The Gunslinger Pt. 2

Around a month ago, I write a review of The Gunslinger. To sum up my initial reaction, The Gunslinger left me confused and alienated by colloquialisms and a lack of information. I promised I’d read to the end.
In hindsight, I wish I hadn’t. As I progressed through The Gunslinger, the points I’d made in my article kept coming back to me. Time and time again, I found myself actually noting down phrases that had put me off. I wasn’t really reading it for fun anymore, just sheer bloody mindedness and as an example of ‘how not to do it’.
There’s one quote that leaves me spluttering with rage. Maybe that’s over the top but King seems to be able to bring out my worst emotions. It’s towards the end of the book, but don’t worry. I could stick whole chapters in this review and it wouldn’t count as a spoiler.

‘The Stranger is a minion of the tower? Like yourself?’
‘Yar. He darkles. He tincts. He is in all times. Yet there is one greater than he.’

Darkles. What the hell does that mean? I had to look it up. Darkles: ‘To appear darkly or indistinctly, to grow dark, to become gloomy.’ And tincts? Dictionary.com was unsure. I went on about a colour or tint but that doesn’t really make sense in the context. Who knows? Maybe it means ‘to turn into a rainbow’.
My point, I think, is that this is really obscure wording which I had to go online to find out the meaning to. I used to have to do that when I was ten and I was reading my first adult book. Since then, not so much. I get the sense that King either read the dictionary as a child or overuses his thesaurus. Possibly both.
My other major problem was the lack of information King was prepared to give me, in terms of what is going on. And, having started that way, King continues this throughout the entire book. Two hundred and thirty ages pages and I am as clueless as I was on page one. Something is going on and there’s been a journey but I’m buggered if I know what any of it means.
We get some back story on the gunslinger’s character, which is nice, in some ways. But I’d actually have preferred not to know about that – mystery is always more interesting in characters – and would much rather have had some information on why the gunslinger is chasing the man in black and how he knows where the man is. It’s never explained. It almost feels like King tried to think of something, couldn’t and decided to offer something vague about the gunslinger knowing the right way regardless.
Having read the whole thing, my last complaint is that the ending chapters are pants. Completely and utterly unwashed pants. They make little to no sense and simply set up the next book, like those films that everybody hates where the director couldn’t help but put in a shot of the monster’s toe twitching. It screams ‘COME BACK AND SPEND MORE MONEY TO SEE HOW IT ENDS! PLEASE, WE NEED THE MONEYS.’
[Spoiler alert, skip the next paragraph if you want to read The Gunslinger.]
The man in black is set up as the villain of the piece. And all that happens when the gunslinger catches him, is they sit across a campfire and discuss ‘the tower’ and some random people who haven’t been mentioned until now, the man in black does a tarot reading then buggers off. That’s it. I was at least expecting the gunslinger to try and shoot the damn man. It was all so boring.
Luckily, the end chapters are short, which is about the only thing in their favour. The last chunk of my book was taken up with a chapter from the next book. I’m not even slightly tempted to read it.
I’m really glad I read books in between reading this. Devoting a week of my life slogging through The Gunslinger would have been torture. And that is my recommendation. If you really really want to read some King, have a few other books waiting for when you get bored. Alternatively, read some of his horror. It might be a bit better.

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

I’m away from home for six days and I brought The Hunger Games along with me, presuming I’d be busy and therefore not have to time to read it quickly. My first night away and I’d already dived in. The next morning, I’d finished it. I didn’t even realise I’d read through the night until the sunlight was streaming through the windows. My immersion was ruined once throughout the entire book and I’m pretty sure that was because I’d been up for so long.
It’s difficult to find fault with The Hunger Games. It’s a truly vivid story, full of loss, hope and betrayal. And more loss. Actually, if the title hasn’t tipped you off to the amount of misery contained in these 454 pages, then listen well when I say, there’s a lot. And yet, despite that, there is always hope. Collins weaves a sturdy tale but it’s her protagonist, a mix of strong nerves and humanity, who really steals the show. If you fail to engage with sixteen-year-old Katniss, there is something wrong with you.
Here’s the basic premise. It’s sometime in the future, America. There’s one huge city, called Capitol, and twelve other smaller cities that circle it. The smaller cities, known as districts, rebel against Capitol, but they lose. Their punishment is the Hunger Games. Two children from each district, from the age of twelve to eighteen are chosen at random and have to enter an arena, to fight to the death. The last child standing gains their life and extra supplies for their district for the year.
I can’t really tell you any more than that without ruining some of the plot. (If you really want to avoid all spoilers, don’t read the blurb. It gives one of the first events away.) But the premise interested me and Collins’ writing delivers what that premise promises.
I suppose if I had to come up with something about it that I didn’t like, it was that I immediately wanted to go out and buy the next one. I can’t. I’m not close enough to a book shop and it’s half six in the morning.
It’s not often that I read a book I enjoy so much, I cannot find a single thing I thought could have been done better (other than, y'know, sellotaping the second book to it). And I view that as a good thing or these reviews would be incredibly difficult to write.
So, not only do I recommend you read The Hunger Games, I think you should read it right now. Yes, this very second. Go on.