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published 1991; hardback 1991; paperback 1993, Signet
The Waste Lands is the third in a series of six or seven books (as of March 1998, books one through four are complete) in Stephen King's The Dark Tower series, inspired by Robert Browning's poem "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came." With a gripping plot line and excellent character development, The Waste Lands is the best so far in an excellent series.
The gunslinger Roland, having "drawn" his three companions, quests with them in search of the Dark Tower. The start of the book yields their first real clue to the whereabouts of the elusive tower-- they happen upon and defeat Mir, the gigantic and insane cyborg bear. Mir guards the Portal of the Bear, one of twelve portals which form the endpoints of The Beams. All Beams meet at the Dark Tower, Roland knows, so finding the tower is now simply a matter of following the Beam from the Portal of the Bear.
Unfortunately, this turns out to be less simple than it might seem. For one, Roland is going insane. In The Drawing of the Three, he killed The Pusher, a mass murderer who rather deserved it, but in doing so, he accidentally set up a paradox. Unknown to Roland, the Pusher had been responsible for the boy Jake's death, and Jake's afterlife had been in Roland's world, where he had met and had eventually been sacrificed by Roland. Now that Roland has killed the murderer, Jake lives in his own time, and Roland is torn by two parts of his mind insisting on conflicting memories of two realities: "There was a boy" versus "There was no boy." Meanwhile, Jake is also losing his sanity, for the same reason-- his mind is a battlefield between warring realities: "I died" versus "I did not die." Jake's sanity and Roland's are saved in a richly symbolic scene where Jake is reborn into Roland's world with Susannah as symbolic mother, Roland as father, and Eddie as midwife. The paradox healed, the group continues on five strong, for Jake befriends the highly intelligent local equivalent of a dog.
Surrounded again by comrades-in-arms (Susannah and Eddie are now gunslingers-in-training), Roland begins to come out of his shell, showing traces of emotion and humor on his heretofore bleak facade. Clearly he has suffered extraordinarily; his friends, family, and presumably his love Susan have been torn from him, killed by the deadly forces which reshaped his world in his youth, and which continue to tear it apart. Future books in the series will surely give more details. For now the gunslinger is still a man of ice, but melting. King's character development here is excellent, providing clues to whet the reader's appetite, but leaving the meat for later books. Roland's comrades, too, are vibrant characters, true creatures of flesh. Even the characters we meet in passing ring true.
Roland's party arrives at Lud, once a great city but now a gang war zone. Jake is captured, but escapes with the help of Roland, Oy (Jake's pet), and an artificially intelligent supersonic train named Blaine. Blaine, who has a great fondness for riddles but is suicidally insane, agrees to take them as close to the tower as he can go, provided they can best him in a riddling competition. The book ends with this cliff-hanger, as they streak across the Waste Lands (a post-nuclear land of mutated wildlife) toward the tower, or toward their deaths.
Stephen King continues to outdo himself in this series. From an intriguing but somewhat uninspired start, he has built an epic story worthy of a master. Too many long works die in the middle books; I sincerely hope King can maintain the quality of these books through the end, three or four books from now.
Review by Greg Ferrar
Reviewed August 12, 1998
ISBN 0-451-17331-7
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