The Waste Lands
Chapters - Stephen King
Section: Argument
A prose summary recapping the events of the first two Dark Tower novels. Roland Deschain, the last gunslinger, pursued and caught the man in black, Walter, across a vast desert. Along the way he met and sacrificed a boy named Jake Chambers Chambers. Roland then drew three companions through magical doors on the Western Sea: Eddie Dean Dean, a heroin addict; Odetta Holmes/Detta Walker, a woman with two personalities who merged into Susannah Dean Dean; and Jack Mort, a serial killer whose death created a paradox around Jake's existence. The ka-tet has now moved inland, where Susannah is learning to shoot, Eddie is learning to carve, and Roland is losing his mind to the paradox of Jake's two deaths.
POV: Roland Deschain·Mentioned: Eddie Dean, Susannah Dean, Jake Chambers, Walter o'Dim, Cuthbert Allgood
Book 1: Jake: Fear In a Handful of Dust
Chapter 1: Bear and Bone
While Susannah Dean practises her shooting near their forest camp, the ka-tet is attacked by Shardik, a colossal cyborg bear that is one of the twelve Guardians built by the Great Old Ones. Susannah shoots the radar-dish from its skull and the creature dies. Roland explains the Guardians, the Beams, and the Dark Tower, and decides they should follow the bear's backtrail to its Portal. He also throws into the campfire the jawbone he carried from the way station; it blazes and changes shape, and Eddie Dean alone sees it briefly become a key and then a rose before vanishing. Roland speaks of the paradox tearing his mind apart over Jake Chambers, the boy he both did and did not let die under the mountains. Throughout, Eddie has been whittling a slingshot from a chunk of wood, the first carving he has done since boyhood. Near the chapter's end he spots an ash tree, cuts a thick branch from it, and that night begins carving the key he saw in the fire.
POV: Roland Deschain·On page: Eddie Dean, Susannah Dean·Mentioned: Jake Chambers, Walter o'Dim, Cuthbert Allgood
Chapter 2: Key and Rose
In New York on 31 May 1977, eleven-year-old Jake Chambers is losing his mind, tormented by warring voices insisting both that he is alive and that he died weeks earlier under a car. After handing in a deranged Final Essay at the Piper School, he leaves and wanders down Second Avenue, drawn by a growing sense of purpose. At a bookshop called The Manhattan Restaurant of the Mind he meets Calvin Tower and Aaron Deepneau and acquires two books, Charlie the Choo-Choo and a book of riddles. Following his certainty to the corner of Second and Forty-sixth, he finds the building gone, replaced by a vacant lot, the former site of Tom and Gerry's Artistic Deli. Inside the lot he hears a vast singing choir, and lying in the weeds he discovers a key and, beyond it, a wild rose of overwhelming beauty. He senses something is wrong with the rose. He pockets the key and goes home, where he stands up to his father for the first time before retreating to his room.
POV: Roland Deschain·On page: Eddie Dean, Susannah Dean, Jake Chambers·Mentioned: Cuthbert Allgood
Chapter 3: Door and Demon
Eddie Dean finishes carving the ash-wood key and gives it to Roland Deschain, whose warring voices fall silent the moment he closes his hand around it. The ka-tet follows the Beam to a clearing where an ancient speaking ring marks the site of a demon-guarded portal between worlds. While Susannah Dean traps the demon of the circle by drawing it into a sexual embrace, Eddie uses the key on a door that materialises in the ring. On the other side, Jake Chambers fights his way through a monstrous plaster doorkeeper in the haunted house on Dutch Hill in Brooklyn. At the crucial moment Susannah releases the demon she has held; Roland catches it in his arms and leaps through with it, battles the doorkeeper inside the Brooklyn house, and kills the demon-infested hand. Eddie, helped by Susannah, then hauls Roland up out of the doorway by his hair, and Eddie drags Jake up by the wrists just as the house collapses behind them. The ka-tet is now complete and Jake's paradox is resolved.
