The Dark Tower series was one of the great joys of my reading life. However, it also frustrated me to the point where I often wanted to bludgeon Stephen King with a hardback copy of It. 
 I was baffled by The Gunslinger when I first read it way back in my high school days. It had been an unobtainable limited edition that had popped up in the title card of King's other books, and when it finally went into wide release I couldn't wait to snatch it up. But then I couldn't make sense of it. There was a cowboy in an almost apocalyptic landscape where magic existed, but everyone knew the lyrics to Hey Jude. After scratching my head over it for a while, I decided that King must have hit the bottle a little extra hard that day, and then I forgot all about it. 
 I was so unimpressed that I didn't even make an effort to get The Drawing of the Three when it first released. When I finally read it, I got an inkling of what King was doing, and it seemed cool as hell. And since I had delayed reading the second book for so long, I didn't have a long wait for the third one. By the early '90s I had gone from Dark Tower skeptic to hardcore convert. (Little did I know the frustrations that awaited.) 
 The gunslinger is Roland Deschain, a kind of knight with two six guns instead of a sword and shield. Roland is chasing a mysterious 'man in black' across a seemingly endless desert. We don't know exactly where they are, but the place seems to be in a state of decay. There are occasional remnants of very advanced technology, but things have devolved to the point where Roland's revolvers are the most high tech thing around. Magic, demons and mutants are also common place in this world. 
 Over the course of the book, we learn that Roland has been chasing this man for years, and he's never been closer. He eventually comes across Jake, a young boy whose last memory is of being pushed into the street and killed by the man in black in what seems to be our New York of the 1970s. Roland knows that Jake has been left as a trap to force him into a choice that will further damn his soul (Which is seeming kind of ragged around the edges anyhow.), but he is committed to catching the man in black so he can find the Dark Tower. 
 After the other books in the series had come out, I would occasionally go back through The Gunslinger and what came later completely changed my mind about this. It went from being a strange book that I didn't understand or care about to the surreal prologue to a series I was more than a little obsessed with. I started to enjoy the cryptic vagueness and lack of information in the story. It was our introduction to the obsessed Roland, and once we got a bigger look at that world I came to love this book. 
 However, when King started the series, he had no idea what came next or how it would end, and he never felt obligated to stick strictly to the hints and clues that he littered in earlier books like this one or even his other books that contained bits of the Dark Tower. So there were continuity errors and predicted events that never came to pass. After finishing the series, King decided to update and revise The Gunslinger to get it in line with what he wrote later. 
 If he would have just stuck to cleaning up some of the continuity errors and revising the prophecy bits to match, I could have lived with that. Unfortunately, King couldn't resist seeding the entire revised edition with more history and foreshadowing of coming events than in the original version. I liked it more when he stuck to just throwing us in the deep end with this strange world and morally compromised main character. I still prefer my original copy, flaws and all. 
 However, there's another factor in play when it comes to this revised edition, but I can't talk about it without spoiling the ending. My official recommendation for newbies is to read the original version first, then the series and then come back to this revised edition if you feel like it. Call me old school, but I think it plays better that way. 
 Here's a bit more about why King gets a bit of a pass for essentially pulling a George Lucas and having Han not shoot first. Do NOT read this if you don't want to know how the series ends. 
 (view spoiler)[ King gave himself a Get-Out-of-Jail free card with the ending to DT. Since we know that Roland is trapped in loops where he keeps getting to the tower but going back to the beginning of The Gunslinger, King could present an almost infinite number of versions of the story with variations and say that they're all different cycles. When I think of this updated version like that, as slightly altered because it's a different cycle than the first time I read it, I like it a lot more. 
 Thinking about this, King could actually rewrite all the books as many times as he pleases using this idea of it being just another cycle where Roland does things differently. If he wanted to really get the DT fans excited, he could even re-do the series as a 'final' cycle where Roland goes back but has the Horn this time, maybe doesn't let Jake fall and finally walks away from the trap in the Tower at the end. (hide spoiler)]