The Waste Lands

'The Wastelands' is the winner as the best among the first three. The ka-tet is fully unified and have started their journey, this time including Jake and newcomer Oy the Billy-Bumbler, who you can’t help but get tickled by. There’s lost technology, action, the ka-tet getting to know each other, and a wacky, fun ending with a psychotic train they’re forced to ride but that never plans to let them survive.

It’s a book you have to keep attention on, else you’ll get lost and confused fast. The worlds collide without the doors. Wastelands is filled with not just fantasy, but mystery and much anticipation on what is later to come. The broken, scattered technology intrigues while the lines that connect the worlds introduces science show more fiction type elements into the story. The worlds all being parallel to each other is a nice touch.

Jake is essential – more of Roland’s human side is brought out by the boy. The gunslinger shows many faces in Wastelands, not just the straight edged one we've seen before. Seeing snippets of Jake’s former life was interesting and he’s definitely one of my favorite characters. The tick-tock man mesmerizes, for King knows how to write expert villains; that’s always been one of his biggest strengths. Blaine is a train with personality who runs the city from beneath, holds zero regard for life, and loves deadly riddles with their tricky twisters.

King obviously had lots of fun with this one. Incredibly detailed with imagination painting the journey’s road, this is an action-adventure, fantastical, sci-fi, and mystery rich book. Most of King’s books would improve with a trimming, but this one is the right length, for there’s plenty to convincingly fill the pages. I pity those who read this one when first published – the wait after its cliffhanger would have bugged me. show less

I don't have a cool name for it yet so for now I'll call it "Dan's Rule of Part Three." It goes like this: For a book series, a movie franchise, a TV show, etc. to reach or exceed five installments (or seasons), your third needs to be an unequivocal hit. Part one needs to be the attention grabber, part two needs to hold it, and part three needs to delight and surprise beyond expectations. If it could speak, part three would say, "You think you know me? You haven't seen anything yet." This is essential for the whole to have the chance at reaching mass popularity. The Waste Lands, part three of Stephen King's Dark Tower opus, does exactly this.

(Minor spoilers ahead)

Roland Deschain, a gunslinger knight from an age long gone, frequently show more reminds us that his world has "moved on," which is to say it's grown old and rusty. Though that's not exactly right. More like it's sick and has worn down in the ensuing centuries. And what is this world exactly? It's not our world, no, and yet it's weirdly similar. It's as if the two have bled together.

The Waste Lands opens with Roland and his newly-drawn Ka-Tet locating the Path of the Beam, which is one of six energy corridors that intersect at the nexus of time and space. At this intersection, folks, resides the Dark Tower, and it's what Roland has sought nearly his entire life. The tower though is still thousands of miles away. For now, other dangers are more immediate.

When Tower Fans set upon this latest path through Mid-World, it was like having the fog removed from our imaginations and for the first time understanding just what this crazy adventure was all about. The Waste Lands thrills in part because it's a quest in the classic sense. Roland and his new Ka-Tet cover some significant ground by the book's end so there's a real sense of spatial accomplishment. (Something ignored in the next few books.) Of course, the road to the Dark Tower has many obstacles, and distance is only one of them. But beware of what you might find when you go looking for things that have stayed hidden for hundreds and thousands of years. show less

The Dark Tower series, as Stephen King explained in his introduction to its first book, The Gunslinger, is essentially his Lord of the Rings—an epic fantasy tale stretching over several volumes to decide the fate of the world (or, in this case, worlds).

There are differences, of course: New Yorkers instead of hobbits; lobstrosities instead of orcs; western/horror/science fiction instead of medieval fantasy; the Dark Tower instead of the One Ring.

But there are also plenty of parallels: Roland, King’s protagonist, has a bit of Aragorn in him. Maybe some Gandalf, too. Riddles figure prominently, a tribute to the most famous scene in Tolkien’s The Hobbit.

And there’s a quest.

Except that in The Lord of the Rings, the terms of that show more quest are clear a third of the way through the first book, The Fellowship of the Ring—during the Council of Elrond, Frodo accepts the task of destroying the One Ring. There’s also a principal adversary: Sauron.

In sharp contrast, Roland’s mission still isn’t entirely apparent by the end of The Waste Lands, the third book in King’s opus. We know Roland has been seeking the Tower for years, and that he believes it holds the key to keeping his world (and maybe others) from “moving on,” or falling apart at the seams. But what exactly he’ll do once he reaches the Tower remains a mystery, as does how he’ll get there and who will try to stop him. (Although a late scene with the “Ageless Stranger” might have marked the entrance of a key opponent.)

