The Waste Lands

The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands follows The Gunslinger and The Drawing of the Three as the third volume in this remarkable series, which well may be the most extraordinary and most imaginative cycle of tales in the English language.

Inspired in part by Robert Browning's narrative poem, Stephen King has written once again of his twenty-year affair with The Dark Tower and its strange world that is both so familiar and unfamiliar to us. Writing of his masterwork, King reveals that he is "...still able to find Roland's world when I set my wits to it, and it still holds me in thrall... more, in many ways, than any of the other worlds I have wandered in my imagination."

The first volume in the cycle, The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger, tells of the haunting, mysterious character of Roland of Gilead, the last gunslinger, in a world that has "moved on." A second volume, The Drawing of the Three, picks up Roland's quest upon a deserted beach of the Western Sea.

In The Waste Lands, we are joined with old acquaintances: the boy Jake who has been introduced in The Gunslinger, along with Eddie Dean and Susannah, who are so prominently featured in The Drawing of the Three. Roland's strange odyssey continues. There are new evils... new dangers to threaten Roland's little band in the devastated city of Lud and the surrounding waste lands, as well as horrific confrontations with Blaine the Mono, the piratical Gasher, and the frightening Tick-Tock Man.

The Dark Tower cycle continues to set its author on a plane apart. What lands, what peoples has Stephen King visited that are so unreachable to us except in the pages of his unique writings?