The Gunslinger Summary: Stephen King's Opening of The Dark Tower
What The Gunslinger is about
Stephen King's The Gunslinger opens with one of the best known first lines in modern fantasy: "The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed." That sentence is also the whole engine of the book. One man is running. Another man is chasing him. The landscape between them is a ruined desert, and almost everything else has to be worked out by the reader as it arrives.
The story began life as a novella published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in October 1978. In 1982 it was collected with four other stories King had published in the same magazine, forming the book The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger. The original novella became the first chapter, slightly revised for inclusion. The larger work went on to become the opening instalment of King's Dark Tower septology.
The plot of that first chapter is deceptively simple. The gunslinger, crossing the desert in pursuit of his quarry, comes to a hut owned by a farmer named Brown, who keeps a pet raven called Zoltan. The gunslinger stays the night. At Brown's urging, he tells the story of the last time he encountered other people. That story is the heart of the book, and it takes place in a town called Tull, the final settlement before the desert begins.
In Tull, the gunslinger goes to the saloon and meets Allie, the bartender. She tells him about Nort, the town drunk, who died after eating narcotic devil-grass. The man in black had passed through before him. Calling himself Walter O'Dim, he brought Nort back from the dead, and he told Allie that if she ever said the word "nineteen" in Nort's hearing, Nort would tell her everything he had seen and heard while he was dead. The gunslinger recognises this at once for what it is, a trap set for Allie and for himself, and he warns her never to say the word.
The main characters
The gunslinger himself is defined almost entirely by his pursuit. He is a hard, methodical man who talks little and who is, by his own account, used to the aftermath of violence. The man in black, Walter O'Dim, is less a character than a presence. He arrives before the gunslinger does, leaves things broken behind him, and sets traps that look like gifts.
Around them stand the people of Tull. Allie is the most sympathetic figure in the book, a woman handed a terrible piece of knowledge and told exactly how to destroy herself with it. Nort is a dead man walking, raised for no good reason. Sylvia Pittston is a fanatical preacher who believes the man in black has made her pregnant with the offspring of the Crimson King. She calls the gunslinger a malicious "Interloper" and warns her congregation against him. Brown and his raven Zoltan sit outside all of this, the quiet frame around a loud story.
How the Tull episode ends
Skip this paragraph if you would rather not know. Sylvia Pittston's preaching works. She stirs the whole town against the gunslinger, and the entire population comes for him, Allie among them, having said the word and been driven insane by what Nort told her. The gunslinger kills all fifty-eight residents of Tull. He finds that Nort has died again anyway. Then he walks out into the desert. Having finished the telling, he fills his water skins at Brown's hut and continues the chase.
The themes
Survival and cost sit at the centre. The gunslinger gets through Tull, but the price is a town. The book keeps asking what a man will spend in order to keep going, and it refuses to make the answer comfortable.
Power is the other thread. Walter's power is not force. It is a single planted word, left in a woman's head to do its work after he has gone. Sylvia's power is belief, turned into a mob. Against both of those, a gun looks blunt and small.
Underneath runs the question of identity. The gunslinger is a survivor of something lost, a man carrying a discipline from a world that has mostly fallen apart. What remains of him is the pursuit.
Why it still matters
It is the doorway into one of the largest and strangest projects in King's career, the Dark Tower sequence, and it reads very differently from the horror novels that made his name. The prose is spare, the world is explained reluctantly, and the mystery is deliberate.
King revised the novella for a 2003 edition. Small additions and deletions were made throughout, the word "parsecs" in the opening paragraph was changed to "eternity", and the Tull story was expanded with a further exchange between Allie and Walter. Readers still argue about which version is better, which tells you something about how closely this short, hard book is read.
More: The Dark Tower Books in Order · Stephen King Books in Order