Read: The Gunslinger (revised)–“The Slow Mutants”; “The Gunslinger and the Man in Black”

This page enumerates the non-grammatical/stylistic differences between the original and revised Gunslingers. IIRC it only contains three spoilers that made me want to chuck my laptop out the window, which is a minor miracle when it comes to online reference material about fiction. Part of me feels like I could have just read the list and saved myself the trouble of reading the book, but it’s probably worth seeing the changes in context. They’re hard enough to wrap your head around as it is without having a full-fledged reading experience to help you internalize them.

So, Jake is dead, and unless the lobstrosity attack that kicks off The Drawing of the Three is to be interpreted as karma-by-shellfish, Roland still doesn’t get his comeuppance for letting the kid die. The man in black now openly cops to being both Marten and Walter during his post-chase palaver with the gunslinger; the servile relationship of the latter to the former is redacted, as is the one between Marten/Walter and the Ageless Stranger, who is now called Legion and not Maerlyn. The Beast has been removed altogether, replaced by a king with a red hand–the crimson king, I presume. And now Roland basically says “yeah, right” when he comes to at the end of his mystical chat with Walter to find the dark man’s bones on the ground.

In other words, everything you thought you knew about the villain of the series is wrong. Listen, I appreciate King wanting to go in what he thought was a better direction, but when you have to change that much about the second most important character in the series, whose nature defines the quest of the first most important character in the series, maybe, to quote LCD Soundsystem, it’s late for revision?

Finally, my guess is that the series ends with the gunslinger stuck in some kind of moebius-strip time-loop. I can live with that, I guess. It’s slowly dawned on me that Roland’s world is what things would look like if Flagg really won at some point, and that’s too cool to let the good guys screw up by winning themselves.

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