The third novel in Stephen King’s Dark Tower saga entitled The Waste Lands was an engaging read that I enjoyed more than the second novel. My primary complaint about the second novel, The Drawing of Three, was that some of the main characters were difficult to connect with. The third novel greatly alleviated that problem with Odetta/Detta’s transformation into Susannah and the reintroduction of Jake.

The third novel takes up a short time after the end fo the second. During this time, Roland, Susannah, and Eddie have been traveling in search of the Dark Tower and Roland has been training the other two as gunslingers, his new partners. During the novel, we see Susannah and Eddie develop into their new roles as gunslingers and as a couple. However, we also see Roland’s mental stability begin to falter as he struggles to deal with the paradox of Jake’s death…he died and, yet he did not. As mentioned previously, Jake also becomes a major character in the third novel. His story actually starts off in New York, where he quickly falls into the same mental paradox as Roland and make the realization that, in order to save his sanity, he must rejoin Roland’s world.

Despite his death in the first novel, I truly believed that Jake would return to the story in some capacity. It probably had something to do with his dying words, “Go then, there are other worlds than this.” That statement seemed to be a very strange thing for a dying child to utter (though his comments always did seem to have more wisdom by far than those of an average child) and screamed of foreshadowing. We actually saw Jake again in book two through the eyes of Jack Mort, his (would-be) killer, but only briefly. He didn’t gain a larger part until book three and I believe that is one of the main reasons I liked the third novel so much more than the second. Jake is definitely my favorite character after Roland.

Overall, I thought The Waste Lands was a very good read. For me, it still wasn’t as good as The Gunslinger, but I enjoyed it far better than The Drawing of Three (which many people seem to like a lot more than me). I have never been a reader of horror novels, so some of King’s imagery is a bit dark for my tastes, but, despite that, I have still enjoyed this series pretty well and I look forward to venturing on.