by Stephen King
Part of The Dark Tower
First published 2003
Roland Deschain walks through a desert that never ends. He is the last of his kind, a gunslinger from the fallen city of Gilead, and he has one purpose: catch the man in black. That man stays just far enough ahead to keep Roland moving forward, through wastelands and ghost towns and the lives of people who rarely survive the encounter. Roland is not cruel, but death follows him. He picks up a boy named Jake along the way, and that companionship costs something neither of them fully understands yet. The tension at the center of this story is not just the chase. It is the question of what Roland is willing to sacrifice to keep going, and whether the thing he is chasing is worth becoming the man he is becoming. King began this story as a young writer and it grew into the spine of everything else he built. This first book is spare and strange, more Western than fantasy at the surface, but underneath it something vast is taking shape.
Genres: fiction, adventure, fantasy, dark-fantasy, epic-fantasy
Vibes: atmospheric, gritty, haunting, introspective, philosophical, sparse
Tropes: chosen-one, found-family, mentor-student, quest
Setting: Gilead, Desert, Wastelands, Ghost Towns
Period: Indeterminate Future
253 pages · Paperback · Plume
Content warnings: death, violence