Fantasy Westerns and Chair Painting

Dear Party-Crashing Chimpanzees,

Talking about two books today.

The Gunslinger by Stephen King
One Vacant Chair by Joe Coomer

I was a little disappointed in The Gunslinger, though I probably should have seen that coming. I don't like long books, and even though The Gunslinger is a short book, it is part of a much, much larger story--The Dark Tower series. The story is slow and not much happens. On top of that, I never got invested into the main character, never really cared what happened to him. The general idea is interesting. The story is about the Gunslinger, which is a title for a sort of warrior in this fantasy western type story. The world is an alternate reality to ours and this gunslinger is chasing after A Man in Black across a desert. Along the way, he meets a boy who has somehow traveled from our world to his and the pair continue onward together.

Even though I didn't love this book, I continued onward with the next one in the series. Unfortunately, even though it started with a decent amount of action, I still could not bring myself to read on. I'm not sure what it is. It might be the daunting idea that there are thousands of more pages before I would finish The Dark Tower, and for me to want to do that, I need to be entirely enraptured in a story and not just passing the time. Maybe one day I'll give it another shot.

One Vacant Chair has a sweet melodic pace to it and I rather enjoyed it. It's an atypical road trip novel featuring a middle age woman on the run from a failing marriage and her 62 year old aunt that paints chair portraits. They travel to Scotland to scatter the ashes of their recently deceased grandmother and mother, respectively, along with her disinterred husband. This is a simple novel about people and relationships and has no explosions and murders and car chase scenes. It's at times funny and sad. It is also interesting in the fact that the main character, Sarah, is written in the first person by a male author, which is not typical. It is also very well done.

-Matt