But it also created more and more tension and made it impossible to put the book aside. Sure, we jump back and forth between Mid-World and New York more and more quickly as the story moves on and that did grind a little bit. While I’ve heard many people say that they felt it was drawn out a bit too much (including my significant other), I wouldn’t have shortened any passage in this book. The first half of the book deals pretty much exclusively with this problem and its solution. Both characters feel as if they’re slowly going insane if some closure isn’t found soon. Jake, in the New York of our world, is also fighting strange memories that seem like half-remembered dreams. Roland, struggling with his dual memory of both meeting and sacrificing Jake and another past without Jake, is not the only one who feels the paradox. I love me a good time paradox if the author knows how to use it and make it seem logical somehow. Having saved Jake from being killed by Jack Mort – the third door on the beach, remember? – Jake never died and thusly never came back to life to meet Roland in The Gunslinger. We continue our journey with Roland teaching Susannah and Eddie to be gunslingers and casually surviving one of the coolest and most terryfing attacks I’ve every read about. The set-up of this third novel in the Dark Tower series is similarly structured as its predecessor, though this one may be more a book of two halves rather than divided into three parts. I may have said the same thing in my review of The Drawing of the Three, but it speaks for King’s ability to one-up himself every single time. Published: New English Library 2003 (1991)įirst sentence: It was her third time with live ammunition… and her first time on the draw from the holster Roland had rigged for her. I’d go so far as to say, this is the book that made me a true Dark Tower fan. The Waste Lands was even more intriguing than The Drawing of the Three and pulled me in faster, harder and longer. After a mindbogglingly good second novel, I couldn’t really stop reading this series.

The waste lands king