Read History
2026 | Score: 8.5
Enjoyed this way more than I thought I would. My last (And only other) King book was It, which I read when I was 11 (mistake). From what I had heard about the dark tower I expected the first book to be fairly weak, but I was engaged and loved it the whole time. First book since the Dragonbone Chair that I wanted to stay up late reading. I need to get the rest of the dark tower and finish the series. This reminded me of Cormac McCarthy if he cared about making stuff seem cool and awesome with a fantasy and mystery twist to it.
Format: Book
Days: 4
Date: 6/29/2026 -> 7/3/2026
Summary (Spoilers)
The Gunslinger
Stephen King
The Dark Tower #1
The Gunslinger Summary
The Gunslinger travels southeast across the desert, chasing the man in black. He stops at a small house where a man named Brown is growing corn. They share a meal and night together, along with Brown’s raven Zoltan. The gunslinger tells Brown of what happened in the nearby town of Tull.
The gunslinger arrived in Tull with his mule, and went to a local saloon. There were several people having a good time, and one man who appears to be dead. The gunslinger sleeps with the proprietor, Allie, in exchange for information. She tells him the man in black, known to them as Walter O’Dim, came through a few weeks back and when Nort died, he brought him back to life as a zombie. The gunslinger stays for a while (but time is weird), until the local priest, a large woman named Sylvia Pittson, enrages the the town into attacking him. He kills everyone (with his guns) and leaves. We do learn through flashbacks that the gunslingers name is Roland Deschain.
The gunslinger leaves Brown and continues southeast, following the path the man in black took. After a while he has run out of water and is nearing death, when he spots buildings in the distance. He makes it to them and sees a boy but then passes out. He wakes up to find the boy has given him some water and food. After he recovers a bit and refreshes his supplies (there is an electric water well/purifier machine from long ago that still works), Roland goes into the basement to find food but a demon shows up. He stops it and takes the old skull it had been using.
Roland and Jake continue traveling after the man in black, and come to the end of the desert. Here there are big mountains. Roland uses the Howken to hypnotize Jake and we learn Jake comes from a time much like our modern times. He got hit by a car and was about to die when the man in black spoke to him and brought him here. Jake does not know how long he has been here since time is weird. Roland fears the boy is a trap of some sort, but still begins to love him.
While camping at the base of the mountains, Jake gets pulled to an avaricious oracle spirit, but Roland saves him using the skull he took earlier. He later takes Mescaline and intentionally returns to the oracle to learn about the future and is given a vague prophecy of the number 3. They continue on. Jake asks Roland to tell him about his own life, and his coming of age.
Roland Deschain grew up in Gilead, being trained to take his fathers mantle of gunslinger. He was trained with several other boys, Alain, Cuthbert, Jamie, and Thomas by the brutal Cort. As young boys they are exposed to political strife, violence, and death. When Roland is 14 and his father is away, he walks in on his mother and Marten (A representation of the man in black) who seem to have just slept together. Marten is insolent and Roland gets angry, so goes and challenges Cort for “his test”. If he beats Cort he basically becomes a man, but 14 is very young for this challenge. He chooses for his weapon his trained hawk David, who he uses to win the fight at the expense of David’s life.
Jake and Roland continue on, and get super close to the man in black on the mountains, but Roland can not kill him. Roland and Jake both seem to know that for some reason Jake will get left behind or die on this journey. They enter caves in the mountain pass and find an old handcar which they use to travel along train tracks. They find an old shopping center and some slow mutants that attack them. When they near the end of the track they have to cross the last rails on foot, and at the end the man in black appears at the mouth of the cave and seems to cause the tracks to begin to fall. Jake falls and is barely hanging on but Roland leaves him to fall to chase the man in black.
They meet outside and again Roland can not kill him. They talk long into the night of how the man in black is merely a servant of the king who rules the Tower. How size is relative and there may be many, many universes within one another. Roland sees a vision of the world being created and a single purple blade of grass. At the end of the night Roland sleeps and wakes up 10 years older, with a skeleton that may belong to the man in black next to him. After taking the skull from the skeleton, Roland does what the man in black said and heads west to a beach, where he waits. THE END.