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"The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed." Few opening lines in modern fantasy have done more heavy lifting. In a single sentence, King establishes the engine of his self-described magnum opus: an obsession, a pursuit, a landscape stripped to almost nothing. Whether the 250 pages that follow live up to that line is the question that has divided readers for forty years, and the honest answer is that they do, but only on the book's terms, and only if you accept that those terms are unusually demanding for an opening volume.

The Gunslinger is a strange creature, and it is worth being upfront about that. King began writing it in 1978, finished it in 1982, and then revised and re-released it in 2003 once the wider series was complete. The revision smooths continuity errors, plants foreshadowing for later volumes, and tightens a few sentences that betrayed how young the writer was when he first set them down. It is the better book for it, particularly if you intend to continue, though purists who treasure the rawness of the original edition have a defensible case.

What makes the novel work, when it works, is atmosphere. Roland of Gilead pursues his quarry through a post-apocalyptic hellscape that owes obvious debts to Sergio Leone, Tolkien, Milton, and Arthurian legend, but feels like none of them in combination. The world has "moved on," to use the book's own haunting phrase, and decay is the dominant register. Towns are dying, the sun is hotter than it should be, technology and magic coexist in fragments that neither explain themselves nor apologise. The prose is genuinely beautiful in long stretches, particularly in the flashback to Roland's training under the brutal teacher Cort, which most readers identify as the book's standout section. The Tull massacre, in which Roland guns down an entire town, including a woman he has slept with, is one of the most quietly shocking scenes in King's catalogue, precisely because it is rendered without theatre.

But the book is slow, and pretending otherwise does it no favours. The narrative moves between present action, dreamlike flashback, and mythic backstory in a way that some find hypnotic and others find frustrating. The middle stretch, in which Roland descends through tunnels with the boy Jake, has been singled out by even sympathetic readers as a section that asks for more patience than it always rewards. Roland himself is deliberately underdrawn, more silhouette than character at this stage, and the relationships he forms can feel cold compared to the warmer ensembles King writes elsewhere. Those who come to the book expecting the propulsive pace of It or the emotional generosity of The Stand will find something almost wilfully different: introspective, elliptical, and content to withhold answers for hundreds of pages, perhaps thousands.

The Man in Black, the supposed antagonist, remains more rumour than figure for almost the entire book, and the climactic confrontation, when it finally arrives, is more philosophical than dramatic. Whether this lands as profound or as a deflection depends largely on the reader. It is fair to say that King is not chiefly interested in suspense here, and a reader who needs the gun to go off at regular intervals will be left checking the page count.

There is also the matter of what this book is doing inside King's larger project. The Dark Tower is the spine of his fiction, and characters, places, and resonances from across his bibliography touch this series at some point. For readers who have followed King for decades, this first volume rewards rereading in a way that no single reading can capture. For newcomers, that knowledge is mostly inaccessible, which is partly why so many find the opening volume baffling on first contact and revelatory on the second.

The honest verdict, then, is that The Gunslinger is a book that asks to be judged by the series it begins rather than as a standalone, and that judging it on its own merits will produce either a generous four-star response or a frustrated two. It is a tone poem with a body count, an introduction that prefers mood to momentum, and the gateway to one of the strangest sustained acts of imagination in American genre fiction. If you have the temperament for it, you already know. If you don't, no review will persuade you, and that is probably as it should be.