Read: The Waste Lands, “Bear and Bone” parts 1-21

Well, the show goes on, at least for now.

I find that I really don’t give a shit about Eddie and Susannah at all, which is probably a pretty big problem given that they show no signs of going away. Indeed, one of the future installments of the series is called Song of Susannah, so unless that’s intended in the same way that, like, “American Pie” is the Song of the Big Bopper, she at least is sticking around and staying in the foreground. They’re just so much less interesting than Roland, so of a piece with every other screwed-up just-folks King everyman and everywoman. Give me the granite-faced cowboy-cum-knight-errant over a pair of Mary Sues for King’s attitudes toward substance abuse, sibling rivalry, racial relations and mental illness anyday.

I don’t know, maybe that’s unfair. Maybe I just fell in love with an idea of what this series was going to be–no-frills post-apocalyptic dark fantasy starring Clint Eastwood, Stephen King’s answer to The Road Warrior–and am bummed that I can’t write Books Two-onward as an armchair author. But I feel pretty secure in saying that the material with Eddie and Odetta/Detta/Susannah, and the material involving Roland set in our world, is less successful even on its own terms than the original all-Roland all-Mid-World* material was on its terms.

But I’ll tell you one thing: Of all the possible plot twists I expected, a giant 70-foot cyborg bear built along with eleven other giant animal cyborgs to protect an interdimensional portal by some futuristic-by-today’s-standards military-tech company that in fact predates the current action by some two millennia was not one of them! I sort of wish this discovery hadn’t been spoiled by an illustration that showed up before the revelation did in the text itself, but oh well. This is the kind of batshit crazy stuff the previous volume could have stood to have a lot more of. A 2,000-year-old half-animal, half-machine bear the size of King Kong! That’s GREAT.

The other thing that got me pretty excited is what I believe to be the first sign that these books tie into King works other than the ones involving Flagg: the Turtle, one of the Twelve Guardians who, like the giant bear, protect the dimensional portals. Roland says he’s a really important guardian and (quoting a bit of doggerel) that “he holds us all within his mind.” That sure as shooting sounds like the Turtle from It, the giant extra-dimensional being that supposedly vomited up the universe and served as the benevolent opposition to It Itself.

It was at this point that I realized I’m not reading these books like regular books, where I derive enjoyment primarily from the plot and the prose and the characters. I’m reading them like a game or a puzzle, impatiently plowing through accounts of how Eddie was better at basketball than his brother and anxiously awaiting the parts where another pair of pieces come together or another major clue is revealed. I’m reading them so that I can read Wikipedia entries on King characters like Flagg without worrying about having something that happens to them in a whole ‘nother book spoiled.

* PS: A whole lot of basic information about these books, like the name of the world Roland inhabits, show up in the Arguments or Afterwords or jacket copy before they show up in the text itself. Besides the name “Mid-World,” I’m pretty sure I learned about the nature of Roland’s quest (something’s broken with reality and he wants to go to the Dark Tower to try and fix it), his last name (Deschain), and the fact that he’s going insane from these extra-diegetic sources rather than the story itself.

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