None of this is to say epic fantasies should always follow Tolkien’s lead—please, by all means, break the mold. But I think the initial directional haziness in The Dark Tower is why I struggled with its first two books. That, and King’s long-winded style.

Thankfully, after spending the first part of The Waste Lands dragging out the formation of his fellowship—Roland, having already gathered Eddie and Susannah, corrects a sin from the first book and rescues a fourth companion—the series finally gets underway. Roland’s “ka-tet” of burgeoning gunslingers makes its way to Lud, a once-wondrous city now descended into chaos and decay. After tangling with its surviving inhabitants, the ka-tet boards Blaine, a monorail with unraveling artificial intelligence, and strikes a (dangerous) deal with him to carry them close to the Tower.

It sounds nuts—and it is—but it’s also fun, and the series finally makes some forward progress. I’d still like a few more details about the Tower, though. Even something as cliché as a prophecy: they’re generally lame, but they at least serve the purpose of giving the reader signposts to navigate by.

But that’s not King’s way. For better or worse, he’s an author you just have to surrender to and trust he knows where he’s going—never more so than in The Dark Tower. And after finishing The Waste Lands, I’m more confident in doing so.

Because the train has finally left the station.

(For more reviews like this one, see www.nickwisseman.com) show less

[The Waste Lands] is the third installment of Stephen King’s epic Dark Tower series, and the darkest of the books up through this point in the story.

The entire Dark Tower series is set in the same world, or worlds, where the hero, Roland of Gilead, a knight errant armed with .45 revolvers rather than a sword, quests for a mysterious Dark Tower. At the conclusion of [The Drawing of the Three], Roland has drawn Eddie, a heroin addict, and Susannah, a wheel-chair bound woman with multiple personalities, into his world from different times and enlisted them in his quest. But now, as Roland teaches Eddie and Susannah to be gunslingers, he finds that he is going mad from a distortion in time he created by saving Jake, a little boy he once show more sent let die in another world and time.

[The Waste Lands] allows King to more fully create Roland’s world as it stands. Roland and his compatriots enter Lud, one of the few still standing cities of Roland’s world, a city that was once alive and bright with technology and light, only to find darkness and madness. The picture of Lud with its diseased and mad inhabitants firmly establishes why Roland seeks the Dark Tower. He must find this mysterious place because it is infecting his world, and all others, with evil and death.

[The Waste Lands] also features one of the most unique characters ever imagined in fiction, Blaine – a suicidal train, obsessed with riddles. Short of Hal in the science fiction movie 2001, I haven’t come across an inanimate object infused with such a human character. And not just humanity, but also evil and malevolence. Blaine is worth reading [The Waste Lands] alone.

5 bones!!!!!
An All-Time Favorite show less

Finally, we get to the batshit pretentious weirdness that I was looking for. Oh, I thoroughly enjoyed this book, but not probably in how the author intended. What's the best part? Was it the religious ZZ Top? or perhaps when the stereotypical black thug turns out to be a math genius, just to solve a simple problem? Or is it when there were not one, but two evil sentient trains? Or maybe it was when one of the keys to the universe is purple grass? Or maybe, when one of the most powerful cosmic beings in the universe, was a cyborg bear that got killed by a single bullet, except not really?

This shits wonderful. Let's keep going.

Finally, we get to the batshit pretentious weirdness that I was looking for. Oh, I thoroughly enjoyed this book, but not probably in how the author intended. What's the best part? Was it the religious ZZ Top? or perhaps when the stereotypical black thug turns out to be a math genius, just to solve a simple problem? Or is it when there were not one, but two evil sentient trains? Or maybe it was when one of the keys to the universe is purple grass? Or maybe, when one of the most powerful cosmic beings in the universe, was a cyborg bear that got killed by a single bullet, except not really?

This shits wonderful. Let's keep going.

Gosh, what a book. WHAT. A. BOOK. Congratulating Stephen King for this magnificent book would still sound like an offense. Amongst the three first books this is, without a shadow of a doubt, the best one. Now that I finished reading this book I realized how worthy it was to go all the way reading the first book.

Roland and his friends now face a new problem: in spite of having solved the gunslinger's poisoning problems, he seems to be suffering the consequences of his own acts after saving "a certain persson" in the previous book. If they don't find a cure to his conflicting mind, he'll be fatality lead to the insanity.

The action does not stop for one single second. The story is dense, quick, fluid. If you blink an eye, you'll miss an show more important detail.

LOVED the book. I'm even afraid to read the rest of the series and finding out that the next books are not as good as this one. show less