The Dark Tower: Waste Lands Bk. 3 (Paperback)

This book is basically a group of adventure episodes: an encounter with a 70 foot high bio-mechanical bear (Shardik), relic of a past age, a strange fight with a demon, a visit to a dying suburban village, an abduction and running battle in a ghost town city, and finally a fantastic trip on a suicidal mono-rail train. Each episode provides a little more insight into Roland’s fantastical world, both past and present. By the end of this book, a fairly coherent picture of this world emerges, from its obvious high technology past, to its current sadly deteriorated state, to some of the rationale behind why certain things work the way they do in this world. The book is very action oriented; there is very little reflection on grander philosophical themes here, and continuing character development of the main characters is fairly minimal.

There is a nice variant on the old time-travel paradox. In The Gunslinger, the boy Jake is sacrificed to Roland’s determination to catch the ‘man in black’. In this story, we find Jake alive and well and still living in (our) New York, due to an action by Roland in The Drawing of the Three that caused the previous history to never occur. But both Roland and Jake have memories of the ‘other’ past, and this duality is slowly driving both to the edge of insanity. The resolution of this problem requires that Jake be brought back to Roland’s world, and how this is accomplished forms the major portion of one of the ‘episodes’.

At various points throughout this book, King makes allusions to other famous science-fiction and fantasy authors and their creations (and some of his own), from Richard Adams (Shardik and Watership Down) to Isaac Asimov’s ‘positronic’ brains of his robot stories, to J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit with its riddling games. For those who have read these works, these allusions provide an enhanced view of this world and how it works, but I am not sure how well some of this plays with readers who haven’t read these other works.

Overall, this book is a page-turner, and does a good job of holding the reader’s interest in the fate of the major characters and the overall resolution of the quest. The ending of this book is a cliff-hanger, like the movie serials of old, and for this reason I don’t recommend you start this book unless you have a copy of book IV, Wizard & Glass, handy, as you will definitely want to immediately find out the resolution to the end situation here.

--- Reviewed by Patrick Shepherd (hyperpat)

The nice thing about this book is that King doesn’t ignore the paradox that was created by the events at the end of the previous book. Instead he draws the logical conclusions, incorporates the consequences into the plot of The Waste Lands, and solves the dilemma in an entirely satisfactory manner.

King also continues the trend of adding details that he has borrowed from other fantasy authors. I couldn’t help smiling when the name of a monstrous bear turned out to be Shardik, just as in the book with the same name by Richard Adams, and when Eddie recognized the name but couldn’t understand why he associated it with rabbits (Adams most well-known work is Watership Down) I laughed out loud. A nice touch, especially since it strengthens the link between Roland’s world and our world.

However, there are two reasons I won’t give this book a top grade. The first is that the pace is somewhat slower than in The Drawing of the Three. (It was noticeable easier to put it down and do other things.) The second is that despite King’s assurance in the Author’s Note that he ran out of story for the moment, it felt like the book ended before the current plot line had run its natural course. It did not really matter that much to me, since I was able to start reading Wizard and Glass right away, but it still feels a bit odd to find the logical end 60 pages into the next book of the series, written six years later.

It is however the growing importance of Eddie and Suz in the relationship that makes this so wonderful to read. Suz in particular seems to be taking on her role as Gunslinger like a fish to water, however eddie is not so sure even know. On the other hand Roland is having problems of his own, which if left unresolved could be the end of them all. I won't spoil the book by giving away any secrets but I am so glad I didn't give up half way through book two. This really is a terrific book.

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