Started reading Gunslinger this morning; I've avoided Steven King before this on general principle, and because I'm not much of a fan of horror. Gunslinger is...um...wow. Not like anything I've ever read before, that's for certes. Post-apocalysm meets the Old West meets Salvador Dali meets JRR Tolkien.

Only, not. At all. In any way. I know the main character's name is Roland, but only because I've read about the series. Roland is a Gunslinger. He shoots stuff, and speaks the High Tongue. Beyond that, I don't know what a Gunslinger is. He's chasing the man in black. The man in black is a sorcerer. He's also apparently very, very evil, or at the very least, quite deranged. The book is split up into several short stories; the first one is about the Gunslinger and how he killed everyone in the town of Tull because the man in black put devils in all of them.

The writing is so very...bare. Every word carries the weight of a hundred; the prose is just like the world it describes, bare and dry and forlorn. Not dead, though, or lifeless- but you can almost taste the dust and cheap whisky when you read it. This only serves to creep me out further when reading, of course, since the story is so very disturbing...but it is addictive, if unbearable in large quantities. It'll take me a while to get through the book, despite its large print...

Well, this is what I get when I borrow books from the brother: mind-fucked temporal doom, with bullets. 0_0