The Gunslinger

Ben: Finished THE GUNSLINGER. 

 

Ben: Currently on EYES OF THE DRAGON, chapter 4, page 11.

 

Me: How was it/how is it?

Ben: I liked The Gunslinger.

Ben: I liked it more as I got further in.

Me: I was gonna say, seems like you finished it a lot faster than you started it.

Ben: Well my reading speed isn't entirely correlated by how much I like it.

Ben: But yeah it seemed a lot less rambling once they started into the mountain.

Me: I like the part where he murders the whole town.

Ben: Also I was afraid when I began THE GUNSLINGER that the ending had been ruined due to my foreknowledge that the child died.

Ben: But fortunately it was foreshadowed.

Ben: And by foreshadowed I mean it was repeatedly and clearly hammered into the reader's head that the kid was going to die.

Me: Oh how did you know that?

Ben: Gabrielle read THE GUNSLINGER years ago and told me.

Ben: She hasn't read any of the other books though so I don't have to worry about spoilers.

Me: Oh good.

Ben: Although your repeated insistence that KA IS A WHEEL has caused me to wonder whether the series will climax with Roland finding a big rusty wheel at the room at the top of the tower and lubricating it in order to fix the universe or something.

Me: Actually he turns a frozen donkey wheel and the tower disappears.

Ben: LOSTOWER

Ben: PRODUCED BY FRANK GRCE

Me: It's just a repeated phrase/theme that runs through a lot of his books.

Ben: Oh is KA not exclusive to THE DARK TOWER?

Me: I think it's mentioned in a few of his books whose stories intersect with TDT but otherwise it's like life or destiny or another word.

Ben: How directly do any of his other works intersect? Which is to say I got to the first page of EYES OF THE DRAGON and lol'd at King Roland.

Me: No relation, I guess he just liked the name a lot.

Me: I think Eyes of the Dragon actually takes place in the same world as The Dark Tower, just sometime in the past before the series proper starts.

Ben: Oh that is cool.

 

Ben: Hahahaha, oh my god, I'm sitting here because the internet at my house is dead and Oprah is like twenty feet away and the person sitting next to her just said "TONIGHT ON MYTHBUSTERS, TAKING CANDY FROM A BABY!" and she did that thing where she slaps her forehead.

Ben: Anyway, even though I knew what the eponymous Dark Tower was supposed to be I still really enjoyed his description of it.

Me: What was the description?

Ben: Like the whole part with the man in black telling the gunslinger about an infinity of infinities and worlds on a blade of grass and all that.

Me: Oh yeah.

Me: Pretty trippy imagery in that chapter.

Ben: One of my friends who has read both the original DARTOWER series and the new revised DARTOWER series says that the foreshadowing in the new THE GUNSLINGER is too obvious, but I'm not sure if he just meant the foreshadowing about Jake dying or the foreshadowing about the greater series.

Ben: If there was any foreshadowing about the rest of the series going on, I didn't really pick it up.

Me: I haven't read the original version but from the Wikipedia description of the changes, it doesn't seem like the revised one gives away future plot development so much as it sets up elements in advance that will become important later.

Me: Normally I don't approve of artists revising their work after the fact (via Star Wars special editions) but from the list on Wikipedia there are only two changes King made that I thought were for the worse.

Me: Don't read that article in advance, though