Hindsight is everything. I first picked up book one of the Dark Tower series, The Gunslinger, when I was in the deepest throes of my teenage King addiction. I had read a lot of his books by this point (around 1995) and was ploughing through them. I came to The Eyes of the Dragon, a book that looked different from the others on the shelf, read it … and hated it. Hated it with every part of my horror-loving self. I knew what I wanted from Stephen King. I wanted the horror. I wanted the science fiction. I wanted the weird darkness in the hearts of normal people. The Gunslinger was, I knew, part of a longer-running story; it was also a fantasy novel, as The Eyes of the Dragon was. It was, I decided, after 20 pages of weird-speak and dusty places and a man called Roland, not for me. That's fine, I thought, not every book has to be for me. But I wasn't alone. It seemed they weren't King's most popular books. I moved on.

In 2003, I realised that I was an idiot. A friend, a huge King fan, noticed the gap in my collection. He told me I was insane. I hadn't read The Dark Tower? King's magnum opus? We were heading towards the end of the series, with Book V (Wolves of the Calla) about to be published, and I was behind. I was going on holiday for a week to sunnier climes, and decided to take the first four books with me.

Day one of the holiday, I put my back out. Seriously. I'm not an old man, just a criminally unfit one. I jumped into a freezing cold swimming pool and pulled a muscle – or rather, the muscle, the one that helps you, you know, move. I spent three days on a sofa, and began reading The Gunslinger on day one. I finished book four, Wizard and Glass, three days later. I was totally embroiled. It was like nothing I'd ever read. It was funny and dark and scary and nasty and really, really strange. Somewhere between high and (so-called) low art; literary metafiction meets SF/fantasy/western pulp. But most importantly, how had I lived without it? The first line – "The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed" – is so perfect. How had I not wanted to read the whole thing? What did the teenage me get so wrong?

Now I understand. The Gunslinger is a quiet, meditative novel; as inauspicious a way to start a sprawling epic fantasy series as I've ever encountered. In Roland Deschain, the titular Gunslinger, there's a superb, violent, powerful and thoughtful protagonist – Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name by way of Robert Browning's poem, Childe Rolande to the Dark Tower Came. He's cold and dark, and we see him wander through dusty western towns, shooting and fucking his way towards his nemesis, The Man in Black. This is Randall Flagg, whom you might remember from The Stand (though he is never called by that name here). He's a Very Bad Man. It transpires that he's been a part of Roland's life, in various guises, since the Gunslinger was a child, and that's he's responsible for some horrible things. Roland has to find him, catch him and kill him. That's what a Gunslinger does.

So far, so fetch quest. But The Gunslinger is curiously structured. There are five distinct parts, each with both a main story thread and some form of character-fleshing flashback into Roland's history. People are introduced who seem as if they'll stick around for the long run, only to be cut down or sacrificed to the story. The only constant throughout each part: Roland and his pursuit. And (Spoiler alert!) just as you think it's building towards Roland catching Flagg (or O'Dim or Marten, noms des plumes that he travels under in this book), the nemeses meet and … they have a campfire. They don't fight. There's no physical battle. Flagg uses magic to show Roland how insignificant he is, and then he makes him sleep for 10 years. That sounds tepid, like a let down – but it's not. It's so powerful to read it: to know it as the start of a journey that's going to take you to other worlds.

And it really does. It feels like a western, for the most part, but Roland's flashbacks, set in his homeland of Gilead, they're high fantasy. It's high-falutin' and fancy, and there are all sorts of traditional fantasy tropes. Oh, and then there are the Slow Mutants, whom Roland and his sort-of-ward Jake (a refugee from another world, where New York is a place and they have taxicabs and movie theatres) meet as they're travelling on the abandoned railroad. (In the earlier versions of the novel, the strangeness of the worlds was more explicit: there were references to England, Mars, Jesus, Easter – all manner of things that implied we, the readers, were not being told the whole truth. These were deleted in a 2003 re-edit of the novel, possibly because they gave too much of the whole Dark Tower game away too early.) While the metafiction present in the later Dark Tower novels isn't directly seen, the world in which it can take place is established.

The Gunslinger is a great novel. It's strange and obtuse, but absolutely succeeds in its primary intent: to establish Roland and his larger quest, to find the Dark Tower and the Crimson King. The books that followed it would take the story to different places still, and push it forward; but reading this, you understand why King's fans love it as they do. It's him, but more so. As the series goes on it becomes his whole canon, the glue that holds his universe together. It's not for everyone, but somehow it also is: as when looking at King's entire literary output, The Gunslinger is a hodge-podge of genres and styles, thrown together, that somehow works perfectly. People assume that they won't like it, but I'd really beg every King fan, however fairweather, to give it a try. That first line is near-perfect; and the rest of the book follows suit.

Connections

Without discussing the links between this and the other Dark Tower books (because that is absolutely everything), there are curiously few direct connections to other King texts. Randall Flagg is the major one (appearing in The Stand, The Eyes of the Dragon, The Talisman, and mentioned or alluded to in many other books). The conversation between Flagg and Roland is echoed much later in Insomnia, along with the presence of the Crimson King (whom we also see in Hearts in Atlantis, The Black House and maybe other works such as It, depending on interpretation). In Cell, one of the characters writes a comicbook featuring a thinly veiled Roland character. The connections would rocket up as the books went on, however, eventually weaving the Dark Tower into every other book that King has written.

Next up

When we make it to the other side of Christmas we'll be looking at Different Seasons (or, the book that spawned The Shawshank Redemption and Stand By Me).