The Gunslinger

The Gunslinger is the first volume in the Dark Tower series by the American author Stephen King. It was first published in 1982 as a fix-up novel, joining five short stories published between 1978 and 1981.

King substantially revised the novel in 2003, and that version has remained in print since, carrying the subtitle Resumption. The central figure is Roland Deschain, the last gunslinger, whose pursuit of the man in black has occupied him for many years, and the book follows him across a desert and into the settlements beyond it as the trail continues. Roland is the last of his kind, and the book offers no immediate explanation of the world he walks through, which is why it reads as an episode that the later volumes explain.

The cast is small and the meetings are what generate the plot. Roland encounters several people along the way, of whom the most consequential is Jake Chambers, a boy who accompanies him part of the distance. Because the story was assembled from separate pieces, its episodes have the shape of short stories while the pursuit supplies the continuity, which is why the revised edition has become the standard text.