Review: The Waste Lands

The Waste Lands (The Dark Tower, #3)The Waste Lands by Stephen King

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Finally! I’m done with Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands after more than 3 months of slow reading. Last night, I lay in my bed for more 2 and a half hours straight to finish it, and then I couldn’t go to sleep for another hour because of my mind having gone into overdrive from all the suspense. I pity everyone who had to wait from 1991, when this was published, till 1997 when the sequel was. Mr. King can be as cruel as Blaine if he’s feeling like it. Hah! With one arm tied behind his back!

There’s a lot going on in this book, it starts off from where The Drawing of the Three left us (duh), and it’s a wild ride from there. In the last book we get a good look at two New Yorks of slightly different time frames. Here we see yet another New York, but mostly we see Mid-World, Roland’s world. What happened to this desolate, perverse, stomach-wrenching dimension is slightly less of a mystery by the book’s end, but a lot remains unanswered. If the question “So what happened?” was of a gently curious nature by the end of Book #2, now it’s a worm, eating at my insides! I must know about this world, what happened to it, what it was like before it all, how it connects to our own world. So similar to our own, yet so exotic, destroyed, hopeless and… well, fantastic!

The final 150 pages of the book or so is where it really shines. Not that the rest is bad; Jake’s arc is interesting and very dream-like. But the characters introduced in the final two chapters of the book are intense, dramatic, brilliant, absolutely disgusting, breath-taking. The dialog is captivating, but I must admit, the descriptions of the scenery and backgrounds are sometimes so dense and poetic I have trouble imagining the grandness of the journey.

So whichun of you cullies gonna lend me the nesswan?

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