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.

Gunslinger (The first book of King’s Dark Tower series)

I’ve never read the Dark Tower series. I’m not sure why, it’s just one of those thing I had on my ‘to do…eventually’ list. So when it turned up in a discount bookshop I was interested, but not overly. But a friend wanted to know what it was like so I forked out a few quid and decided to give it a go.
I’ve read only one piece of writing of King’s before this and let’s just say, I wasn’t impressed. Check it out if you like. The Man in the Black Suit. Oddly, Gunslinger has a ‘man in black’. Anyway, I found it, at best, boring. The idea had merit but it wasn’t given enough time to develop its full potential in the short story format.
So, I read Gunslinger expecting a mediocre book at best. Aaaaaand that’s pretty much what I got. Perhaps, as a King newbie, I simply don’t get his style and if I persevered, I might grow to like him. But I think a book should be accessible to fans and newcomers alike and I just don’t get this from Gunslinger. He uses a lot of colloquialisms that go right over my head and, because I don’t understand them, I get confused and that completely ruins my immersion.
This is my main problem with King’s writing. At no point did I not know I was reading, which is unusual for me. Every time I hit one of King’s odd words or turns of phrase, I had to stop and re-read the sentence to understand what the word might be referring to. Which would be acceptable if they weren’t on every page.
My other main problem with Gunslinger is the lack of information King gives me. He’s quite happy to tell me that ‘the sky was the yellow color of old cheese’ – and to be honest, that doesn’t really tell me much because I’m not sure how old cheese differs from fresh…and what sort of cheese? Gorgonzola, roule, chedder? – but not, for instance, what the sodding hell is going on, who’s involved or even what time period it’s set in. Hey Jude makes an appearance and there’s mention of ‘coaches’, ‘a café’ and ‘New York’ but so far the only settings that have been mentioned are rocky deserts and a town out of a Wild West film. I can’t picture this world King’s set up and I’m forty pages in.
I will read to the end and I’ll post an addition to this review once I have, but my initial reaction is thus: too difficult to get into and, so far, not worth the effort.