The Waste Lands Summary: Inside Book Three of Stephen King's Dark Tower
What The Waste Lands is about
The Waste Lands is the third novel in Stephen King's Dark Tower series, published in 1991 by Grant in a limited edition hardcover with full-colour illustrations by Ned Dameron. It was reissued in 2003 to coincide with the publication of The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla. Its full title is The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands: Redemption, though almost everyone shortens it.
The story picks up with Roland Deschain, the last gunslinger, travelling east from the shore of the Western Sea with Susannah and Eddie Dean. In the woods of Out-World they meet Shardik, an enormous cyborg bear, and through that encounter they find one of the six Beams that hold the world together. Following the Path of the Beam becomes their route inland to Mid-World, and from there towards the ruined city of Lud.
Two problems drive the first half of the book. Roland's mind has split in two. He remembers meeting the boy Jake Chambers at the way station and letting him fall to his death in the mountains. He also remembers crossing the desert alone and never meeting the boy at all. In 1977 New York, Jake is living through exactly the same mental division, alarming his private school and angering his cocaine-abusing father. The cause is a paradox created in the previous book: by saving Jake from Jack Mort, Roland ensured Jake never died, and so never arrived in Mid-World to travel with him.
Solving that paradox takes up the section titled "Jake: Fear in a Handful of Dust". The second half, "Lud: A Heap of Broken Images", takes the reunited group into a decayed high-tech city at war with itself.
The main characters
Roland is the driving force, a man slowly losing his sanity to a contradiction he cannot resolve. Eddie Dean, the former addict, turns out to be the one who receives the answer when Roland burns Walter's jawbone, and the task falls to him: he must carve a key that opens a door to New York in 1977. Susannah, whose own mind has been divided since her introduction, faces the worst of the crossing when she traps an incubus using her mind while Eddie works.
Jake Chambers is the emotional centre of the book. He walks out of school, finds a key in a littered vacant lot where a single red rose has bloomed, and uses it on a door in an abandoned haunted house on Dutch Hill to cross into Roland's world. The group also gains Oy, an unusually intelligent billy-bumbler that resembles a cross between a badger, a raccoon and a dog, with a long neck, curly tail, retractable claws and a parrot-like ability to speak.
The antagonists are memorable. Gasher, a dying Gray fighter, kidnaps Jake on a crumbling bridge modelled on the George Washington Bridge. The Tick-Tock Man rules beneath Lud. Blaine the Mono, the monorail's artificial intelligence, has been driven insane by centuries of system degradation.
The themes
King took his title from T. S. Eliot's 1922 poem The Waste Land, and reprints several lines in the opening pages. Both section titles are taken from the poem. That borrowing is not decoration. The book is built around fragments: a fractured mind, a city broken into two warring factions called the Pubes and the Grays, machines running on long after their makers are gone, a radioactive expanse of mutated animals and ancient ruins said to have been created by something worse than nuclear war.
Identity and madness sit at the heart of it. Roland and Jake each carry two incompatible sets of memories, and neither can be dismissed as false. Lud is madness on a civic scale, a population fighting forever to the beat of drums they no longer understand. Blaine is madness in a machine. Against all this, King sets the slow formation of the ka-tet, a group bound together by fate, and the small courtesies that survive: the ancient citizens of River Crossing give Roland a silver cross and a courtly tribute, and it matters.
Why it still matters
The Waste Lands was nominated for the 1991 Bram Stoker Award for Novel. It is the book where the Dark Tower series stops being a loose sequence of westerns in a strange land and becomes a full quest with a fixed group and a clear direction. It also contains one of the most discussed endings in modern fantasy, and readers coming to it fresh should know that before they start.
How it ends (spoilers)
Roland and Oy track Gasher through a man-made labyrinth and into the sewers beneath Lud. Jake shoots the Tick-Tock Man and leaves him for dead, though the Ageless Stranger, the enemy the Man in Black warned Roland he must kill, arrives to recruit the injured man as a servant. The ka-tet reunites at the Cradle of Lud and boards Blaine the Mono. Blaine releases poison gas to kill the population of the city, then announces it will derail itself with them aboard at the end of the line in Topeka. Roland persuades it to hold a riddling contest instead, with the group's safety as the prize. The novel closes with Blaine racing across the Waste Lands and the contest still running.
More: The Dark Tower Books in Order · Stephen King Books in Order