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.