#STEPHEN KING THE GUNSLINGER AUDIOBOOK YOUTUBE SERIES#
The Gunslinger is a quiet, meditative novel as inauspicious a way to start a sprawling epic fantasy series as I've ever encountered. How had I not wanted to read the whole thing? What did the teenage me get so wrong? But most importantly, how had I lived without it? The first line – "The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed" – is so perfect. Somewhere between high and (so-called) low art literary metafiction meets SF/fantasy/western pulp. It was funny and dark and scary and nasty and really, really strange. I finished book four, Wizard and Glass, three days later. I spent three days on a sofa, and began reading The Gunslinger on day one. I jumped into a freezing cold swimming pool and pulled a muscle – or rather, the muscle, the one that helps you, you know, move. I'm not an old man, just a criminally unfit one. I was going on holiday for a week to sunnier climes, and decided to take the first four books with me.ĭay one of the holiday, I put my back out. I hadn't read The Dark Tower? King's magnum opus? We were heading towards the end of the series, with Book V ( Wolves of the Calla) about to be published, and I was behind.
A friend, a huge King fan, noticed the gap in my collection. It seemed they weren't King's most popular books. That's fine, I thought, not every book has to be for me. It was, I decided, after 20 pages of weird-speak and dusty places and a man called Roland, not for me. The Gunslinger was, I knew, part of a longer-running story it was also a fantasy novel, as The Eyes of the Dragon was.
I wanted the weird darkness in the hearts of normal people.
Hated it with every part of my horror-loving self. I came to The Eyes of the Dragon, a book that looked different from the others on the shelf, read it … and hated it. I had read a lot of his books by this point (around 1995) and was ploughing through them. I first picked up book one of the Dark Tower series, The Gunslinger, when I was in the deepest throes of my teenage King addiction.
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