Read: The Waste Lands–“Town and Ka-tet,” parts 1-15
After a long, long time, the Dark Tower series once again starts feeling like how I, based on The Gunslinger, imagined the Dark Tower series would feel. The group (now a fivesome with the addition of Jake and his newfound pet billy-bumbler Oy) enters a run-down old town at a crossroads, meets its elderly but decent inhabitants, and bam! We’re back to the batwing saloon doors and archaic speech of the Clint/Conan mash-up that was the first book. As I’m sure you’ve guessed, I think that’s pretty swell.
I like all this business with the evil choo-choo train, too. I do hope that the pay-off is worth the build-up, though. I worry that this note is being hit a little too hard and too often, and that I’m gonna end up disappointed.
And I liked hearing the dimly remembered oral history of how Road Warrior-style anarchy beset the city of Lud and its surroundings; more of that sort of thing and less of Eddie and Henry playing one-on-one, please. It seems like the impression I got that Roland’s world is seriously on its way out was accurate, and not just because of the mystical spacetime-breakdown stuff–we’ve learned that every major population center/bastion of civilization has been destroyed, that their inhabitants have been scattered and left to fend for themselves in completely isolated communities with no real means of interacting with one another, and that no one on any side of the myriad conflicts is having much luck reproducing. It’s not just Mad Max, it’s also a bit of Children of Men, but with Clive Owen’s adventure maybe 30 or 40 years back in the rear-view mirror. It’s a sad, dying world and I want to see more of it in that light.