The Dark Tower/The Waste Lands
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| Written by: | Stephen King |
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| Central Theme: | |
| Synopsis: | |
| Genre(s): | Dark fantasy, Horror, Science fiction, Western |
| Series: | The Dark Tower |
| Preceded by: | The Dark Tower/The Drawing of the Three |
| Followed by: | The Dark Tower/Wizard and Glass |
| First published: | August 1991 |
Preceded by The Drawing of the Three.
Book 3 of Stephen King's The Dark Tower, released in 1991, has two parts. In the first, the Temporal Paradox the previous book created makes Roland begin to lose his mind. In the second, the ka-tet, now including the recently resurrected Jake continue their journey, get caught, escape and move on.
Followed by Wizard and Glass.
Tropes used in The Dark Tower/The Waste Lands include:
- A God Am I: Deconstructed by Blaine. He knews full well he's not a god, but people just refused to see him as anything else, so he decided to lean into the trope, and a large part of why he's so sadistic is because of his annoyance with the blind fanatics who worship him.
- Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever - Shardik, a gigantic cyborg bear attacks the protagonists at the beginning of the book.
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot - Shardik, Blaine, and Patricia all went crazy years before the start of the series.
- Arc Words - Among others, 'Blaine is a pain'.
- Cliff Hanger - Mighty fine one. Readers had to wait six years for the resolution.
- Cool Train - Blaine the Mono
- Blaine is a pain.
- And that is the truth.
- Driven to Suicide: Patricia, egged on by Blaine.
- Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory - Parodied in Jake's essay
- Everything Is Worse With Bears - Especially 50-foot tall, millennia old parasite-ridden cyborg god bears.
- Fan Disservice: How the ka-tet holds off the Oracle.
- Genius Loci - The Plaster Man
- Horny Devils: The Oracle. Sex with an incubus here is portrayed as very unpleasant and painful.
- I Have Many Names - Flagg says this very line.
- It Tastes Like Feet: Eddie asks Roland if billy-bumblers make good eating. Roland answers no, they're horrible: tough and gamy, and he'd sooner eat dog. When quizzed, he confirms that, yes, he's also eaten dog meat.
- Jedi Mind Trick - The key.
- Jerkass - Blaine. Dear God.
- Kick The Billybumbler - Gasher literally does this.
- Literary Allusion Title: To T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land". Part of the poem is used as an Epigraph and in-story Susannah quotes it.
- Living Lie Detector: Blaine can determine if someone is lying with 97% accuracy by using voice analysis.
- Meaningful Name - The city of Lud, whose surface inhabitants have forgotten what technology is and now fear it. At one point near the end, the point is made explicit when they are referred to as Luddites.
- Mordor - the titular Waste Lands, a vast area beyond the city of Lud which Roland and his ka-tet must cross with Blaine's dubious help.
- Nightmare Fuel - Charlie the Choo-choo terrifies all the characters.
- No Indoor Voice: Blaine. At least ... none that he's consciously aware of ...
- Also true of Jake's father.
- Only Smart People May Pass - Blaine forces our heroes to display their knowledge of... prime numbers!
- Split Personality - Blaine has the AI version. Eddie refers to the two personalities (the aggressive one who TALKS IN CAPITALS and the quiet, sane one who doesn't) as Big Blaine and Little Blaine.
- Subverted Kids Show - Charlie the Choo-choo is an example of a subverted kids' storybook.
- Must Make Amends
- Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory: Deconstructed. Roland remembers two versions of a certain crucial event, and it slowly drives him insane.
- Temporal Paradox: The hitch of the plot in the first half is Roland remembering how he got Jake killed off in the first book, as well as an alternate series of events. Since both are technically true, he can't really make his mind settle on our or the other, which induces this effect on his own memory.
- The Seventies - Jake comes from 1977.
- True Art Is Incomprehensible - The main reason Jake gets an A+ for his essay.
- Wasteland Elder: Eddie daydreams about meeting some of these ("wise fuckin' elves!", he muses), who would give the ka-tet some food and supplies and maybe tell them the best route to the Dark Tower, when he sees the Lud skyline from a distance. He realizes, though, that the chances of them meeting anyone like that are slim to none (though they do meet some decent folk in River Crossing).