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Review: The Gunslinger

The Gunslinger The Gunslinger by Stephen King
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This book was just... So, incredibly, boring. The first line is interesting enough: "The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed." Iconic. It made me think that right away I was going to be thrown into an action-packed chase scene, but it ended up being the complete opposite. Who thought that starting a book off with the main character just walking through sand would be interesting? The entire first chapter was such a huge slug-fest, and honestly it didn't get much better from there.

The main character--we'll call him Roland because that's shorter to type out than "the gunslinger" (sorry my writing won't be as edgy and pretentious as King's was in this book)--stumbles through the desert, talks to a hermit, and then stumbles through the desert some more. The story is told by alternating between the current stumbles of the gunslinger, and his past which is revealed as Roland retells his story to people he encounters during his stumbles.

The grand majority of his stumbles (okay I'll stop abusing that word now) were incredibly uninteresting. Literally because he was just vaguely following the man in black. That's not interesting, sorry. In the second last chapter is when things finally heat up, and it has what I found to be the most compelling of Roland's backstory. But that's really just a sorry consolation prize for everything else I had to go through for the entire book. (Hmm... Reminds me of The Shining, actually. Not to the same extent as this book though.) After the backstory in that chapter it goes right back to vague and boring stumbling after the man in black, save for one tense encounter.

If there is one thing I've always been able to count King on, no matter whether I was actually invested in the story or not, it has been his writing. I love when he writes in a third person limited perspective that's always so rich with the character's personality that it's hard not to enjoy myself while reading, or when it at least has some other enjoyable quality to it (I can't remember exact details from his books I've read longer ago). But in The Gunslinger... The writing was the opposite of enjoyable.

Since Roland is from some sort of alternate dimension (or something else to that effect), he speak funny. He speaks kind of old-timey, I guess. And since the narrative is from his limited perspective... THE WHOLE BOOK "SPEAK FUNNY" TOO! The whole she-bang is written in the same weird oldish way that is honestly nothing but a bore and a bother to read.

What I like most is when King writes the narrative in a way that lets the character's personality really shine through to carry the story (ie. It, Mr. Mercedes). But honestly? Roland? Him? What personality? I didn't find it. He's a gunslinger. He... Slings guns. He had no personality and therefore the narrative had no personality and therefore the writing was almost as dry as the desert that half of this novel took place in.

And, you know what, I'll admit it: It was also very annoying how many words I didn't know. There were so many weirdo fricken words that I couldn't even bother looking them all up because then I'd have to stop reading basically every other sentence. I still ended up looking up a bunch of words, but often times it was to no avail because they still didn't make much sense in the context. And just skipping over the words was also annoying because that didn't really fix anything either. Great. Love it. Immerse me in the narrative daddy, I love it when I can't understand a single fricken word you're saying because in the end it's worth it because I'm so IMMERSED. IN THE. NARRATIVE. CAN'T YOU TELL HOW IMMERSED I AM RIGHT NOW? (SUPER FRICKEN IMMERSED.) (view spoiler)

I can so very easily understand why not many people have actually read this series compared to its length and the effort King put into it. This first book, man. It just kills all the readers off, and I don't blame them. If I wasn't previously familiar with King's work I don't even know if I would have finished this. But I already bought the first four books in this series so there's no going back for me now!! Not that I'd actually want to quit, though. All this said and done, I do still have high hope for this series being good. I have a really bad track record with first books in series, so this is just going along with the trend.

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