The Gunslinger is a book written by the fiction author Stephen King and reviewed by himself after he concluded the series The Dark Tower (this post being about the revised edition). It is known as a book completely different from all other 6 from the series - that has 7 books - in part due to the author’s young age and his thoughts at the time wrote this one: according to himself in the preface to the revised edition, he confesses that he were much more worried about the form than the content, influenced by seminars he wrote back then.
The narrative is in the third person, being the narrator onmiscient. There are dialogs and the timeline is not linear, and as pages go by it jumps from the present to both near and far past, to clarify obscure points in the narrative. The history content is about a gunslinger named Roland, whose main objective is to find the mysterious Dark Tower. To accomplish it, he chases a sorcerer to whom he refers to as Marten, others call Walter, and everyone also calls him The Dark Man. Though the terms gunslinger and sorcery are very present in the narrative and crucial parts are revolved around them, there are only a few moments of climax where there is the effective use of guns and/or magic.
The when of the story is a post-apocalyptic world more akin to the past than the future. There are cues in the narrative that suggest the existence of parallel universes or maybe an afterlife, evidences sustained by the character named Jake, that is suddenly introduced to the story, and that by all means seems to have come to this world after being hit by a car in New York city, somehow due to Marten. Even the post-apocalyptic world had some prosperity during Roland’s childhood, when he was trained by Cork - not effectively to become a gunslinger, but to learn the art of combat and defeat his instructor, gaining the possibility to become a gunslinger and avoid exile on failure. Roland defeated his master at a very young age, after finding out that Marten had been abusing his mother and possibly betraying his father, but the narrative does not clarify what happened after Roland acquired the right to carry pistols, after winning Cork in a cunning and non-conventional battle, that made him the youngest gunslinger of all times.
Such narrative, rich in detail and suspense, obscure and full of questions, offers the reader more than a passtime. It offers a puzzle that is impossible to solve at first sight, capable of drawing your attention thoroughly and incite you to ramble further, to think about life and the universe, way beyond the original narrative. Certainly it is a recommended read for all those who love a good fiction and, mostly, to those who are not intimidated by a detailed and nebulous narrative, to those who like secrets and challenges and keep on reading to unveil them.