The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands

It wouldn't be right for me to make this post in any other way than a series of loosely connected bullet points containing positive and negative thoughts alike. Away we go!

• I'd been told by people, mainly Sweeney, that this book represented the height of the series; if I couldn't get on board with The Dark Tower here, I just wasn't going to do so. So I put a lot of pressure on myself, to whatever extent it's possible, to enjoy this book. I've got five more Dark Tower books, after all, and if I couldn't get down with the best one, it was bound to be a sad, years-long journey of half-hearted skimming and Internet synopsis checking for me.
• I liked The Waste Lands better than The Drawing of the Three, which I liked more than The Gunslinger, which I didn't even hate so much as I was frustrated by its vague and problematic writing. But I still wouldn't quite say I loved The Drawing of the Three. In fact, about 400 pages in - that's two thirds of the book - I was almost resigning myself to the aforementioned sad fate of half-heartedly reading the books and trying to feign excitement about them to Sween, to my own wife, and most of all to myself. The book just wasn't pulling me in; I'd been reading it for over a month, but rarely getting more than twenty pages at a time, and often putting it down for a few weeks at a time.
• And then something clicked, and I read the book's final 200 pages or so all in one night. (Series veterans, this turning point came when Roland and his crew began to cross a rickety bridge after leaving a small city. Gasher kidnaps someone, Roland and a new four-legged companion go off looking for him, the other two find their way onto the heavily foreshadowed Blaine the Train, and it's all high stakes riddles from there. Action, interesting character pairings, and suspense. That's good enough for me!)
• The book started strong, too. They all seem to do that. The Gunslinger gave us the Tull massacre, The Drawing of the Three gave us the lobstrosities, and The Waste Lands gave us Shardik, the gigantic bear cyborg. Stephen King has no problems luring me in! It's the non-action sequences that rely on dialogue and careful narration that tend to lose me.
• Here's a minor pet peeve indicative of King's overall shortcomings. Two thirds of the way into the book, and just before its climax, a strong wind picks up, and King just kind of casually drops a reference to this being the first of the great autumn storms of Mid-World. Yet to the best of my knowledge this is the very first reference to such a climatological phenomenon through three books set here, and even to the idea that it's now autumn. A better writer would have sprinkled in foreshadowing earlier in the book to alert an astute reader that the skies were growing darker, or the days colder, or something. Even just some idle dialogue from Roland or some other character, like, "Storm's comin' any day now, I reckon." Simple, easy stuff. Not King's style, though. Again, this is just a pet peeve, but it really comes across like the guy has all these cool ideas flying through his head and pouring out onto the page almost on a half-whim, which is awesome, but it's also apparent that he lacks the desire to go back and tighten up previous portions of his story, and it all suffers from a certain looseness as a result. Editing, man!
• Credit were credit is due, though; in past Dark Tower posts I've been frustrated by King's inability to "show, don't tell," especially when it comes to character relationships. "Roland suddenly realized he loved the boy." "Eddie slowly came to fall in love with Susannah." There's really none of that here, and every character interaction feels richer for it.
• I'm not sure how I feel about Oy. On one hand, he seems like a Scooby-Doo knock-off with no real place in a gritty fantasy Western. On the other, his face-licking, loyal, "who's a good boy!?" shtick serves as a nice comic relief from Roland's humorless one-track mindset. I don't dislike the character or the concept, but I do think it makes the whole series slightly sillier - which, granted, the series could use, I guess.
• It's really just cringe-worthy to read Stephen King, an able-bodied white guy from Maine, trying his hand at ebonics from the perspective of an angry legless black woman. "AW HELL NO, THESE HONKY-ASS MOTHAFUCKAS REALLY GOAN TRY DAT STUPID WHITE BOY SHIT ON DIS BITCH?" (Shudder.)
• It's really become apparent to me just how much The Dark Tower inspired the later seasons - the shitty ones - of Lost. Desmond floating between alternate timelines and needing a "constant" to set him straight, a man in black as the ultimate villain, the idea of a "ka-tet" being analogous to the gathering at the afterlife afterparty in the show's final episode. I can't hold this against Stephen King or The Dark Tower, but it's amazing how bad that show became when it tired its hand at these concepts.
• Partial credit for this one. My biggest beef with The Gunslinger was the complete lack of clarity or the establishment of any kind of stakes with Jake's death, rebirth, and subsequent re-death. He's died once, so why should I bat an eye at him dying again? I won't rehash it all here and now, but suffice it to say, King ties that loop back off in the first half of this book, and while a lot of his mechanics are hazy and unclear and frankly confusing, he gets the job done. It was a messy job, but the jury rigged solution seems steady enough to get us through the rest of the series.
• I did appreciate spending substantial time up front from Jake's point of view. It helped transform him from a weird plot device into a legitimate rounded-out character.
• Internal comparisons to the Bilbo-and-Gollum chapter from The Hobbit were going to be inevitable during all those riddles between Blaine and the ka-tet, but I'm sure King knew that, and I'll consider it an homage more than a rip-off or a stolen idea. Interestingly, Susannah makes a Lord of the Rings connection during the train ride, comparing the environment to Mordor, but she never stops and thinks about Tolkien's work with regard to the riddles themselves. Weird!

And yeah. That's The Waste Lands. Up next is the substantially longer and mostly-or-entirely flashback-based Wizard and Glass. I have every intention of getting through that one before the end of 2014, but how soon I dive back in is anyone's guess.