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Monday, February 26, 2024

Books of 2024: Week 9 - The Gunslinger and Black Tears


Cody reads Stephen King and Charles Campbell.


THE GUNSLINGER by Stephen King

Stephen King said he wrote the book The Running Man (published under the Richard Bachman pen name) in just one week. On the opposite end of the spectrum, we have The Gunslinger, which King gradually wrote over a dozen years. The first couple sections of the five-part story were written in 1970, when he was still a college student, drawing inspiration from a poem he had read during his sophomore year: Robert Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.” When he was having trouble writing Salem’s Lot, he returned to The Gunslinger and wrote another section of it. The fourth section of the book was written soon after he finished working on The Shining. The final section was written in late 1981, and all five were published separately in the pages of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Then, in 1982, he gathered all five sections together and sent The Gunslinger out into the world as a novel. The fact that the sections were written so far apart from each other is somewhat evident in the book, as the style of writing does change a bit as it goes on; the first two sections especially come off in a different way than what follows. But it all holds together as a fascinating story.

The Gunslinger is the first chapter in what is considered to be King’s “magnum opus”, the Dark Tower saga, which consists of eight novels and a short story and ties in with many of King’s other novels in various ways. It’s set in a world that, in the unrevised version of the first book, seems to have been a lot like ours at one time, complete with people being aware of the song “Hey Jude,” although we’ll also learn that this world exists within a single molecule of a weed dying in a vacant lot. Making it more clear that it isn’t exactly the world we know is the fact that eventually a character will show up saying they were somehow transported into this world from the one they were previously living in, and the place they describe as their homeland is modern day New York City. So it’s a different place, but with some overlap, like “Hey Jude.” Following the space age, this world somehow reverted to a sort of medieval existence, but instead of knights it had gunslingers. Then everything fell apart, and now it’s a mixture of a post-apocalyptic wasteland and the Old West. The lead character is the gunslinger Roland, who is pursuing the mysterious Man in Black across the desert while also trying to reach the Dark Tower, which exists at the point where all worlds and universes meet in a single nexus. Twenty years after publishing The Gunslinger, King would go back and revise the text to make sure Roland’s world was clearly more separate from ours and to rework anything that didn’t perfectly match up with the books that followed – but I’ll admit, I have never read the revised version. The only Gunslinger I’m familiar with is the one that reached shelves in 1982.

The early works of King stir up a lot of nostalgia in me, because I was a young kid in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, back when he truly was a Literary King. A highly-respected, incredibly prolific writer who frequently dropped nightmare fuel onto the page, and every time a new book was published it was A Big Deal. My local library didn’t even keep the King novels on shelves with books by other authors. His work was kept on a separate bookcase in its own section, and I think there was a King-related poster on the wall beside this bookcase. Since I became a horror fan at a young age, I was drawn to this bookcase every time I went into the library – even though I was so young, my focus should have been on the books in the kids' section, down in the basement of the library. (And I did spend a good amount of time down there, especially since they had some of those awesome Crestwood House monster books.) I started reading some of the books that were on that King bookcase... and out of all of the books that were there, it’s The Gunslinger that presses my nostalgia buttons the most. 

I still remember the first time I read this book, sometime in ‘91 or ‘92, at which time I would have been 7 or 8 years old. It was a 1988 edition of the book that featured illustrations by Michael Whelan, and I started reading it when I was staying at my older sister’s house one night. Everyone had already gone to bed, but I wasn’t ready to sleep yet. So I opened The Gunslinger and was immediately captivated by this character Roland and this strange world he inhabited. The night went on as the pages went by, but I didn’t want to stop reading the book. Even though I started to feel extremely tired, I just kept going through it, trying to see if I could get through it all in one sitting. I don’t recall if I managed to accomplish that goal or not, but I know I got very far into it. And loved it. 

The Gunslinger is very different from the average King book, but it also happens to be one of my King books. It basically reads like a Western, but one where demons and monsters lurk at the edge of the story at all times, and occasionally they emerge onto the page. It’s about a gunslinger making his way across the desert, but there are also acts of magic, people crossing between dimensions, creatures that are called Slow Mutants, and a flashback to a sort of medieval kingdom. It has an ending of sorts, since Roland does catch up with that Man in Black by the end, but it also leaves you knowing there’s a lot more story to come – because Roland still needs to reach the Dark Tower. And it’s going to take several more books for him to do that.


BLACK TEARS by Charles Campbell

When I read Charles Campbell’s murder mystery Midnight Rider, I was under the mistaken impression that it was the first novel he had written. Turns out, it was actually from deep into his bibliography – so, left wanting to read more of his work after Midnight Rider, I decided to circle back to the book that actually was his first, Black Tears. 

Set in small town South Carolina, this supernatural horror story centers on a woman named Theresa Barnwell, who starts seeing the ghostly figure of a young boy who carries around a cane fishing pole. And that’s when things in her life start to get strange and frightening. There are mysterious floods in her house, she hears a sound like rain in her head all the time, her cousin dies in a car accident that seems to have involved that young boy in some way. It’s soon apparent that Theresa and her family are in danger, so she has to solve the mystery of this young boy in hopes that she’ll be able to save her own life and the lives of her children. The mystery she has to solve goes back several decades and has something to do with her family history.

Black Tears isn’t the most well-polished book around; there are punctuation issues and some awkward dialogue passages, but if you can brush those aside, you’ll find that Campbell has crafted an interesting horror tale. It took me a while to really get invested in what was going on, but once I did, the book took me on a fun ride. My favorite section came when the Barnwell family decides to go on a water park vacation even though their supernatural issues haven’t been resolved yet. Campbell spends several pages telling us the details of this vacation, but this all turns out to have been build-up to trouble, so when the horrific events kick in, they’re even more effective after we’ve been reading about the Barnwells going through the vacation motions. That leads into an action-packed finale that takes up a good percentage of the book’s pages.

This one didn’t have me locked in from the start, but it grabbed me eventually, and as it went on, I could more and more clearly imagine it being brought to the screen as a Blumhouse production.

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