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Summary: once again they ride again....~!
Review: Roland and the rest continue on thier quest for the dark tower. They meet and insane train named Blaine, they draw a new friend, and continue on the road. They find a new town called Lud, and meet some crazy folks along the way. The Tick Tock man, and Gasher...ewwwww...anyway, these will tie in together with other books as well....if you don't believe me then check this out "My life for you"...now if you don't know then read some of the other popular King books! I urge you to read on~ this is even better than the first one and second one because they have new adventures each time. The bear with the big metal hat, and the new friend that is drawn from New York...ahhh, yes the sweet smell of finding the one whose life you let be extinguished! The agony, "My Life for you" now read the book, and find out what the hell I am talking about!
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Summary: Riddle Me This, Gunslingers...
Review: This is the most personal of the DARK TOWER books so far. Roland of Gilead with Susannah and Eddie finally form a group of seekers (Ka-tet) wandering and wending through what is left of Mid-World. Artifacts of The Great Old Ones menace and terrify character and constant reader alike. All the time Roland is tortured by the memory of The Boy who has become a shadow to him.. sometimes real, sometimes a shade. Cut to New York City... The Boy (Jake) is traumatized by the same dilemma. Real or not. This part of the book is the most confusing, but rewarding. The Ka-tet is completed by the rescue of Jake through a door-this time created and orchestrated by Eddie Dean. GO GUYS. Jake brings missing pieces thru the portal with him. Time to traverse the menacing maze of Lud and enter the cradle of Blaine... "Blaine is a pain and thats the truth" Riddle for your lives my friends, Charlie the choo-choo is on the loose!!!
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Summary: The best of the series, hands down
Review: King handles the first half of this book with a brilliance he hasn't matched elsewhere. I actually read WL before the other two in the series (had to review it), and I'm glad I did -- "Gunslinger" would have put me off of DT altogether, and it really is an excellent series. The Waste Lands hooked me from page one, and the intricacies of Jake's travails in New York... suffice it to say that the whole section leaves me, as a writer, with a green-eyed monster in my head. :) Ned Dameron's illustrations are lush and beautiful; I was very disappointed in the illustrations for the others after seeing these.
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Summary: awesome book
Review: I am 13 years old and a big steven king fan (yes a 13 year old steven king fan). This book is the best of the first three i've read so far. I was into this book so much that i didn't go to bed at my bedtime! The only thing that got me disappointed was it was to be continued. Well i guess i'll just hafta get dark tower IV.
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Summary: The Third Installment
Review: This is the third part in King's Dark Tower Fantasy series. Much more fast paced then the two previous novels, this book really gets you into it. From riddeling high speed trains, to loud rock and roll this book gets you ready for the final installment of this series. In this book you really begin to focus on Rolands Mid-World and how much like our own it is. Roland begins to hint to the others who/what is behind the evil possessing mid-world. King does an excellent job of bringing the characters to life. You truly experience their fear, puzzlement and anxiety. If you have read the first two installments don't miss this one.
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Summary: Time-lapse photography book-style
Review: There's something about conceptual, temporal art that seems to be a pervading problem-- series novels, concept albums, time-lapse series of paintings, you name it. You hit a point where you've just had something really exciting happen at Point A. You've got a great idea for something exciting to happen at Point B. And you've got this really big space in between (Side 3 of Pink Floyd's The Wall, for example). How do you get from point A to point B without boring the life out of your reader/listener/viewer/whatever? There are two choices. Choice A is used by visual artists a whole lot: ignore that span of time. Cut it out. Make it go away. Deus ex machina: "And then three years passed." You get a more impressionist work, and you risk losing some of your fan base, because they don't have the mental capacity to make the jump. Choice B is used by almost everyone who writes books and/or music, and that is the transitional piece. Queensryche's fabulous concept album _Operation Mindcrime_ would be a perfect disc if not for the opening song on side two. Pink Floyd... well, I've already gone there. Point is, there's a weak link in every chain. The one book, one song, one whatever that contains a few useful tidbits but otherwise could have been ten minutes or four hundred pages shorter. In the present scenario, that book is The Waste Lands. To be fair, given that this problem seems to be ubiquitous, King does some good with it, using this five-hundred-plus page monstrosity to bring back some old faces and acquaint us with some new ones (would it be a spoiler to tell you we've got a new adversary here whom you know from another, non-Dark Tower book or two?), drops a few more hints about the war that caused the world to move on, introduces us to the author of that war, a man named Fannin/Fanon (mentioned in Drawing of the Three as the leader of the opposing forces, and here given us as The Ageless Stranger, who we were told early on will be the final obstacle to Roland gaining the Tower), and gives us the latter half of the series' equivalent of Walter in the Tick-Tock Man. Did that last paragraph confuse you? It should have. The book probably will, too, although King gives all that to us in a lot more words. He also gets us from point A to... well, about halfway to point B (and the ending of this book will make you throw it across the room, guaranteed-- it's such a shocker that King felt the need to reprint the last eleven pages of The Wastelands as the prologue to Wizard and Glass!). We get to know the characters we already know a little better. We see more full-color illustrations (Dameron's just not right for this, Grant should have stuck with Hale, whose work for DOT was the best in the series to date). We tie up a loose end or two, but nothing really satisfying. We hope for a better book in Wizard and Glass (and, for those of you following this thing through to the bitter end, let me assure you that we get it). That being said, it's still not as bad as some of King's early-career unreadable howlers like Firestarter. It's confusing, it's pretty much plotless, but at least it's readable. The compulsiveness of a series, by book III, rests quite a bit on how much you liked what came before. And if DOT didn't hook you, you don't have a pulse.
