The Gunslinger
Stephen King, 1982
Fantasy HorrorScience fictionContemporary fiction
A lone gunslinger tracks a sorcerer across a dead desert, in a world that has already moved on and left him behind.
Feels like dread, awe and longing. About adventure, solitude and time.
A page from the book
What it sounds like to turn aiming a gun into a prayer.
I do not aim with my hand; he who aims with his hand has forgotten the face of his father.I aim with my eye.I do not shoot with my hand; he who shoots with his hand has forgotten the face of his father.I shoot with my mind.I do not kill with my gun; he who kills with his gun has forgotten the face of his father.I kill with my heart. Stephen King.King began the first Gunslinger story in 1970, aged 22; it appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1978 before becoming the novel.
Books that feel like this
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A flu escapes a lab and empties America; survivors choose between a saintly old woman and a smiling dark man. King's big, bleak, compulsive plague epic.
Pet Sematary
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A doctor moves his family to a Maine town where the local pet cemetery sits beside something older, and grief becomes a door that should stay shut.
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Questions readers ask
- What is The Gunslinger like?
- Feels like dread, awe and longing. About adventure, solitude and time.
- What should I read after The Gunslinger?
- If you liked The Gunslinger, try The Fifth Season (N.K. Jemisin), The Return of the King (J.R.R. Tolkien) and Hyperion (Dan Simmons).
A taste of the feed
She doesn't hate him for being powerful. She hates him for being honest.
This is why she hates Alabaster: not because he is more powerful, not even because he is crazy, but because he refuses to allow her any of the polite fictions and unspoken truths that have kept her comfortable, and safe, for years.
The Fifth Season · N.K. Jemisin
What a single star can do to someone at the end of their strength.
There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.
The Return of the King · J.R.R. Tolkien
The best years are the ones nobody thought to photograph.
Sarai had treasured every stage of Rachel’s childhood, enjoying the day-to-day normalcy of things; a normalcy which she quietly accepted as the best of life. She had always felt that the essence of human experience lay not primarily in the peak experiences, the wedding days and triumphs which stood out in the memory like dates circled in red on old calendars, but, rather, in the unself-conscious flow of little things - the weekend afternoon with each member of the family engaged in his or her own pursuit, their crossings and connections casual, dialogues imminently forgettable, but the sum of such hours creating a synergy which was important and eternal.
Hyperion · Dan Simmons
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