by Jay Wilburn
The plan is to reread all of Stephen King’s works in the order that they were published. Richard Chizmar of Cemetery Dance had the vision. I’m doing it because I am a writer and I want to improve my fiction. And I love Stephen King’s stories. I think there is something to be learned through this process.
You can also go back to the beginning and read Before Carrie or any of my other posts up through this one and beyond by checking out this link to the Master List of all my #StephenKingRevisited posts.
Turn on the drum track to “Velcro Fly.” It’s time to make another sacrifice …
The Wastelands is dedicated to Stephen King’s son, Owen King.
“The gods frowned upon wastrels.” This novel holds all the wonder of forgotten lands, impossible creatures, and lost cities of ancient advanced technology. From a positronic demon goliath of a beast to Blaine the Pain where the story cliffhangs us at the end, this book is epic, spectacular, and gritty in its sideways apocalyptic world.
Eddie decides early on that “beating heroine was child’s play compared to beating your childhood.”
Mir the bear is a great scene that clarifies the world while making it even more disjointed. The turtle was important in It and is the counter-partner to the bear on both sides of a beam leading to and through the Dark Tower itself.
I forgot the subplots of the divides in Roland’s and Jake’s sanity. It is a lot of work to bring the boy back. I forgot about Oy, too.
The bookstore owner mentions the Territories which may harken back to the other worlds of The Talisman. Like The Talisman we have a train ride through radiated nightmare landscapes. The train is upgraded in this one with a barony class car and everything. Also, the description of the horror is better in this book’s version of the train ride.
There’s a woman named Mercy in this story much like the character in the story within a story in Misery.
The albino twins with long hair mirror the characters that were part of the later Matrix movies. I wonder if that idea came from here.
“Anyone who thinks impressions of old movie actors are funny absolutely cannot be trusted.”
I’m not sure Roland still had his boots at this point, but they are mentioned in a scene late in the book.
The dark man of The Stand and many other King tales shows up under a new R.F. name.
The clearing where the path ends is a great stand-in for the word death.
The landscapes described in this novel are epic. Demons, ghosts, legit magic, and alien machine intelligences populate the world of humans clinging to the edge of extinction as the last gunslingers plow a path of destruction on their mad quest for the Tower. I had forgotten that this novel ended in a cliffhanger and much of what I recall about the full trip was at the beginning of the next book. I didn’t finish the fourth book in this series, Wizard and Glass, the first time I attempted it, but I’m excited to get to it in the coming months.
My next post will be Before Needful Things which will be linked on the Master List of all my Stephen King Revisited posts.
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