The Gunslinger

You had me there for the first half Mr. King, but really lost me during the second.

Because I loved many other King books so far, I felt right at home at the beginning. The story throws you right into the action from the first sentence. There are no explanations right away, which creates a really intriguing setting. You want to know where and why this is happening.

There's a part modern, fantasy and dystopian world waiting to get explored. And the first half of the book does this really good. The Gunslinger meets interesting chracters and creatures along the way. There's a old western town ready to be explored and destroyed. There's death, a worshiping cult and a huge shootout.

Then he meets this weird out of place boy in the middle of the desert, and everything started to fall apart for me. This boy joins the Gunslinger and I think we're supposed to care for him. Hell, the Gunslinger himself starts loving him. But for me it just felt out of place. I didn't care for him at all. At this point we get glimpses of the story behind the Gunslinger and the former world state, and it's pretty boring.

Then King started to write more and more gibberish. Don't get me wrong, King is one of my favorite authors and I really enjoyed most of his work I've read so far, but The Gunslinger really fell apart. He throws in really unnecessary long and convoluted similes every few sentences, and I stopped counting how many chapters ended with the characters sleeping in.

I powered through to see if King fell into his curse of bad endings, but it was pretty neutral. Nothing bad, nothing good. I just didn't care for it at all.