The man in black had also stayed in the town he brought a dead man stricken by addiction to the opiate-like "devil grass" back to life and left a trap for Roland. Roland spends the night there and recalls his time spent in Tull, a small town Roland passed through not long before the start of the novel. Vestiges of forgotten or skewed versions of real-world technology also appear, such as a reference to a gas pump that is worshipped as a god named " Amoco" and an abandoned way station with a water pump powered by an "atomic slug."Īs Roland travels across the desert in search of the man in black, whom he knows as Walter, he encounters a farmer named Brown and Zoltan, Brown's crow.
Roland exists in a world that has "moved on." This world has a few things in common with our own, however, including memories of the old song " Hey Jude" and the child's rhyme that begins " Beans, Beans, the Musical Fruit", as well as the existence of hamburgers and beer. The main story takes place in a world somewhat similar to the Old West but in an alternate timeframe or parallel universe. The book tells the story of The Gunslinger, Roland of Gilead, and his quest to catch the man in black, the first of many steps toward Roland's ultimate destination, The Dark Tower.
Ferman, long-time editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. In 2003, the novel was reissued in a revised and expanded version with modified language and added and changed scenes intended to resolve inconsistencies with the later books in the series. Since then, the book has been re-issued in various formats and included in boxed sets with other volumes of the series. In 1988, Plume released it in trade paperback form. This led to another run of ten-thousand copies. The following year, because the Pet Sematary cover noted The Gunslinger among King's previous works, many fans called the offices of King, Grant, and Doubleday wanting more information on the already-out-of-print book. The finished product was first published by Donald M. It took King twelve-and-a-half years to finish the novel. " The Gunslinger and the Dark Man" (November 1981)." The Oracle and the Mountains" (February 1981).The five stories that constitute the novel were originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction: King explains that he "played with the idea of trying a long romantic novel embodying the feel, if not the exact sense, of the Browning poem." King started writing this novel in 1970 on a ream of bright green paper that he found at the library. The novel was inspired by Robert Browning's poem " Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" (1855), which King read as a sophomore at the University of Maine.
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