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The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger
I have listened to the book driving back and forth to work. Makes traffic easier to tolerate. Read well.
The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger
This is the best King book ever, in fact every book of this series has been stunning but you have to start somewhere and this is it. King paints a dream like fantasy world that incorporates things from the here and now like a dream would. The man in black is great and the Gunslinger not your typical anti-hero, read it three times.
The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger
Tried to read this yet again and yet again have no idea why people like this book. Slow, plodding, awful dialog.
The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger
Stephen King is an excellent writer, but this book stinks. Although his stamp of excellence occasionally peeks out from its pages, the story fails. Here's why:1) There is no clear point or plot. Every few pages throughout the book I asked myself, "Why in the hell am I reading this?" Had the book been written by a no-name author, and not marketed as a "#1 Bestseller," I would have put it down after three pages. Maybe two.2) The characters are undefined. I had no picture of who they are, what their personalities are, what motivates them, and half the time what their names even are.3) The world Stephen King has created is all over the place. Is it the future? Is it the past? Is it both? Is it an alternative reality? Is it the American southwest? In an alternative universe? I have no idea, even after finishing the book.4) I found Stephen King's perversity a turn-off. If it's weird, scatalogical, and sexually deviant, chances are Stephen King addresses it or hints at it here. I was hoping he would avoid that in this book; I was wrong.5) He often uses a peculiar, undefined vocabulary to define things the reader cannot know. And, by the end of the book, he never defines them. Thanks a lot! As if I'm going to wade through six more volumes of this crap to make sense of his fantasy world. (I know people say this series gets better, but he lost me.)6) The weird magic gets annoying, and is inconsistent. In some ways the book seems to be hyper-reality-based, and then suddenly there is magic, which throws everything for a frustrating loop.7) The whole book is vague. I would have preferred some sort of introduction to give the book a context. Something like (and I'm totally making this up here): "In the years after our modern world suffered an annihilating nuclear Holocaust, there remained, on a parallel version of our planet, a race of man . . ."I sense this was a practice book for Stephen King -- a tester by which he sharpened his novelistic teeth.
The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger
This is all just filler because this new rating system is crap and I don't have that much to say about this product.
The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger
The preview of this only contained the forward by Mr. King. I decided to take a chance and bought it anyway. It was readable, and at best OK. But you could tell it was written when he was young. If it was $2.99, that would have been a better price, but the story itself seems to lack cohesiveness.