I picked this book up at WHSmith because it sounded like a blend of Lord Of The Rings and The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly. Is it a worthwhile read for those have it?
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It is sort of like that. Its a group on a mystical quest, and Roland is modeled on the Man With No Name. All that said, its a pretty good series. Like Recon said, it gets pretty weird. I read it all the way through, and felt that for the weirdness, it was pretty good.
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By about the 4 installment it was getting just a little too weird for my imagination to picture the scenery and world. Up until then, he was doing a great job of building character(s), backstory, and weaving a really odd world that had "moved on". You can tell he wanted (and even had) an "epic odyssey" and that King tends to write in a sort of "stream of consciousness" style (that you also tend to read it in). I mean, the man just cranks out text at some ungodly speed and you have to sort of just let it "wash over you and let it take you with the current".... but after a while, you begin to wonder where in the hell it's headed and if you really want to drift with it any more. I ended up swimming to shore and walking away from it. Probably not my best metaphor.
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It's not even close to the books you compared it to. I read it and did not care for it that much and I read a lot of Stephen King. You can really tell the Gunslinger is one of his first books. I really like the character he imagined, but the Gunslinger could have been a lot better. Now with that said, the next one in the series, The Drawing of Three was really, really good, but if you are going to get into the series you pretty much have to read the Gunslinger first since The Drawing of Three literally starts exactly where the Gunslinger ended. The Gunslinger is an alright book, but not the greatest and once again, it is nothing like the other books you compared it to.