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Summary: The best Stephen King book!
Review: I really think this specific volume of the Dark Tower series is the best of all of Stephen King's books. The world of the Dark Tower is second only to Tolkien's Middle-Earth as the most vivid fictional world I've briefly visited, but what makes King's world vivid is different from what makes Tolkien's vivid. Middle-Earth seems like a real place, while Roland's world feels like a fever-dream, you vaguely recognize everything but its all rearranged into a shape that is completely unrecognizable. The Waste Lands engulfs the reader into this bizarre world more than any of the other books in the series. King put no restraints on his imagination when he wrote this sucker down! It has everything from a 70 foot tall robot bear to a city who's citizens perform mass ritual killings to ZZ-Top music played over speakers set up throughout the city and operated by a monorail with multiple-personalities! Like I mentioned before, its like a dream you have after having eaten pizza at midnight. It sometimes seems to me that we live in a world that shuns the world of dreams ... in our on-going quest for control and domination over nature, and thus shall we destroy feeling and passion in our own lives causing our own world to "move on." Men like Stephen King himself may be the gunslingers of our world, they boldly chart the dream-world and bring it alive for those who have the courage to follow and possibly chart new unexplored areas for themselves. Like the Dark Tower itself the dream-world must have a champion. Long live Stephen King, champion of the dream world!
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Summary: Another Great Steven King Book
Review: This is the third installment of Steven King's fantasy series, The Dark Tower, which follows the story of the Gunslinger Roland, the equivalent of an Arthurian knight in the world King has created, and his quest to reach the Dark Tower in order to make the world right again. In previous books, Roland met three people from our world, two of whom accompanied him on his quest. This installment includes three important separate stories: (1) the "drawing" of one more person from Earth, the child Jake whom we first met in the introductory book in this series; (2) the companions' travails in the city that lies in the path of their quest; and (3) the beginning of the companions' encounter with the mad monorail. Each of these stories is compelling in its own right, although I do not suggest reading this book before reading the previous two because, although you would be entertained and intrigued by King's alternate world, you would be missing the full story. Along with the interesting plots, we also learn much more about Roland's world. Part of this new knowledge comes from the tales Roland tells his companions, but much more is a by-product of the plot. We learn more about how the world has changed from Roland's youth, and we are treated to an imaginative post-apocalyptic vision of a city ruled by gangs whose original rivalry was rooted in a generation gap. King treats us as visitors to this world in much the same way that Roland's companions are. Rather than explain every little detail as it comes up, he prefers to let us discover the world as if we were really visiting it. Finally, King makes even more explicit the fact to which he alluded in earlier volumes that the villains in Roland's world are the same villains patrolling our world in Steven King books. In his other works, King usually drops a reference to other books he has written--e.g., several of his books allude to the dog who ran amok in Cujo. In the Dark Tower series, however, rather than making oblique references to other books, King has made it clear that the boogie men from other books inhabit this world as well. Fans of King's horror works should, therefore, also read this series in order to learn more about what King thinks of his villains.
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Summary: Stephen King appears to be running out of ideas...
Review: After the stunning originality of the first two 'Dark Tower' books, Stephen King appears to be running out of inspiration and ideas. There is nothing new in this book, with regard to characters, plots, or even the background. As a result, he appears to be throwing in lots of cliches borrowed from 'Alice in Wonderland' and 'Peter Pan'. In the author's end-note, King basically admits that he didn't know how to end this book, so he just did. The characters in the book also are now basically saying 'Let's get to the Dark Tower so that we can get this tiresome journey over with' - I can't agree with them more.
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Summary: a little of everything.
Review: The books starts off great. Then for about 200 pages we leap back to the drawing of jake. This clears up the mystery from the previous book and finally are thrown into Lud with an interesting environment and equally exciting characters - Blaine and the Tick-Tock man.
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