Bryan Fordham reviewed The Waste Lands by Stephen King (The Dark Tower, #3)
Review of 'The Waste Lands' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
Much more to this story than the others, building on the world that has been established. And a lot more happens.
Paperback, 422 pages
English language
Published Jan. 1, 1992 by Plume.
With The Waste Lands, the third masterful novel in Stephen King's epic saga, The Dark Tower, we again enter the realm of the mightiest imagination of our time. King's hero, Roland, the Last Gunslinger, moves ever closer to the Dark Tower of his dreams and nightmares--as he crosses a desert of damnation in a macabre world that is a twisted mirror image of our own. With him are those he has drawn to this world, street-smart Eddie Dean and courageous wheelchair-bound Susannah. Ahead of him are mind-rending revelations about who he is and what is driving him. Against him is arrayed a swelling legion of fiendish foes both more and less than human. And as the pace of action and adventure, discovery and danger pulse-poundingly quickens, the reader is inescapably drawn into a breathtaking drama that is both hauntingly dreamlike...and eerily familiar. The Waste Lands is a triumph of storytelling …
With The Waste Lands, the third masterful novel in Stephen King's epic saga, The Dark Tower, we again enter the realm of the mightiest imagination of our time. King's hero, Roland, the Last Gunslinger, moves ever closer to the Dark Tower of his dreams and nightmares--as he crosses a desert of damnation in a macabre world that is a twisted mirror image of our own. With him are those he has drawn to this world, street-smart Eddie Dean and courageous wheelchair-bound Susannah. Ahead of him are mind-rending revelations about who he is and what is driving him. Against him is arrayed a swelling legion of fiendish foes both more and less than human. And as the pace of action and adventure, discovery and danger pulse-poundingly quickens, the reader is inescapably drawn into a breathtaking drama that is both hauntingly dreamlike...and eerily familiar. The Waste Lands is a triumph of storytelling sorcery--and further testament to Stephen King's novelistic mastery.
Much more to this story than the others, building on the world that has been established. And a lot more happens.
I've read far beyond not compelled to review which I really should, it's just good for the sake of being good. The Waste Lands where we follow the Beam, the city of Lud, and Blaine the Pain. There was a lot of diversity here, snapshots of time gone wonky, people losing their minds--Lord of the Flies comes to mind and a Mono who controls them all with failed dipolar circuitry.
What a wicked web is weaved and who doesn't smell Gasher through his run? If the mad hatter was truly mad and lived during these times, maybe he would have been the tiktok man?
If you want a vivisection of a city in squalor, it's people gone to ash and our trio+bumbler through this arc and onto the most insane ending you should read this.
The series gets better and better. The pacing of this book is amazing, it feels like so many stories and the drip-like revelations about roland and his world give it a lot of depth.