Hello everyone and welcome to the Stephen King cast, one man's musings on the works of Stephen King.

Each week I will review one entry in the bibliography of Stephen King and the chronological order of publication.

And this week is, uh, it's one of the big ones for me as I step through the magic door back into the strange yet familiar land of midworld.

Home of gun-toting knights, dimension-hopping magicians, the nexus of all realities, and monstrous crustaceans who'd like to talk to you before chopping you up into bits. This week, I return to the world of Roland Dischain, the last gunslinger in a world that's moved on as he awakens on the beach where

we'd last left him in the concluding pages of the first volume of the Dark Tower, only to

find that while he might have bested the man in black, the struggles he now has to face are

unpredictable and even more deadly. The Dark Tower series is the sigil for the Uber Stephen King fan, but it's not among his

most famous or widely read entries. Personally, people I've known who've been major King fans

have never been able to enjoy the Dark Tower because I've heard many of them say, I can't get into it.

I attribute that to the first entry in the series of The Gunslinger.

As you no doubt know by now, the Gunslinger was begun by a 19-year-old Stephen King,

and by 1987 in his career, which includes possessed and obsessive cars, friendly werewolves, and space turtles,

the Gunslinger is still by far his weirdest.

Between the strange dialogue, the anachronisms galore, the style of prose, and the bizarre nature

to the central story, which still doesn't really add up to much, you buy it, but reach the

tower to save the universe.

It's enough to turn away those who'd come for another entry from the Master of Horror.

Plus, because it was begun by an earlier king, the gunslinger doesn't read like a king book.

It feels very academic, like a college student who swings a newly discovered pen like a fresh sword,

marveling at the heft in his hand, the way the metal shines in the light,

and the sound it makes is it cuts through the air.

And as a result, we get slices of heavy symbolism, allusion, and more pronounced themes

...