You might just say I’m still on the Dark Tower choo choo train, with Stephen King’s 1991 book, The Waste Lands, the third in the series. Last we left off with our merry band of travelers — Roland, the gunslinger; Eddie, the reformed heroin addict; and Susannah Dean, the double amputee who no longer has a split-personality per se — they were finally going beyond the beach into the hills of Roland’s world, with a blossoming love between Eddie and Susannah (which I think gets more earned in this third book).
In The Waste Lands, unlike The Drawing of the Three, where Roland’s body was mangled and depleted, but his mind was sharp, here his body is restored, but his mind is torn asunder with the paradox of Jake’s fate. Basically, Jake both died in his world and Roland’s, and didn’t because Roland stopped Jack Mort. And in his world of 1970s New York, Jake is also mentally confused because horrifically, he’s aware of the fact that he died. In other words, the first third of the book or so, is really the Drawing of Jake, to bring him back to Roland’s world and join this merry band of travelers on their journey to the Dark Tower.
Even though this one wasn’t as hilarious as the prior installment, owing to Roland entering our world, it did have something that installment didn’t have: answers, or at least, closer hints at what the world of the Gunslinger is, and what the Dark Tower is. King spends considerable time and exposition through this 605-page book world-building. We learn that there are 12 portals in Roland’s world guarded by 12 high-tech animal machines, including a 70-foot tall bear that tries to kill them, and at the center of the crisscrossing “beams” of the portals, is the Dark Tower itself, essentially the center of the universe (or that universe, as it were), as I understood it.
Through the journey into Lud, akin to our New York City but now rendered a waste land due to something seemingly worse than nuclear war, we also learn that there are still “people” within Roland’s world, known as Grays and Pubes, two surviving factions, with disgusting radiation rashes and the former of whom aim to take Jake as their own. It’s also worth pointing out that even this fallen world still has reverence and awe for the gunslingers, thought to be a thing of the past.
Within Lud is Blaine, the “choo choo train.” The train, like the bear, after hundreds, if not thousands of years of operation, has gone insane — it’s an interesting sci-fi thought proffered by King, the idea of machines “going insane,” which also occurred with the aforementioned bear — and intends to take its cargo (our travelers) not just out of Lud, but to blow up Lud in its wake and kill them all later on down the “road.” Fortunately, Roland is able to talk Blaine out that with a bargain: since Blaine likes riddles, if Roland and the others can come up with a riddle capable of stumping Blaine, then he won’t kill them. We shall learn their fate in the next book. An aside, but I think it’s amusing King explicitly states that Blaine is a pink train and the cover of the book, presumably featuring Blaine since it’s a train, is not pink.
Nonetheless, what’s also exciting toward the end of the book is that the real foe of the series finally turned up: The Ageless Stranger, the magician, the wizard, the person the Man in Black from the first novel warned Roland about. He recruits the great-grandson of a Nazi, Tick-Tock Man, to stop our protagonists from reaching the Dark Tower. Tick-Tock Man was depicted as the worst “being” aside from the machines within this fallen world, and he becomes the servant of this being, if that gives you a hint of what’s in store for Roland and the others.
So, I liked that we received more information in this book about the world King is exploring and building, and I liked that King brought Jake back in a sensible way, even if it’s a horrifying thought to know you had died. Jake’s a great character and a necessary addition to the team, plus he brings with him, Oy, a “billy bumbler”, which is a cross between a raccoon and a dog, with parrot-like speaking abilities (because of that I think, I was picturing him bird-like), and he’s intelligent. Every great journey series needs a lovable and fun creature to tag along with our heroes! And Oy really is a hero, as he’s the one who largely saves Jake from the Tick-Tock Man.
Overall, while I thought The Drawing of the Three was a better book in totality due to its action set pieces, humor, and pacing, The Waste Lands was a worthy addition to the series because of the necessary exposition and character work King put into it to give us a clearer, if still murky, understanding of Roland’s world. In fact, Eddie in particular is so well-done in this book, you forget that he started out as a drug-smuggling heroin addict in the prior book. I do think Susannah could use more time and attention other than being Eddie’s love interest, but there’s still five more books to go!
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