Stephen King’s voice is smooth, straightforward, easily digested. Technically, aesthetically, he is quite good at that voice - but I don’t think when it comes down to it, that I care very much for it. It is maybe without flaws, but that makes it without character? Or perhaps it is simply unambitious to the point that it becomes uninteresting. The plot of The Gunslinger, on the other hand, is quite ambitious, aiming for the unusual, unpredictable, and potentially offputting. Snippets of Lore are dropped here and there, slowly filling in the backdrop of the strange Arthurian-Western post-apocalyptic dystopia. I think at periods in my life I would be enraptured by that, but at the moment I feel like it is little more than a random collage, a patchwork of tropes and times thrown together based on authorial whim - surely a story, a cohesive world can be woven of a random collage, but again, it becomes a bit uninteresting.