Reviews with content warning for Gore - The Gunslinger

Reviews tagging 'Gore'

The Gunslinger by Stephen King

11 reviews

lisahearts's review against another edition

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3.0

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vermispore's review against another edition

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adventurous sad tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

A really good book if you like Stephan King and can tolerate high fantasy that doesn't explain much right away. Well written and a fun read, but its the kind of book you love or hate.

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ekcd_'s review against another edition

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adventurous mysterious tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0

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theverycraftyvegan's review against another edition

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adventurous dark mysterious slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.5

My spouse is going to hate when I tell him I didn’t love this book. He thinks The Dark Tower is the greatest series of books ever written, but book one didn’t do anything for me.

Was it well written? Debatable. Stephen King is a great author and I’ve loved many of his other books, but The Gunslinger isn’t one of them. You jump around a lot between the present and the past, and it was all very confusing for me. It felt like the book had absolutely no flow. Maybe the series gets better as you go but I don’t know if I’m interested enough to read 7 more—and most of them very long—books to find out.

Dystopian and apocalyptic, everyone and everything is dying. A very hard existence in an unsavoury world filled with violence and death.

I also didn’t like a single character.

And literally every character you meet dies, except for Roland, so don’t grow attached to anyone.

Jake, the boy, was a confusing addition. Where did he come from? Our time? How did he get there? Why is he there?

And Roland’s love for and eventual betrayal of Jake was just the worst.

Alice was needy and clingy and portrayed to be ugly due to a facial scar and her age. (40s???)

Sylvia was just a horrible excuse of a human.

The people of Tull all sucked.

But the battle of Tull was hands down my favourite part to read.

The Man in Black… I don’t even know what my thoughts are on him. He was very cryptic and I felt like because he only starts to speak at the end of the book I didn’t get to know him.

I’ve read it. I can say I’ve read it. It wasn’t for me. Might be an unpopular opinion, but there it is.

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pkc's review against another edition

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challenging mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.5

I think the key to getting the most out of this book is to to pretend like you’re listening to a friend recount the dreams they had the night previous. That’s the level of abstract oddness you can expect, mixed in with a heady dose of action, classic King gore and flawed characters. In short, I LOVED it can’t wait to read the rest of the series. Though, I do hope the rest of the books are a bit less abstract. I’ll take weirdness any day of the week, but fleshed out weirdness please.

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gbyronwilliams's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

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kia_y_k's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.0

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iljb111203's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional mysterious sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

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bluejayreads's review against another edition

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adventurous mysterious slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No

3.0

I am not the biggest Stephen King fan. He’s definitely a good writer, but I’m not very into the horror genre and that’s what he’s famous for. I didn’t know what this book was about going in or even if it was horror or not, but one of my friends has been going on and on about how awesome this series is and I figured I might as well give it a shot.

I have yet to see a description for this book that actually says much about what the book is about, instead of something like “the first volume in King’s magnum opus” or some other such praise that tells me nothing about the story. The story is about the gunslinger, whose name we later learn is Roland, tracking the mysterious “man in black” across a desert wasteland. Along the way he reflects on his past and tells some of his story to people he meets, so you slowly put together some of his backstory, what this world is, and why he’s chasing the man in black, although the book ends before the puzzle is anywhere close to complete.

That’s really all there is to the plot. Roland is traveling across the desert wasteland and we the reader get stories and flashbacks to orient ourselves to the world (and the characters, to a point) as we go. Even the mysterious Dark Tower that gives the series its name doesn’t get mentioned until the end and I have no idea why Roland wants to find it so bad. I actually have very little idea about Roland himself – the book contains a lot of things that he did or that happened to him, but very little about who he is as a person. He kept his thoughts and feelings tightly under wraps and that prevented me from connecting with him as a character. I didn’t dislike him, but I didn’t know enough about him to like him, either.

The Gunslinger grabbed me right out of the gate with questions: who this gunslinger is (he doesn’t get a name until quite a ways in), why he’s chasing the man in black, who the man in black is, and whether the gunslinger is just traveling through a desert or if the whole world is some apocalyptic desert wasteland. But then it doesn’t make much of an attempt to answer the questions. Even though it’s long enough to be a complete novel, the whole book feels like the first bit of a longer story – the part where the protagonist may have a goal but everything is relatively normal, and the reader is getting oriented to the world before everything goes sideways and the plot starts. I have to imagine this was intentional and Stephen wanted to make the whole series feel like a single story split into multiple volumes, but it was absolutely bizarre to read a whole book that felt like a beginning. It technically is a self-contained story, but the whole book had a feeling of waiting for the plot to start.

If I was just reading on my own, I probably wouldn’t continue the series. This book was reasonably interesting, but it wasn’t enough to grab me and leave me begging for book two. But I had a great time discussing this book with my friend, and my library has the whole series on audiobook. So I’ll probably read book two eventually, if for no other reason than discussing it with my friend.

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luciawolfie's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional mysterious sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

It feels like a fever dream that lasts too long

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