Viking Hardcover - June 23, 2003 Plume Trade Paperback - June 24, 2003 NAL Massmarket Paperback - August 26, 2003 Unabridged audiobook - August 26, 2003
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About About The Waste Lands: The Dark Tower III
Stephen King's third foray into Mid-World raises the stakes on all the mystery and quasi-Gothic romanticism established in The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger. At the same time, Stephen King continues and enhances here the artful fusion of gritty realism and extravagant fantasy that powered the action in The Drawing of the Three. Beginning with its title and its shades of Eliot at his most darkly portentous, The Waste Lands is perhaps the most ambitious work to date in the Dark Tower cycle, full of incisive psychological explorations and fast-paced, seamlessly episodic storytelling. And, despite its highly unresolved cliffhanger of an ending—or because of it—The Waste Lands is arguably the most popular and widely discussed volume in the series.
As he did with the Loser's Club in It and the Ad Hoc Committee in The Stand, Stephen King dramatizes the forging of an unlikely community and highlights the deeply complex bonds that develop among the ostensibly dissimilar figures who are united under the ka-tet: Roland, Eddie, Susannah, Jake, and even Oy the billy-bumbler. The Waste Lands also establishes the physics by which Roland's universe operates. Six beams run between twelve portals which mark the edges of Mid-World. Standing at the point where the beams cross at the center of the world—or the center of all worlds—is the Dark Tower.
Book One, subtitled "Fear in a Handful of Dust," chronicles the drawing of the real third—Jake Chambers. To effect this drawing, Roland and Jake must battle their own fraying psyches and achieve a reconciliation between their doubled memories regarding the paradoxical events (or nonevents) surrounding Jake's death(s). Book Two, subtitled "A Heap of Broken Images," takes readers to the city of Lud and finds the pilgrims again waylaid and separated from each other. All are tested on their gunslinging abilities before they ultimately find themselves en route to Topeka, where Mid-World ends and End-World begins, borne along at 800 miles per hour, in helpless thrall to the madly rambling riddle-lover called Blaine the Mono.
The Waste Lands ends here, with an eerie "moment of silence" in the wake of Roland's desperate final bargain with Blaine. "Try me with your questions," the mono taunts, "and let the contest begin."
The Waste Lands