The Gunslinger

Imagine a super tough cowboy hero named Roland in a busted-up world full of deserts and ruins, chasing a creepy wizard bad guy called the Man in Black to find a magical tower that keeps everything from falling apart. Along the way, Roland remembers training hard as a kid to fight with guns, saves a town from evil people but has to kill them all, meets a scared boy named Jake who got yanked from New York through a magic door, and finally beats the bad guy who tells spooky future secrets with magic cards before Roland wins the fight.

The Gunslinger, the inaugural volume of Stephen King's magnum opus The Dark Tower series, follows Roland Deschain, the last gunslinger of a fallen world, as he relentlessly pursues the Man in Black across the scorched Mohaine Desert of Mid-World. Interspersed with flashbacks to Roland's adolescence in the barony of Gilead, the narrative details his rigorous apprenticeship under the grizzled warrior Cort—culminating in a brutal rite of passage—and the devastating betrayal by the sorcerer Marten, who seduced his mother Gabrielle, propelling Roland into manhood with patricidal resolve. Arriving in the decayed frontier town of Tull, Roland forms a fleeting liaison with the enigmatic waitress Allie, only to uncover the town's corruption under the sway of the fire-and-brimstone preacher Sylvia Pittston, unleashing a cataclysmic massacre to purge the affliction. Venturing into the Cyclopean mountains, Roland communes with a raw and demonic oracle, teetering on the brink of madness amid thinnies that warp reality. In the ensuing wastelands, he encounters Jake Chambers, a displaced boy from 1977 New York City, drawn through a mystical beach door by the Man in Black's machinations. Their nascent ka-tet confronts the sorcerer amid a primordial circle of standing stones, where Walter O'Dim performs a fateful tarot reading—The Prisoner, The Lady of Shadows, Death—foretelling trials ahead. Roland slays his quarry, awakening from an unnatural slumber to decipher skeletal omens that illuminate the multiverse's fragility and the existential quest for the Dark Tower, the linchpin of existence.