The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.

The desert was the apotheosis of all deserts, huge, standing to the sky for what looked like eternity in all directions. It was white and blinding and waterless and without feature save for the faint, cloudy haze of the mountains which sketched themselves on the horizon and the devil-grass which brought sweet dreams, nightmares, death. An occasional tombstone sign pointed the way, for once the drifted track that cut its way through the thick crust of alkali had been a highway. Coaches and buckas had followed it. The world had moved on since then. The world had emptied.

In his foreword and introduction, Stephen King says that he set out to write an epic like The Lord of the Rings, with a feel to it like The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. So what we get in this first part of the Dark Tower series is mostly about setting the atmosphere, with not a lot of things going on, and certainly more questions raised than answered.

Roland, the Gunslinger, travels across the desert of what clearly is a post-apocalyptic world, sparsely populated with people and mutants. There are artifacts from the time before the world had moved on, in the form of machinery and railways, but that world is probably not ours, because Roland's childhood memories (from almost an eternity ago) do not support that, and he later meets a boy Jake, who was in the moment of his death transported into Roland's world from what seems to be present-day New York, and the boy's account is foreign to Roland. After having crossed the desert and mountains, Roland finally catches up with the man in black he was chasing, and they have a long (ten years long) talk in which the incredible size of the universe is revealed to Roland, both in terms of galaxies and the space between them, as well as in terms of sub-atomic particles and the space between those. Apparently, it all comes together at the Dark Tower, the ultimate target of Roland's quest, and currently controlled by the man in black's master.

I am intrigued (or confused) enough to likely pick up the second volume when I come across it (I got this one from a street vendor for 10 RMB, about 1.12 Euro, which makes me think that it was not an official print. The first page said that a book without cover is stolen property, but a cover it had, and except for the foreword and introduction, all pages appeared in the right order as well).