For a man who admitted in Danse Macabre that "if I find I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out," The Gunslinger is like a wild glimpse into the mind of the better writer, the one who knew how to scribe all along but also realized he could make one hell of a good living churning out "spine-tinglers" like Carrie or Pet Sematary. I don't mean to hack on King's early stuff, or some of the later flops (mostly ghastly concoctions like "The Ten O'Clock People" in Nightmares and Dreamscapes, ironically published alongside one of the better poems I've ever read, "Brooklyn August"), but somehow I doubt King himself would entirely disagree. Even Harlan Ellison and Ernest Hemingway sold some popular stinkers.

The writing itself is still quintessential King, the occasional streaming ticks that turn singsong phrases like "beans, beans the musical fruit" into strange recurring mantras, snippets of popular American rock 'n roll songs whacked out of time and place but nuzzled fondly by Kingian nostalgia, and the tendency for the narrative voice to intrude by batting a character's thoughts around like a shuttlecock. Except here it comes together and functions in a way that's more likely to leave the careful reader awestruck by the bricklayer prose than eyeball rolling at tawdry theatrics and snarled plottng.

Unlike much of King's better known material, The Gunslinger is difficult to categorize. There are elements of science fiction, the speculative projection of some broken-down future time in a multi-dimensional branch universe (though how it directly relates to our own is only loosely revealed in iconic references to restaurant slogans and Beatles songs) and mysterious adumbrations concerning twentieth century American technology that has somehow infected (or been infected by) ancient history in Roland's world. There are elements of dark fantasy, the invocation of spirits (tied to science, the use of drugs to enhance the "speaking" trance), magic, mysticism, and the blasted post-apocalyptic landscape like something out of a frenzied Bosch nightmare. And it wouldn't be King without at least some horror element -- in this case a tango with the undead in a root cellar, or a dark crawl through an ancient cavern by rail on a handcar, replete with scabby mutants.

Mostly, though, it's a western.

Part of it is the hard-boiled narrative voice of the gunslinger himself, the True Grit meets The Wild Bunch golem-obstinate plodding mythology of the stone cold American West and its packs of nomadic noble killers. Make no mistake, though, this is far more McMurty's Lonesome Dove or Eastwood's Unforgiven, than John Ford's Duke, eschewing the romantic nonsensical coping mechanisms of the spaghetti westerns and potboiler dime novels that once cluttered American culture in a vain attempt to blot out a sordid colonial history of madness and massacre.

The other part of it is the one-third fount of inspiration King cites, the 1855 Robert Browning poem "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" (which cribs its title from Edgar's song in King Lear, which in turn cribs its title from a Scottish ballad entitled "Childe Roland" as well, perhaps, as the 12th century French epic "Song of Roland") which King recalls being assigned in a sophomore undergrad course. Like the overarching theme of the poem -- the ultimate knight's crusade, innenwelt and umwelt, and if you're in Harold Bloom's camp, a quest for ultimate affirmation and simultaneous annihilation -- King's ascending "knight" is on a spiritual self-quest externalized through a landscape ravaged by projection and memory.

He knew why the rhyme had occurred to him. There had been the recurring dream of his room in the castle and of his mother, who had sung it to him as he lay solemnly in the tiny bed by the window of many colors... now it came back maddeningly, like prickly heat, chasing its own tail in his mind as he walked... out here even the devil-grass had grown stunted and yellow. The hardpan had disintegrated in places to mere rubble.

He watched his feet move up and down, listened to the nonsense rhyme sing itself into a pitiful garble in his mind, and wondered when he would fall down for the first time. He didn't want to fall, even though there was no one to see him. It was a matter of pride. A gunslinger knows about pride -- that invisible bone that keeps the neck stiff.

Ellen Datlow has referred to King as sui generis. Read into that whatever you will, Datlow is precisely correct in its most simple interpretation -- King defies categorization. And while I tend to find a lot of his more well-known material dramatically less interesting, I can't think of a cycle that better fits Datlow's classification than The Dark Tower series. Whether it transcends itself, bats average, or flops altogether remains to be seen, but for now readers of speculative fiction owe it to themselves to see another side of the inimitable Mr. King.

Disclaimer: There's an interesting little twist on the tale to which you need to pay attention, if for some crazy reason this review convinces you to go out and pick up a copy of book one -- hold up a minute. It turns out King has recently re-written the entire first book and expanded it by roughly twenty percent. According to the recent Amazon.com King interview, "I always thought that one was different from the other ones in that it was written when I was so young. It always seemed to me like it was trying too hard to be something really, really important. So I tried to simplify it a little bit." By the time you read this, the revised version will already be on store shelves (and the SF Site comparative review forthcoming).