The Waste Lands: The Dark Tower series #3 by Stephen King (novel #237)

He thought he was at last beginning to fully understand what that innocuous phrase – the world has moved on – really meant. What a breadth of ignorance and evil it covered. ~ thoughts of Eddie Dean

The Waste Lands is the third in Stephen King's eight-volume The Dark Tower series. It is a dark fantasy set in Earth’s future, where physical and metaphysical laws are significantly altered. There is some collective memory of the old world, and characters describe the present state as a world that has “moved on.” There are portals between Roland’s world and the old world.

 

In volume I, the reader is introduced to the gunslinger Roland Deschain. Gunslinger is not so much a description as a title or profession: a knightly order trained in personal combat to be defenders of justice. Roland is the last of the gunslingers.

He had never been a man who understood himself deeply or cared to; the concept of self-consciousness (let alone self-analysis) was alien to him.

 

Like many things in this series, the reader gradually learns the full meaning and significance of “gunslinger.”

He was not broad-shouldered, as Marshal Dillon had been, nor anywhere near as tall, and his face seemed to her more that of a tired poet than a wild-west lawman, but she had still seen him as an existential version of that make-believe Kansas peace officer…  ~ Susannah’s perception of Roland Deschain

 

Roland is on a quest to find the Dark Tower, and once finding it presumably to set something right that has somehow gone wrong in the world that moved on. Through volume #3, the exact purpose of gaining the Dark Tower is not yet precisely clear.

 

In volume #1, Roland was alone. In volume #2, he picks up two companions from 20th-century America: Eddie, a former drug addict, and Susannah, a former schizophrenic and double-leg amputee. Eddie and Susanah become Roland’s companions and gunslingers in training. In The Waste Lands, the three risk great peril to add one more to their group, a boy named Jake, also from the 20th century. It is unclear if Jake will also become a gunslinger, only that Roland loves him like a son. But nothing…NOTHING…is more important than finding the Dark Tower.

 

I enjoyed this volume. It was exciting, like each volume thus far, but it might have been my least favorite. King has created a world of fantastic physical and meta-physical qualities that, in this volume, seemed a little incongruous and confusing. Perhaps my confusion made them seem incongruous. Nonetheless, hard to put it down. So far, each volume reaches a dangerous climax, a miraculous victory, and a brief return to normalcy, normal for Roland’s world, but no real closure. The action and desperation usually pick up quickly in the next volume, so I am off to begin volume #4.

 

My rating: 3 1/2 out of 5 stars

 

 

In the King multiverse, I understand that there is an interconnection of most, if not all, of Stephen King’s stories. The only other work I’ve read by King is The Stand (loved it), and I’m familiar with a few others due to film. So, I won’t detect most interconnections, but I did find one between The Stand and The Dark Tower. At one point, while traveling the wastelands, Roland and company find a 20th-century newspaper that refers to a worldwide pandemic that exterminated most of humanity. The article identifies the virus as Captain Trips: a direct reference to the pandemic in The Stand.

 

.