The Gunslinger

I just finished listening to the podcast series on The Gunslinger, which I enjoyed a lot. I first read the novel while I was in high school and reread it later when all the Dark Tower books came out.

During the discussion episode you were wondering about whether King wrote anything in first person. I couldn’t think of any novels, but the novella The Body, which is the basis for the movie Stand By Me and is part of the collection Different Seasons, is written in first person.

Yeah, that line contains the essence of the whole story.

Roland really is Lancelot on steroids, maybe. Chivalric hero, really good at fighting, easily distracted by women, bad at making decisions.

I'm with you on the direction of the series. When I read these when I was in the Army, I did read all that were available over the span of two or three weeks, but then never went back to it because books two through four just weren't what I was really after. But I'm so glad this one held up to my memory of it at least. The next part is on the March ballot, so we'll see what happens.

I absolutely love this story. I read it for the first time a few years ago (I've come to most classics late in life), and it completely sucked me into the world. This is the only story I remember from the first novel, although I remember enjoying the whole thing, so I'm sure I'll remember the others if/when you cover them. I tried to read more in the series, but didn't really care for the direction it went in (basically I wanted post-apocalyptic weird western rather than inter-dimesional fantasy/real-world crossover). I don't even remember whether I read one or two of the sequels before giving up. Maybe I'll go back one day, but there's always too much other stuff to read.

Anyway, yes, I definitely understood this as a post-apocalyptic version of our world (not taking into account the revelations of the sequels), and I still choose to read it that way now, although I'm not against the reading Glenn and Brandon both had. I think Roland is as close as it's possible to get to a chivalric hero in a post-apocalyptic world. I'm not sure King was trying to invert that archetype so much as peel off some of the legendary layers off and ground the hero in a firmer sense of reality. Although King goes a bit too far sometimes (and I accept that's just his style - Ian Watson is the only other author I've read who compares for scatological references), the contrast between the weird post-apocalyptic environment and mundanity of everyday life really works. Then again, I wasn't really taken aback by any of Roland's actions (apart from the scene with Silvia Pittston and the demon fetus - that was just too bizarre). There's very much a sense that, while Roland aspires to be a chivalric hero (and clearly has his own notions of such figures), he also acknowledges that he has to do whatever it takes to survive in a hostile environment.

One kind of unanswered question is why Roland stayed in Tull even though he suspected the man in black had set a trap for him. I think the relationship he developed with Allie was part of that. But on a more fundamental level, I felt like him being unable/unwilling to leave was either part of the trap, or just something metaphysical about the universe: the man in black had set a trap and it had to be sprung.

There is one phrase I absolutely adore from this story. Not the opening sentence (though that's great too). For me it's "The world has moved on", probably one of my favourite phrases in any story ever. It evokes so much and has so much meaning behind it without revealing anything. To me it epitomises the post-apocalyptic nature of the world the Gunslinger inhabits, and also his own mental state: the world has moved on, now all that matters is his pursuit of the man in black.

Yeah our church was spared that nonsense, but I had an aunt who came to visit and went a little nuts with that stuff. Brent and I went to the library and checked out things like The Satanic Bible and left them around our house. As an adult, I don't think that was a good idea but as an adolescent it seemed like the best way to fight that fire was to feed it. My mother now remembers that weekend with a sense of humor, but she was not pleased at the time.

In your discussion episode (released 11/17/2020), you asked about Christianity in the USA in the late 1970's. That time was the start of the "Satanic Panic", when churches/pastors started complaining about heavy metal music and D&D. A few people were convinced there was this whole cabal of Satanists trying to induct us hapless youths. Think witch trials, etc. This was pretty mainstream, not fringe and weird. It made it to our fairly ordinary Lutheran church, for example. There was even a local legend that a defunct cemetery in the area was used for Black Masses, though that might pre-date the 1970's (even if I don't).

1978 was the year Judas Priest released "Better By You, Better Than Me" on the album Stained Class, which eventually led to a trial in 1990 about subliminal messages after a couple of teens shot themselves. We were also told that Queen was backward-masking stuff on their albums about that time. Bunch of other nonsense. A couple years later, Ozzy Osbourne put out Blizzard of Ozz, which lead to another complaint (about the song Suicide Solution) that got dismissed.

I love High Plains Drifter! And I think you are absolutely right that King thought of it as post-apocalyptic in its earliest conception -- that was a big mode at the time (and again now, it seems). I forgot about how this works in The Stand, though that's one of only two non-Dark Tower King novels I've read (It will be on the next Atoz ballot, though). This would be an interesting thing to track through his works -- in fact I think King's work probably makes for some great insights into American culture from the 1970s up to the present and somebody should write that book.

I do think that when we finish doing The Gunslinger this way it would be fun to continue the other volumes in the series on Atoz in some capacity. But we've probably got a few years before we get there!

The western that King was watching when he thought this up had to be High Plains Drifter. That’s my take and I’m sticking to it, Lol.

When I first read this I thought it was a post apocalyptic story until it went all fantasy with portals to our reality and stuff in the next books. There were a bunch of movies and stories from the 70s that this cues off of. It was the pessimism of the times that made this into a marketable story. I think Glenn and Brandon commented about this in reference to Gene Wolfe stories from this period.

‘’I haven’t read many of the later King books but all of the early ones I have read treat religion the way it was done here. King has religion as where evil and corruption hides, also where it spreads. I think The Stand is the only King book where religion is used as a positive force at all, but I am probably missing other examples.

In the discussion podcast the topic of first and third person narrator in the various frame stories isn’t something that I ever noticed before. I agree with the idea that King didn’t want the reader to spend time in the gunslinger’s head. In my opinion though, King avoided it because the gunslinger doesn’t justify what he is doing, the gunslinger was just doing his work. Later in the books, stories that came out in the 80s, the gunslinger is compared to the Terminator, which was probably what King was going for when he started writing this story.

Oh yeah, that's an absolute classic. I haven't read Neuromancer in thirty years, but I can always conjure up both the line and the image it places in my head.

Let us know if you see any interesting differences between the two editions.