Brian Schwartz

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The Waste Lands (Dark Tower, #3)

by Stephen King (Goodreads Author)

bookshelves: science-fiction-fantasy, currently-reading

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Brian Schwartz said: " King really shows us his writing chops in the scene where Jake desperately tries to unlock the door in the haunted house to get to Roland’s world. The scene is frantically paced. The house is collapsing in on itself as it reshapes itself into the evi King really shows us his writing chops in the scene where Jake desperately tries to unlock the door in the haunted house to get to Roland’s world. The scene is frantically paced. The house is collapsing in on itself as it reshapes itself into the evil guardian of this door. Detta desperately hangs on to the demon upon which she is forcing copulation. Eddie scrambles to make his homemade key function as rain pounds down upon him and thunder rocks the world around him. When this scene is brought to resolution, the reader almost needs to pause for a breath before moving on. You’ll seldom read writing better than this.

I detected a major flaw in King’s timeline regarding Eddie and Henry Dean. Perhaps it can be explained away as some anomaly of time within the Dark Tower, but I’m confident it is author error.

In THE DRAWING OF THE THREE, King tells us that Henry Dean returned from Vietnam with a heroin addiction. American forces withdrew completely from Vietnam in 1975. However, when Jake of 1977 New York encounters Henry and Eddie on the playground, Henry is still a youth. Eddie recollects that his encounter with Jake occurred shortly before Henry entered the Army. Unless Henry Dean was part of some covert operation in communist Vietnam, he could not have come back from Vietnam to introduce Eddie to heroin.

In introducing the Guardians, King provides the link to IT. Roland tells the legend of the Guardians to his companions. He tells them that the Guardian opposite the bear on their beam is the turtle. The turtle is the creator of our universe, having vomited it up while sick. While the bear continues to inhabit Roland’s world, his counterpart is living in the caverns under Derry, Maine.

King provides a postscript to this book. He promises that the next in the series is to come soon, but confides that he has trouble finding his way into Roland’s world. King had no idea just how long it would be before he and the Constant Reader visited Roland’s world. It would be six years before we were able to read the account of the riddling contest between Roland and Blaine as the next book, WIZARD AND GLASS, would not be published until 1997. That is an awfully long time to hang on a cliff. . .

THE WASTE LANDS was an excellent book and really picks up the pace of THE DARK TOWER saga ...more "

Aug 14, 2026 07:28PM · see review