Book Review by: Twilight

Book Review

This month's selection is The Dark Tower: The Wastelands by Stephen King

The Wastelands is the third in the Dark Tower Series. As the story begins, a few months after the events on the beach, the group has traveled a ways inland and is making their way through a forest. Susannah is learning to shoot, Eddie has taken up carving and Roland is beginning to know what it feels like to lose his mind.

Roland begins to teach Susannah how to shoot in the way of a Gunslinger, hard lessons she won't soon forgive him for but lessons she will need regardless. As they work in a clearing, they hear something they can't identify - the roar of some horrible beast and the sound of trees crashing down, and it's in the direction of their camp where Eddie waits. The creature is revealed to be a bear, sort of, a giant beast standing seventy feet high, and very, very old.. suffering from some parasite and quite insane, and with a hatred of people vaguely remembered. It knows there are people in the woods again, and it isn't happy about it. The bear approaches the camp where Eddie is lost in his thoughts, carving again, an old hobby he was teased out of in childhood but which he now feels compelled to take up again. He hears the bear approach and is scared out of his daze. He barely has time enough to grab one of Roland?s guns and climb the nearest large tree he can find. Looking down on the bear now trying to knock him loose from the tree, he sees something growing from the top of the bear's head... to his mind it looks like a small radar dish turning jerkily. Roland and Susannah come to the clearing and Roland recognizes what the Bear must be, something he calls one of the twelve Guardians. Of what we don?t yet know. Susannah manages to shoot the small dish on the bear's head, killing it and saving Eddie. Once the bear has died, the trio takes a closer look... they discover that the bear is a type of robot, with words stamped into a metal plate on its head. Roland begins to tell them of the Guardians, but before he can get much out he collapses on the ground, muttering incoherently about the boy Jake. "There was a boy... there wasn't a boy"... and we find that in going back to New York and saving Jake from the Pusher, Roland has changed the past and created a loop in time where he shouldn't remember the boy, yet he does, and it's making him go crazy. Finally Roland comes around, and tells the story of the Guardians, as he knows it.... twelve creatures such as the bear, created to guard twelve portals in this world, and the nexus of these portals are where Roland believes they will find the Dark Tower. And then Roland is goaded into telling them about Jake... about how his memories leading to meeting Jake are clear, a single track, and his memories after coming out of the mountains the same, but in between, a loop with two sets of memories. As they sit around the fire listening to Roland, he pulls the jawbone of the speaking demon from the way station (where he met Jake but didn't) from his pocket and throws it into the fire. The bone explodes into an image of light... an image of a key Eddie knows he must remember. Finally they sleep and awaken to a blaring recorded message from the bear shutting down... they make their way along the bear's back trail to the place Roland believes they will find the portal it guarded. As they travel, they talk more about Roland's memories of the boy Jake, and what they mean. When they reach the den of the bear, the portal, they find it guarded by several smaller mechanical creatures, each winding down in the way the bear had been. After taking out the smaller creatures, they make their way to a place where there are humming noises and vibrations below the ground... the portal Roland told them of. Roland tells them of how the portals work, and that they are all connected by a Beam... he believes that if they follow this Beam they will reach the nexus and the Dark Tower. They realize that they can actually see the Beam, in the clouds and in the way things grow along it... after camping for the night they set off.

Part II begins in New York, with Jake, who is clearly not dead after all. He faces his own demons though... it is Finals Week at the snobby prep school he attends, and he cannot concentrate... for he has his own set of double memories making him feel that he is losing his mind. He dreams of a rose, and a key, and has nightmares of a desert. In class, he is called on to turn in his Final Essay, but when he looks at it he is horrified... for he has pasted pictures of trains; written of the Prisoner, and the Lady of Shadows, and of Roland, and someone called Blaine that he doesn't even recognize. And he thinks that turning this in will surely get him sent right off to the loony bin, where he's starting to think he belongs. He turns in his essay, and goes to the restroom, and keeps on walking... in search of a door and a key and a rose, with no idea why he looks for these things. He wanders the city in a daze until he comes to a bookstore, where he goes in and finds two things that draw him... one a book about a train, Charlie the Choo-Choo (Jake has no idea why this children's book is in his hands, but he holds it anyway) and book of riddles.. Riddle-de-Dum even. (Sound a bit like something we've heard a lobstrosity say?) Jake leaves the bookstore with his new books, wandering again in search of the door, seeing what will happen even before it does... he knows the place he needs to find and where to find it... but when he reaches it all he sees is a littered vacant lot and no door at all. Feeling drawn anyway, he ignores the No Trespassing sign and climbs the fence... hearing strange voices and seeing odd graffiti he crawls through the lot until he comes upon a key lying in the dirt, and beyond it a single rose, and he understands that what he came for is still there. And he knows that the rose must be protected. When Jake comes to, outside the vacant lot, he wonders if it was all a dream, until he sees the key tucked inside his book. He makes his way home, grimy and torn up, to face his parents who know he ditched school and want to know where he's been. He faces his parents, finds his teacher has been there and that he's gotten an A+ on his essay though he can't make sense of it himself, and finally calms down enough to pick up Charlie the Choo-Choo. The book gives him chills and he knows that Charlie isn't really Charlie, he's Blaine... and that the train lives someplace called Mid-World, though he doesn't know where that is or why he knows it. He only knows he has to get there, has to get to Roland again, and that he will need the door and the key to do it. Jake takes the key and holds it, and finally the voices that have plagued him are gone... in another world the voices in Roland's head go quiet as well. In each of their worlds they sleep finally, Jake dreaming of Mid-World, and a place in New York he doesn't know yet and a young Eddie, the Prisoner, telling him how to get where he needs to go. Jake awakens in the morning, packs a bag and sets off, but not before taking a gun from his father's desk, again not knowing why he does this but only that he must.

