A man known as the gunslinger is in pursuit of a mysterious man in black. Who this gunslinger is and what he wants will be revealed slowly over the course of the book, along with the details of the mysterious fantasy world we find him in. One thing's for sure: he's not going to let the man in black get away from him, no matter how much desert he must cross or what he'll have to sacrifice.

The Gunslinger is a fantasy novel with a Western feel to it. The setting includes a vast desert, a small town with little more than a bar and a church, and uncharted wilderness beyond. The main character is stoic and emotionally hardened, the kind of man who does what he feels he has to. And of course that includes leaving some bullet-riddled bodies behind him.

Unique in this world is that the gunslinger is the only character who seems to own operating guns. Meanwhile, magic is real and demons a real threat. The worldbuilding in this book gives few explanations, tossing out new concepts and hoping the reader can either guess what terms mean and how things work or else wait patiently for more clues to be given later.

The main character is almost equally mysterious, with a name that isn't revealed until many pages in and motivations that remained unclear to me even after I reached the ending. There are long sections of backstory given, both for him and certain other characters, but I suspect to get the full answers would require reading the entire series. In this book, you'll mainly gain a greater understanding of how the gunslinger came to be the person he is, including some hints at why he's so emotionally distant.

The writing quality is excellent, including a liberal sprinkling of clever lines. Often a description would catch me by surprise and make me pause to consider. Other times, it describes an experience few people have likely had before in a way that makes it easy to conceptualize, like when the characters are travelling through a vast tunnel and we're treated to such lines as: "There was no fuel in this rock womb, and what they had brought with them was going rapidly to ash. At times the urge to strike a light was well-nigh insatiable. They had discovered one could grow as hungry for light as for food.". This book is practically begging you to stop and savor the prose.

On the negative side, however, the main character was raised in a clearly sexist society and doesn't seem to have progressed beyond it in any way. Neither does the narrative do anything to challenge him or to present the reader with female characters who define themselves rather than being defined by their relationships with men. Nearly all the female characters were sexualized, and this was often presented as the most important thing about them or one of the few important things about them. The female character I found most interesting was given this treatment, was present only for a portion of the story, and then was ever after referred to with an explanation of who she'd been. As if the author was expecting the reader to have forgotten about her completely. Meanwhile, some of the male characters who appeared only briefly in backstory were afterwards referred to by name alone, with a clear expectation that readers should remember them. This is the kind of book where women exist mainly to be mothers or sisters or servants or sexual partners to men, and you shouldn't go in expecting anything else.

But if you're willing to give the book a shot in spite of that, I would say that its strengths lie in the writing and the (male) characterization. Whether you'll enjoy the book likely comes down to whether you enjoy the writing style and characters of the same mold as the gunslinger. If you're willing to strap in for the ride and go wherever the author takes you, you'll find a steadily unfolding narrative with new discoveries around every turn. You'll probably want to stay on for the whole series to see how it ends. But if you don't have the stomach for long stretches of toxic masculinity, it's best to find a different book.

I don't think I'm this book's target audience.

What a horrible way to start a series. I could only get to page a 110 before I decided I didn't want to waste my tme with this book. I had heard before that this book wasn't as good as the actual series but... I was on page 110 an I still didn't know what the purpose of the character was, why he was following the black man or what the heck was going on with the dead people who weren't dead.
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L'ultimo cavaliere è il primo romanzo di Stephen King che leggo: mi sembrava doveroso visto che è un autore così importante. Devo dire che l'inizio non mi colpita particolarmente: sì, ha un'ambientazione molto particolare e un protagonista altrettanto intrigante, ma mi è sembrato mancasse qualcosa. Probabilmente il fatto che sia un'opera giovanile ha il suo peso.

Ci sono, infatti, molti passaggi efficaci circondati da parti più deboli e meno incisive, parti che nemmeno le cinquanta cartelle aggiunte dall'autore in questa edizione sono riuscite a rafforzare.

Tuttavia, il mio giudizio complessivo sul romanzo è positivo perché le ultime pagine fanno davvero ben sperare per i volumi successivi (in tutto sette). Penso che L'ultimo cavaliere risenta anche della sindrome da “primo libro”: incuriosisce abbastanza da desiderare di continuare la serie, ma non spicca per eccellenza (che, però, mi aspetto nei romanzi successivi).

Un ultimo appunto. Certo che Tolkien, tra le altre cose, ha instillato la mania di Torri Nere in un considerevole numero di scrittori. Si finisce per trovare Torri Nere ovunque... ( )

Not going to rate this one. I love King's books but this one and I, we just cannot connect. This is my third time reading it and I am just going to accept that it's not for me.

The writing is so beautiful in places you want to read it over and over again but the story is not one I can fall into.