This is the way the world ends: with a nanosecond of computer error in a Defense Department laboratory and a million casual contacts that form the links in a chain letter of death. And here is the bleak new world of the day after: a world stripped of its institutions and emptied of 99 percent of its people. A world in which a handful of panicky survivors choose sides - or are chosen. A world in which good rides on the frail shoulders of the 108-year-old...

In The Gunslinger, King introduces Roland Deschain of Gilead, the Last Gunslinger. He is a haunting, solitary figure at first, on a mysterious quest through a desolate world that eerily mirrors our own. Pursuing the man in black, an evil being who can bring the dead back to life, Roland is a good man who seems to leave nothing but death in his wake.

Roland, the Last Gunslinger, and his companions--Eddie Dean and Susannah--cross the desert of damnation, drawing ever closer to the Dark Tower, a legion of fiendish foes, and revelations that could alter the world.

Roland is drawn through a gateway of time and space into the drug-and-crime-ridden world of the twentieth-century to battle a dark power determined to prevent his search for the Dark Tower.