I rated this four stars the first time I read it. I think that was because I hadn’t read the rest of the series yet, and now that I have in my head what this series can really do when it’s going, this one just feels a little anemic in comparison. Also, it’s such a weird book that I didn’t know what to make of it at the time, but I can see what he’s doing now that I’ve read the rest of it. In fact, there were SO many little lines in here that hint towards things to come, in the opening scenes of the second book, even, I almost couldn’t believe it. He wrote the first chapter of this back in 1978, so he really must have outlined the shit out of it to foreshadow things he wouldn’t get around to writing for another twenty-five years.
This book was infamously inspired by the poem “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” by Robert Browning, but also King just let his inner self go. This series is chock full of allusions to other works, Arthurian legend, science fiction, horror, and ties in to many of King’s other books, including It and The Stand. So it’s one of those where you can go along for the story–in this case, Roland is chasing a man wearing black through a desert for as some yet unknown purpose and reason–or you can go down the rabbit hole. I have chosen the rabbits.
I’ve really got two reasons for my lowered rating. One, the characters and worldbuilding are much more fleshed out later. This book acts as a prologue to Roland’s journey (and if you’ve read the last book, a little something else), hinting at things to come but not really giving up much information otherwise. It can’t really stand on its own, in that it doesn’t make full sense, and also that it isn’t a full story. It does have a mini-arc of Roland crossing a line that means he has fully committed to finding the Dark Tower, but as we don’t yet know what any of that means, the narrative satisfaction of it is minimal. Roland, the man in black, and Jake feel more like prototypes here, as if they appeared to King and he himself is still trying to figure out a bit what’s going on with them.
The second reason for my lowered rating is that I had truly forgotten how unpleasant the first third of this book is. I hate apocalyptic stories with very few exceptions, and that first section is an apocalyptic western that is full of nastiness and horror, and it was a lot. Later, the storytelling and the characters King creates makes the nasty moments more bearable and gives them more context, but starting out the story with all that brutal unpleasantness isn’t personally my favorite.
Anyway, this is definitely a key part of the series, but it’s not ever going to be my favorite. I’m so excited to get to revisit my favorites now, hopefully very soon.
[3.5 stars]
