Read: The Waste Lands–the rest of the book
Any reading experience that involves pumping your fists in the air and silently cheering (so as not to wake your wife, who went to sleep two hours ago) is probably a pretty good one. Such was my reaction to the return of your friend and his, Randall Flagg Richard Fannin, the highlight among highlights of the strongest section of this series yet.
You’ll recall that the whole reason I decided to read the Dark Tower series was for more Flagg, who I’d heard was the big bad. Obviously I was going to be pretty delighted by his big comeback no matter what. Plus, years of reading comics and consuming genre entertainment have me geared toward appreciating the frisson of continuity. (I think my favorite example of how much enjoyment you can get out of just a little reference to past adventures is from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: “What’s that?” “The Ark of the Covenant.” “Are you sure?” “Pretty sure.”)
But it wasn’t just the button-pushing that had me that excited, it was how that button was pushed. First, after a couple hundred pages of deft back-and-forth between the equally compelling perspectives of the four main characters, King suddenly cuts away from the climax itself for a chapter starring a character named Andrew. Huh? Oh, okay, that’s the real name of the Tick-Tock Man, the Thor-like warlord who ran the Grays. (Funny that his opposite number on Pubes was a dwarf; funny also that his flashback to better times in his city involved the presence of a guy whose job was to beat another guy into doing his jobs. Things have been pretty profoundly wrong around here for a while.) And then, just as out of the blue, Flagg himself arrives, sounding and even dressing much like he did back in post-plague Las Vegas. The thing that really thunderstruck me is that after all this build-up of the Tick-Tock Man–the way that his minion Gasher is made to seem horrible in such a way as to make Tick-Tock seem all the more horrible as Gasher’s boss, his Conan/Lord Humungous-like bearing (complete with a leg thrown over the side of his thrown), his ability to out-kill even Roland–he’s just the Dark Tower’s answer to Lloyd Henreid or even the Trashcan Man. (I might have known from that moniker!) It’s a startlingly effective bit of writing.
So what else happens? Blaine isn’t a demon after all, not really. He’s HAL, a computer gone bad, only instead of operating a spaceship he operates the entire city, though he appears to be most deeply personified in the pink monorail (paging Dr. Freud!). In a way his set-up is similar to that of It‘s titular entity: A central consciousness located elsewhere with a sort of pseudopod/embodiment sent out to do dirty work, but if you kill the latter you kill the former too.
The waste lands themselves feel familiar too. And not just in terms of Mordor, to which in true King fashion Susannah directly compares it. If a character or circumstance in a King novel is reminiscent of something else from pop culture or literature, you can bet a character will say or think so; in fact, during this very book, both halves of my high concept description of Roland as “Conan starring Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name” are explicitly referenced as Eddie and Jake think about the gunslinger. But no, what the waste lands really reminded me of, with their misshapen bug- and bird-like beasts, is “The Mist.” I wonder if Project Arrowhead had anything to do with the technology that powers the Beam?
I can see why King’s fans wanted to pull a Misery on him upon reaching the end of this book, which doesn’t even bother pretending to offer a conclusion, even a “to be continued” conclusion like the previous two books. It basically just stops in the middle of a scene, like an even more cliffhangery Two Towers. I’m glad I don’t have to wait for Book 4, which I hope follows more in the mode of the second half of Book 3, “Lud,” than in that of the first half, “Jake.”
Mostly I wanna see the two hardcases throw down.