The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger (1982) by Stephen King, illustrated by Michael Whelan, is the legendary first installment of King’s Dark Tower series—a surreal, genre-blending epic that fuses spaghetti Western grit with apocalyptic fantasy. This original edition, published by Grant with Whelan’s seminal cover art and interior illustrations, introduces Roland Deschain, the last gunslinger of a fallen civilization, as he pursues the sorcerous Man in Black across a desolate, time-warped landscape. Whelan’s paintings—most famously Roland standing amid the bones of a dead civilization under a crimson sky—capture the novel’s stark beauty and existential dread, while his renderings of key scenes (Jake’s fate in the mountains, the palaver with the Man in Black) deepen the mythic resonance.
King’s prose, lean and hypnotic, draws from Robert Browning’s poem “Childe Roland” and Sergio Leone’s films, crafting a dreamlike odyssey that asks: “What sacrifices define a quest?” The 1982 text, later revised in 2003, retains its raw, enigmatic power here.
A holy grail for collectors, this edition marries King’s visionary worldbuilding with Whelan’s iconic artistry, launching a saga that would span eight books and forty years.
![A.A. Milne - When We Were Very Young 1924. First edition [1]](https://www.nocloo.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/aam-young1-300x400.jpg)