Read: The Waste Lands–“Door and Demon”
Compared to yesterday’s reading, this section was kind of by the numbers. The Dean Brothers remain a whole lot less interesting than a post-apocalyptic cowboy shooting at giant cybernetic bears, and the bit in the haunted house with Jake was like a less frightening version of the house on Niebold Street from It, or the Marsten house from ‘Salem’s Lot, or the Overlook Hotel from The Shining, or or or. But I did like this passage an awful lot:
She put a hand on the back of his neck, pressing his head against her thigh, and said bitterly to Roland, “Sometimes I hate you, big white man.”
Roland placed the heels of his hands against his forehead and pressed hard. “Sometimes I hate myself.”
That’s the appeal of the gunslinger–a guy so driven to do the right thing and fulfill his quest that he becomes loathsome even to himself.
In other news, I detected some thematic allusions to other King books–the constant injunctions for the characters to “stand” and the notion that life is a wheel that keeps coming around to the same place again are awfully familiar. Meanwhile, Susannah-Detta’s I’ve got you/you’ve got me sex duel with the demon was pretty much the ritual of Chüd from It.
One final note: They really have to stop putting the illustrations before the passages they illustrate. The damn book keeps spoiling itself!