind afterward.
And in this town full of corpses, Roland rests, eats the rest of the (probably mutant) beef they have, and then finally moves on.
Having already read the book, this entire volume sees Roland failing to recover his humanity - though he bonds with Jake, Roland ultimately leaves him to his death in the name of the quest. It's in the later books, when forced by his Ka-Tet, his surrogate family, to allow his heart to open again, that he gets his chance at redemption.
But this bleak, dark introduction shows us where he's at when the story begins, and shows us just how far he has to go.
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