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