PacManY2J's Full Review: Stephen King - The Waste Lands: The Dark Tower III
The Waste Lands, the third installment of Stephen King's epic Dark Tower series, is where vintage King really starts to shine. The story was captivating already and continues as such, but it's The Waste Lands in which King's penchant for psychological suspense really emerges. Add that to other exciting elements in this book, and you see the series really taking off.
The "vintage King" I mentioned comes early in the story. The Drawing of the Three ends with Eddie and Susannah Dean joining forces with Roland the gunslinger, all as one team. Roland has just returned from another time and place to save the life of Jake. But by saving him, Jake does not get transported into Roland's world after dying. Now Roland's mind is filled with memories of Jake's existence as well as his absence. But it's Jake who has the greater mental struggle. At the very moment Roland saves his life, Jake begins to have memories of his own death despite being alive. King brilliantly writes the mental anguish Jake endures as a result of remembering his own death. It's this frightening psychological struggle that gets the book moving quickly from the very beginning.
After that, the action keeps on moving, as Jake copes with the memories and tries to make sense out of other strange occurrences. Eventually, things are righted when Jake escapes our world and joins up with Roland, Susannah, and Eddie. The four become a ka-tet, a group bound together by fate to achieve a common goal. Their goal remains the same as in the last two books: to find the mysterious Dark Tower.
On their journey, they encounter several obstacles. New villains are introduced into the storyline, including a train that at times seems more human than machine. I'm glad King chose to add new villains instead of making the "Man In Black" the central antagonist every time. That's not to say that Walter the sorcerer is done for - but we get to focus on some new characters here, keeping things fresh.
Instead of just using guns as their weapons, we see the ka-tet increasingly using their minds to overcome their hurdles. This mainly occurs in the form of riddles, which begins becoming a big theme in this book but should become more of a major theme in the next installment. The biggest theme in The Waste Lands is destiny, referred to as ka.
The destiny theme along with the riddles begin to give this story even more of a classic "journey story" feeling along the lines of The Lord of the Rings (which King references in the book). Some may find this mood a bit hokey. I would agree, but at the same time, I like it. It gives a strange and unique story a familiar feeling, and it shows King successfully taking a stab at a different genre.
Stephen King's Dark Tower series develops quite a bit as The Waste Lands brings out a familiar style of King writing while taking bold steps in making this series totally different from his other works. I was hooked from the beginning, but the third book is making it even harder to stop.
In 1978, Stephen King introduced the world to the last gunslinger, Roland of Gilead. Nothing has been the same since. More than twenty years later, th...More at HotBookSale
The third reissued book of King s macabre Dark Tower saga finds Roland, the Last Gunslinger, moving ever closer to the Dark Tower of his dreams--and n...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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