Dark Tower Re-Read, Book 3: The Waste Lands

Reading The Waste Lands in Panama City Beach, FL

I'm continuing my re-read of Stephen King's Dark Tower series, which has improbably become one of my favorites in recent years. I started with The Gunslinger and The Drawing of the Three. Technically it was my third time reading those, since I first read them back in the early 90's and somehow never kept up with the series. For whatever reason they didn't grab me the first time, but the second time I read them in 2017-18 I was hooked to become, in the common terms of palaver, a Tower junkie. Why? Maybe I wasn't ready as a teenager. Maybe it takes a while for King's genius to come through. Maybe ka works slowly yet persistently.

So. This is my second time reading The Waste Lands. I was lucky enough to read most of it on the beach during a socially distanced beach trip with my wife (see above!), the same beach where I read a few of the other books during the last trip to the Tower. Also, part of my reason for waiting until this summer to re-read this series despite thinking about it constantly for the last two years is that I was rewarding myself for hopefully earning tenure. While I was at the beach I received the official notice that I will be tenured as of Aug. 1. So what better way to celebrate this long, difficult, and strangely satisfying culmination of years of work than with a long, difficult, and strangely satisfying series of books!

I really enjoyed The Waste Lands the first time, but I'm appreciating it at a much deeper level this time. It has almost everything that people (including me) love about The Dark Tower series. We get the whole ka-tet together for the first time. We get more of a sense of Roland and the strange world he comes from. We see Eddie and Susannah become full-fledged gunslingers. We are reacquainted with an old character and meet plenty of new ones, including the beloved billy-bumbler Oy. There are plenty of the sorts of WTF? moments that keep you guessing and that make the Dark Tower so enjoyable. 

The deepest themes of the series (destiny and free will, time and memory, the meaning of life, etc.) finally arrive in their full form, although there are enough loose ends and impending surprises to make me excited to re-read the rest of the books soon.

If you haven't read The Waste Lands, I discussed some aspect of the plot in my first review of the first time here or here.

For this re-read review, I'd like to say a bit more about something that wasn't so obvious to me before: the connections to the previous books and the whole of the series. There are little connections to the previous books I just didn't notice the first time (especially some of the details in The Gunslinger), and of course I couldn't really appreciate the foreshadowing to future books that I hadn't read yet (although of course in the Dark Tower multiverse that wouldn't have necessarily stopped me!). 

Roland casually mentions elements of his backstory both here and in the previous books that won't be explained until book four or later, but now that I see the connections. And this is why I think the Dark Tower, far more than most series, really repays re-reading. In a series where time is as wonky as it is here, it really couldn't be any other way. But also the books are rich enough that you will notice new things each time. And they are entertaining and bizarre enough to be even more fun the second or third time around. I found myself getting really excited to revisit Shardik and to meet Oy again for the first time (if anything in the Dark Tower can be said to be the "first time"). And I found myself appreciating Lud and Blaine a lot more than I did the first time, too, partly because both give deep insights into Mid-World and its odd connections to our world.

I still find a particular super unsettling scene to be super unsettling, which will require some spoilers. Don't say I didn't warn you.

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To summon Jake to Mid-World, they need to fend off a sex-crazed demon while Eddie performs the ritual. Basically Susannah agrees to be raped by a demon if the demon is male (which it turns out to be), an event for which she calls forth the Detta side of her personality. She seems oddly agreeable to this, and then Detta takes it as a challenge somewhat like her exploits back in the day (these involved luring white men to their cars and then leaving them literally with their pants down). But the scene is unsettling and just bizarre. Not that King's readers aren't used to such things (a certain scene of IT is even more controversial) and not that it doesn't have huge consequences later, but this time I think I just found it odd how easily Susannah accepts this task, and how little such a horrific act seems to affect her later, not to mention how blazé Eddie is about his wife going through this ordeal. 

I wish I could say better things are in store for Susannah in future books, or for that matter, the rest of the ka-tet. But ka has other plans for them. I'm not saying King shouldn't have included this scene or that it doesn't serve a purpose in the story, but I'm always a bit uneasier about how he handles Susannah than most of the other characters. But on the other hand, she is a fascinating three dimensional (or more?) character who is a key part of the ka-tet throughout the rest of the books, which is a lot more than a disabled Black woman would get from most non-disabled white male authors in the 80's and 90's, so this unease is not a complaint exactly. I'm still not sure. Check back with me after I re-read book six. 

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As was the case with my re-reads of the first two books, I'm enjoying this a lot more because I already have a sense of how engrossing and weird and terrifying the Dark Tower multiverse really is. I don't think I was really, as Eddie puts it, a "Tower junkie" until books four or five the first time. At this stage on my previous journey, The Waste Lands made me want to keep reading and gave me a richer sense of Roland's world, but the Dark Tower had yet to become one of my all-time favorites. And on this re-read I'm discovering all over again why I love this series so much.

One more bit of business: Which is my favorite Dark Tower book? A lot of people pick this one, and it's easy to see why: it has almost everything, including enough plot for three regular novels. 

I'm still not sure. I seem to remember the lush world building of book four quite fondly, and then we still have the mind-bending self-referential stuff in the later books (starting in book five and going through the towering conclusion of book seven). And of course there's the delightful side trip of book 4.5 (which I think I will read in its place in the story this time between books 4 and 5). On the topic of self-referential stuff, we do get a hint of that with the Charlie the Choo Choo story line in The Waste Lands, which I deeply appreciated this time.

So what will my favorite Dark Tower book be? I'm still not sure. For now I will follow ka and let that answer emerge as it will, do it please ya.

See also my Goodreads review.