The Gunslinger - The Dark Tower I - by Stephen King

Maybe five or six years ago I read the original version of The Gunslinger. When thinking about re-reading it (with the intention that I'd read the whole series), I realized that I barely remembered anything about it. This time I read the revised and expanded version and I enjoyed it as if I had never read it before. The whole book has a very dreamlike quality to it which maybe explains why it had evaporated from my memory. Plus it doesn't help that basically the gunslinger makes very little progress in his quest or that it is never really explained why he's trying to get to the dark tower in the first place.

The book follows Roland Deschain as he pursues "the man in black" across the desert in a weird fantasy world that is sort of like something out of an old Western. Roland meets different people along the way and falls into different types of traps that "the man in black" has left in his way. I enjoyed the individual scenarios that Roland encounters but they don't really add up to much as a whole. Basically it seems like the whole thing is just a build up for the next book. I'll give it a B+.