Entertaining the Alien

32. The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger, Stephen King*

I debated whether or not to list this as a reread, because it's the revised version that came out last year. But really, the changes weren't that fundamental (unlike, say, the revised version of The Stand vs. the original version--I'd argue that those are two very different books).

Overall, I'm feeling pretty ambivalent about the changes King made to this. Ironically, while Mer felt he moved away from spoilering himself (the "but what he didn't know was that death was waiting for him around the corner" syndrome), I actually felt like the spoilers worsened, a lot, because he kept referring to things that happened in 'future' books. I mean, I get that the world (and even to some extent, the plot) changed on him as he wrote the series, and I get that he used the revisions of earlier books to sort of backfill those changes, but I kept thinking that a first time reader of the series would lose a lot of the impact later on.

To use a rather spoilerish example myself (you've been warned!), in the revised Gunslinger, King keeps referring to Susan's fate in Wizard and Glass (I think in the original Gunslinger she gets no more mention than just of a mysterious "girl in the window" in Roland's past). Had I known, in vivid detail, exactly what awaited Susan before I read Wizard and Glass I think a huge part of the emotional punch of the book would have been lost on me. A little bit of this works well--for example, I'm still waiting to find out why Cuthbert and Roland had to kill Alain, something referred to tangentially once or twice--but too much kills off a lot of the mythic, veiled feel that I love so much about the series.

I still love the book, and I think some of the changes are interesting, but I think whenever I hand the series to a new reader to start on, I'm going to hand them the original version of The Gunslinger, and save the revision for another time.