The Dark Tower, book 1

The Gunslinger is the first book in the Stephen King Dark Tower series. I'm re-reading the first two books and completing the series in preparation for the upcoming film.

from the back of the book:

In the first book of this brilliant series, now expanded and revised by the author, Stephen King introduces readers to one of the most enigmatic heroes, Roland of Gilead, the last gunslinger. He is a haunting figure, a loner on a spellbinding journey into good and evil. In his desolate world, which frighteningly mirrors our own, Roland pursues the man in black, encounters an alluring woman named Alice, and begins a friendship with the boy from New York named Jake. Both grippingly realistic and eerily dreamlike, The Gunslinger leaves readers eagerly awaiting the next chapter.

one of my favorite quotes:

Above, the stars were unwinking, also constant. Suns and worlds by the million. Dizzying constellations, cold fire in every primary hue. As he watched, the sky washed from violet to ebony. A meteor etched a brief, spectacular arc below Old Mother and winked out. The fire threw strange shadows as the devil-grass burned its slow way down into new patterns -not ideograms but a straightforward crisscross vaguely frightening in its own no-nonsense surety. He had lain his fuel in a pattern that was not artful but only workable. It spoke of blacks and whites. It spoke of a man who might straighten pictures in strange hotel rooms. The fire burned its steady, slow flame, and phantoms danced in its incandescent core. The gunslinger did not see. The two patterns, art and craft, were welded together as he slept. The wind moaned, a witch with cancer in her belly. Every now and then a perverse downdraft would make the smoke whirl and puff toward him and he breathed some of it in. It built dreams in the same way that a small irritant may build a pearl in an oyster. The gunslinger occasionally moaned with the wind. The stars were as indifferent to this as they were to wars, crucifixions, resurrections. This also would have pleased him.

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