I dag er det søndag, og Verdens bokdag, og tid for nye smakebiter hos Flukten fra virkeligheten. Min kommer fra Stephen King’s serie The Dark Tower, bok I, The Gunslinger. Dette er en serie jeg er veldig glad i, men som jeg bare har lest på norsk. Mest fordi min kjærlighet til serien startet før jeg begynte å lese noe særlig på engelsk. Jeg nyter det nye med å lese på originalspråket, men er ikke blitt mindre glad i min norske oversettelse.

Alt du trenger å vite før du leser serien er at de handler om en mann som heter Roland Deschain, fra Gilead. Roland er en revolvermann, og er den eneste igjen med arverett til kongedømmet han vokste opp i, og som ikke lenger finnes. Roland leter etter The Dark Tower – senteret av alt. Stephen King har funnet ideer til begynnelsen av historien i dette diktet: (Childe Roland at the Dark Tower Came – Robert Browning (1812-89)). Smakebiten er fra slutten av boken:

He began west again, his back set against the sunrise, heading toward the ocean, realizing that a great passage of his life had come and gone. “I loved you Jake”, he said aloud.
The stiffness wore out of his body and he began to walk more rapidly. By that evening, he had come to the end of the land. He sat on a beach that stretched left or right forever, deserted. The waves beat endlessly against the shore. The setting sun painted the water in a wide strip of fool’s gold.

Fra forlaget:
The Gunslinger is the first volume in Stephen King’s epic Dark Tower series. The Dark Tower is soon to be a major motion picture starring Matthew McConaughey and Idris Elba, due in cinemas July 28, 2017. In this first novel in his epic fantasy masterpiece, Stephen King introduces readers to one of his most enigmatic heroes, Roland of Gilead, the Last Gunslinger. He is a haunting figure, a loner, on a spellbinding journey into good and evil, in a desolate world which frighteningly echoes our own. In his first step towards the powerful and mysterious Dark Tower, Roland encounters an alluring woman named Alice, begins a friendship with Jake, a kid from New York, and faces an agonising choice between damnation and salvation as he pursues the Man in Black. Both grippingly realistic and eerily dreamlike,

Linker:
Stephen King’s serie The Dark Tower
The Dark Tower Wiki