by Stephen King
Part of The Dark Tower, book 0.5
First published 2008
Roland Deschain is the last Gunslinger, and he is alone. He has been tracking the Man in Black across a vast desert for longer than most men live. This novella drops back to an earlier stretch of that pursuit, before the events of The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger. Roland wakes injured in a field of roses, the bodies of dead men around him. The Little Sisters of Eluria are nearby, a group of women who call themselves healers. They are not healers. Roland is weak, stripped of his guns, and held in a tent with other broken men who keep disappearing one by one. He has to figure out what the Sisters actually are, find a way to recover his weapons, and get out alive. The tension is simple and physical: a man who survives by speed and strength has neither, and the people tending him want something he cannot afford to give. King wrote this story as a companion to the revised 2003 edition of The Gunslinger, and it fits cleanly into Roland's early years on the road toward the Dark Tower.
Genres: fiction, adventure, fantasy, horror, novella, dark-fantasy
Vibes: atmospheric, dark, gritty, menacing, suspenseful, tense
Tropes: forced-proximity, survival-against-odds, trapped-protagonist, unreliable-allies
Setting: Eluria, The Dark Tower world, Desert
Period: Early in Roland's journey
312 pages · Hardcover · Donald M. Grant Publisher, Inc.
Content warnings: body-horror, gore, violence