The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger

King started The Dark Tower as a stylistic exercise without knowing where it was going, and it shows in the fragmentation. The gunslinger pursuing the man in black through an endless desert has something of a literary hallucination rather than a conventional novel. Less terrifying than his usual work, more philosophical. The opening may disorient King readers who know him for horror; those with patience will find the start of his most personal saga. More volumes are needed before everything makes sense.