The Gunslinger is the first instalment in The Dark Tower series by Stephen King. It follows Roland Deschain, the last gunslinger, as he pursues the man in black. The series is inspired by a Robert Browning poem, “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.”
Here are my favourite metaphors, similes, and descriptions from The Gunslinger by Stephen King:
metaphors & similes
The wind moaned, a witch with cancer in her belly.
Every now and then a perverse downdraft would make the smoke whirl and puff toward him and he breathed some of it in. It built dreams in the same way that a small irritant may build a pearl in an oyster.
Thunder racketed the sky with a sound like some god coughing.
The gunslinger saw the murder in his eyes quite clearly, and although he did not fear it, he marked it as a man might mark a page in a book, one that contained potentially valuable instructions.
There was still a sick ache in his head from the sunstroke, and the water sat uneasily in his stomach, as if it did not know where to go.
His teeth felt strange in his head, tiny tombstones set in pink moist earth.
He looked at the gunslinger, who saw that the boy’s mouth was trembling as he strove to keep back tears—only a boy, he thought, and pain smote him, the icepick that too much cold water can sometimes plant in the forehead.
That afternoon they found a single footprint in one of these snowpatches. Jake stared at it for a moment with awful fascination, then looked up frightfully, as if expecting to see the man in black materialize into his own footprint.
descriptions
This one is from the introduction:
Time puts gray in your beard, time takes away your jump-shot, and all the while you’re thinking—silly you—that it’s still on your side.
This one is the opening line:
The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.
She wept, hands at her face. He was glad she had her hands at her face. Not because of the scar but because it gave her back her maidenhood, if not her maidenhead.
It is only 37% of the way through the book that we find out the name of the protagonist! How interesting:
They nodded at each other and then the man Allie had called Roland walked away, his body festooned with guns and water.
His parents do not hate him, but they do seem to have overlooked him.
Jake could pick him out of a line-up of skinny men with crewcuts. Probably.
The cellar smelled of cabbages and turnips and potatoes with long, sightless eyes gone to everlasting rot. The ladder, however, seemed quite sturdy, and he climbed down.
A large praying mantis was performing ablutions on the springy stem of the kid’s cowlick.
Which ones are your favourites?
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