Read: The Gunslinger
This was the first prose book I read in one sitting in a long, long time. Not even because I was so thoroughly engrossed or anything like that–just because from the moment I saw how quickly I was progressing through my slim trade paperback edition of the book, I considered it a fun and surmountable challenge to myself to get all the way through in one night.
I’d wondered how King would adapt to a story set in a fantasy world (perhaps a distantly post-apocalyptic one, from what I can gather) where he couldn’t indulge in his usual pop-culture references and American idioms. Turns out he manages pretty well, substituting all that for a very bleak, almost fatalistic tone reminiscent of some of his nastier short stories. (About the only rock and roll reference in the whole magilla is the notion that in this strange culture, the song “Hey Jude” has become a folk anthem of sorts, the kind of nod to the might of the Beatles that you don’t see this disciple of Eddie Cochran make very often.)
It wasn’t until the very, very end of the book, after a couple hundred pages of picturing the mysterious man in black as Randy Flagg in a monk’s outfit, that it became apparent that this guy wasn’t Flagg after all. Given the book’s convoluted publication history–its first chapter was written some 12 years before the novel’s initial publication and was printed in a genre fiction magazine as a stand-alone short story, as were all the subsequent chapters–I guess Flagg didn’t even exist when the man in black was first conceived of by King.
Even more strikingly, the same can be said of the majority of the book’s alluded-to backstory, since King admits in his afterword that he’s really making it up as he goes along and will fill in the gaps–what kind of revolution befell the gunslinger’s home, how his various friends and enemies died, what he’s done on his not-coincidentally 12-year quest to catch the man in black–when he gets to ’em. He also expresses confidence that this information is there, somewhere inside his brain. I don’t really doubt that, but for someone weaned on Tolkien, a guy who but for a desire to give vent to an elaborately detailed backstory wouldn’t have told the main story at all, it comes as a bit of a shock.
As for the story itself, it’s the kind of high concept that non-Big Two, non-arthouse comics publishers live and die for: “Conan starring Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name.” That’s pretty brilliant, and as is the case with The Stand, strong casting (done in this case by me and not by TV producers) carries the book through its weaker spots. Although now that I think about it there’s no glaring missteps to speak of, just that bone-dry tone that can get tedious at times but for the presence of Dirty Harry in fantasy drag.
The set pieces are a mixed bag. On the high end is the gunslinger’s massacre of every single resident of the town of Tull, led by a fundamentalist zealot preacher of the BBW variety; the gunslinger’s discovery of Jake, a little boy from New York killed by the man in black and dragged into the gunslinger’s world to be sacrificed by the gunslinger in his pursuit of the MIB and thus to haunt his conscience; and the long journey by handcart through the mountains, reminiscent of both the Mines of Moria and the Lincoln Tunnel sequence in The Stand. Weaker are the horny female oracle, the fairly nondescript Slow Mutants, and the man in black’s startling revelation of the nature of their world, which presents straight-faced an idea best reserved for zonked-out collegiate bullshitting and Onion articles.
I think the best thing about the book is the overall sense of decrepitude and futility, like we’re in a world that’s just about at the end of its timeline and is poised to go out with a whimper. The desert, the willow forest, the mountains, the caves, the ocean–they all seem kind of hopeless, like the desert planet in King’s short story “Beachworld” now that I think about it. I hope the future volumes stick with this smart use of environment as secondary antagonist, nothingplaces where the man in black and his superiors thrive.