As Jake begins to travel through the city, the trio of travelers reach a sign proclaiming that they've come to Mid-World. As Jake makes his way to a place in Brooklyn, Roland and his new gunslingers begin to trek through Mid-World, Roland in awe of things he never believed he'd see.. until he spots in the distance a stone ring, a place of a speaking-demon, an Oracle. Chilled, he knows they must go there, that Jake reaching them depends on it, though it's the last thing he wants to do. As Jake makes his way to the place where he will find the door, Eddie races to finish carving the key seen in the image in the fire. Jake comes across a basketball court, where he is amazed to find the boys from his dream the night before - but not as amazed as Eddie who calls it up from memory, for the boys are a younger Eddie and his brother Henry. They leave the basketball court and set off toward a place they believe to be haunted, a creepy old house called The Mansion, and Jake follows at a distance. He realizes when he sees the house that this is the place he has to go into, this is the door... At the same time, the trio of gunslingers approach the stone ring where the speaking demon resides... they will have to face the demon, for this is where the door will bring Jake through. As Jake makes his way to the door marked The Boy, the house begins to change, to try and claim him. On the other side, Susannah does her best to hold the demon at bay while Eddie frantically draws a doorway and a keyhole... finally they are able to get Jake through the doorway, more or less unscathed.

A few days later, as the group travels onward, Jake awakens to something licking his face... and finds it's a billy-bumbler, a dog like creature with odd gold-ringed eyes and the ability to say simple words. The bumbler adopts Jake, who calls him Oy. They venture on into Mid-World, and come upon a town which looks to be deserted though none of them believe it is. And they're proven right, though the people who dwell here are all very old and are moving on in much the same way as this world. The people of this town tell them for the first time about Blaine, the monorail that Jake has seen in his dreams. After sharing a meal with them, and narrowly escaping staying to help with endless work to be done, they move on, toward a city called Lud, a city they've been warned about. The people of Lud are at war and have been for ages, one band called the Pubes and the other the Grays. As they get closer to the city, they hear an odd drum beat in the distance, one Eddie identifies as a song... Velcro Fly. The familiarity of it isn't comforting to him though... finally they reach the edges of the city, and see a bridge they'll have to cross... both Eddie and Susannah recognize it as it as the George Washington Bridge, oddly out of place here. The bridge is in a state of disrepair, but they know they'll have to cross it anyway. As they slowly make their way across, they almost lose Oy, but he is saved at the last moment. Jake reaches the far side of the bridge... where he is grabbed by a sleazy disgusting leprous looking thing, who takes him hostage. Roland and the others try to catch up. As they enter the city, Eddie and Susannah leave Roland to go in search of the train they know they'll have to take to get across the barren lands east of the city, and Roland and Oy go off in search of Jake. Roland pursues Jake and the leprous man through booby-traps of all kinds, while Jake is taken to the Tick-Tock man, a very large and very odd fellow who leads the Grays... Eddie and Susannah have run afoul of the Pubes in the meantime, and end up having to kill one before they will be left to make their way to the Cradle... the train station where Blaine awaits. And they discover the meaning of the drumbeats they hear... it is an old loudspeaker system, and the drums play when one of the Pubes is being sacrificed and sent to death. After leading Jake through a maze of streets and alleys, the nasty man called Gasher takes Jake down a manhole, into an underground warren where Tick Tock awaits... Roland and Oy follow using Oy's sense of smell to track where Jake has gone. Roland follows Jake and Gasher into the sewer system as Eddie and Susannah reach the cradle of Blaine. Blaine is computerized, as everything in this city once was, but he has gone a little mad... and the only thing that will get them on the train is riddles (like the ones in the book Jake was compelled to pick up). Meanwhile, Roland has caught up to where Gasher has taken Jake, and hatches a plan to rescue him... time is running out though, as Eddie and Susannah wait in the cradle. Blaine demands to have a riddle and threatens to fry Eddie and Susannah where they stand if they don?t comply, and things begin to get desperate for them as they wait. Jake is still held by the Tick Tock man, and finds out that he's been kidnapped because Tick Tock believes that Jake will be able to tell him how to restore and use the computers that ran the city. Jake is able to stall while Roland hatches a plan to get Jake out of the locked room using Oy as a distraction though he fears it will get Oy killed and that Jake may not forgive him. Roland sends Oy in through an air duct and while Oy is attacking, Roland makes his way to the door, which Jake barely manages to get open in time... Roland finishes off Gasher and the three make a mad dash through the tunnels to reach the Cradle of Blaine. Blaine, meanwhile, has set off a chain reaction that will gas and poison any living thing in the city... as Roland, Jake and Oy race to reach Blaine, Eddie and Susannah try in vain to reason with the mad monorail train. Finally, with only seconds to spare, Roland, Jake and Oy reach the Cradle... where Blaine will only let them board if they ask him a riddle. He is easily able to answer it, but the group manages to bargain with him to get them out of the city if they tell him riddles. Blaine agrees, but with a catch... if they can't ask a riddle he can?t answer by the time he reaches the end of his route, he will commit suicide and kill them all in the process. The five have no choice but to agree to Blaine?s terms, for time has run out and the gas is being released in the city even as they board the train. The train speeds along the blasted ruins of the Wastelands, a place the travelers would not have survived crossing, and they try desperately to hatch a plan to get off the train alive. Roland begins to tell all the riddles he can remember from his younger days in Gilead, with Blaine taunting him now and again and answering them all... and as we leave our travelers, they still speed across the Wastelands at the mercy of Blaine...

To Be Continued

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