…Loriga adds romantic yearning and original wit to an increasingly ubiquitous figure, the neuronic hero, that blurred-out soul lost in a transnational wonderland of neurochemical engineering and noirish intrigue.

And then there’s Michael Agger’s examination of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series, in which Agger poses the following question:

Sergio Leone meets Tolkien in Stephen King’s seven-volume series. Is that a good mix?

The short answer, he would seem to say, is…well, no, not really. I’ve only read the first four of seven books so far, so I can’t really comment on the series as whole, or any excesses which King may have lately brought to it. But I was struck by something else Agger writes in his semi-review:

In 1970, when he was 22, Stephen King wrote a sentence he liked: “The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.” It’s an innocent sentence — pulpy and suggestive — but it grew to become a monster.

Again, I couldn’t say whether the series has become a monster or not, but I do intend to read the final three books, so I’ve not lost faith in King just yet. Personally, I’ve always really liked that sentence, largely because it is so suggestive. In fact, it’s always been one of my personal favorites, along with “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold,” and “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” First sentences can be extremely important.