The Gunslinger: The Dark Tower I

In spite of the rave reviews this series has garnered, I was not impressed. I would never peg myself as a Stephen King fan to start with, but I did like "The Green Mile" and the whole idea of a futuristic, sci-fi western intrigued me, so I gave it a shot. I read the newly revised edition of the first in a series of seven "Dark Tower" books. The present world the gunslinger, Roland Deschain, inhabits is a bleak one of deterioration, mutation, and despair. But when he was a boy, there was a civilization that sounds a bit Arthurian. He lived in a stone palace that was the center of culture. His father, also a gunslinger, was the ostensible ruler. Becoming a gunslinger bears similarity to becoming a knight--hard training under hard-handed masters. But gunslingers are esteemed in that world, just as knights were. Then the "world moved on" and the gunslinger is now on a quest to find "the man in black," who seems to be a sorcerer of some kind; for example, he can enchant a whole town into seeing the gunslinger as an evil spirit, so that he is forced to kill the entire population in self-defense. They sounded a miserable lot anyway, but YUCK. Then he finds a young boy in a deserted way station in the desert--no doubt another trap set by the man in black. And the gunslinger must betray this boy to his death in order to catch the man in black. It is all very grim, a little murky as to storyline, and, to my taste, somewhat boring. Don't think I will pursue the other 6 books in the series.