POV: Roland Deschain·On page: Eddie Dean, Susannah Dean, Jake Chambers
Book 2: Lud: A Heap of Broken Images
Chapter 4: Town and Ka-Tet
Recovering from a feverish spider-bite, Jake Chambers wakes to find a stray billy-bumbler licking his face; he names it Oy and it follows the ka-tet. Travelling the Great Road towards the city of Lud, they pass through a deserted town and reach River Crossing, where a handful of elderly survivors led by Aunt Talitha welcome them with food and drink. The old people tell of Lud's long war between two factions, the Grays and the Pubes, and warn that the city is now lawless and that both sides would seize a child like Jake. Talitha and the twins describe Blaine the Mono, an ancient monorail that once ran from the city. As they leave, Roland kneels for Talitha's blessing, and she gives him a silver cross on a fine-link silver chain that she has worn for over a hundred years, asking him to lay it at the foot of the Dark Tower. The ka-tet reads Charlie the Choo-Choo together, recognising it as a coded account of Blaine, and agrees that ka requires them to enter Lud and find the train.
POV: Roland Deschain·On page: Eddie Dean, Susannah Dean, Jake Chambers, Oy·Mentioned: Walter o'Dim, Cuthbert Allgood
Chapter 5: Bridge and City
Approaching Lud, the ka-tet passes the wreck of an ancient aeroplane holding the mummified outlaw prince David Quick, then edges across the long, decaying bridge over the Send River, nearly losing Oy through a gap in the deck. On the far side they are confronted by Gasher, a diseased member of the Grays who holds a live grenade and demands Jake. To save the others Jake gives himself up, and Gasher drags him through booby-trapped streets and tunnels towards the Tick-Tock Man's lair. Roland Deschain tracks the pair with Oy's help, while Eddie and Susannah Dean fight off a mob of Pubes and force the reluctant spokeswoman Maud to lead them through the city to the Cradle of Lud. Underground, Jake is brought before Andrew Quick, the Tick-Tock Man, charismatic and psychotic chief of the Grays, who interrogates him about his Seiko watch and the technology of his world. Roland sends Oy in through the ventilation grille; the bumbler savages Tick-Tock's eye, Jake snatches up a Schmeisser and then his stolen revolver and empties both into him, and Roland bursts in to gun down Gasher, Brandon, Copperhead and Hoots. The air-raid alarm rises across Lud as they flee. At the Cradle, Eddie and Susannah wake the insane monorail Blaine, who threatens to kill them unless they supply a worthy riddle; Roland answers with Cuthbert's old chestnut about death - what is better than all the gods and worse than Old Man Splitfoot, that dead people eat always and that kills the living slowly - and gives the answer nothing, and Blaine demands more. Back in the kitchen of the bunker, a hooded stranger revives the dying Tick-Tock, naming himself in turn the Ageless Stranger, Maerlyn, the Magician and the Wizard before settling on Richard Fannin.
POV: Roland Deschain·On page: Eddie Dean, Susannah Dean, Jake Chambers, Oy, Gasher, Blaine the Mono·Mentioned: Cuthbert Allgood
Chapter 6: Riddle and Waste Lands
Reunited at the Cradle of Lud, the ka-tet gathers around Blaine's diamond-shaped control box, where the monorail has set them a combination puzzle. Susannah Dean lets her old Detta Walker self come surging up and uses the Net of Eratosthenes to sieve out the prime numbers, then takes back control and presses the sequence. The Cradle opens and they board Blaine the Mono, settling into the Barony Cabin with its ice-sculpture of Roland Deschain at the door. Through the transparent walls they watch a purple poison cloud boil up from the manholes and gratings of Lud, driving Pubes and Grays alike before it and dropping them dead in the streets, while the mono slides out of the Cradle and accelerates away into the waste lands proper. The viewing screen shows a blasted, twisted landscape rolling by at terrifying speed. Smooth and conversational at first, Blaine soon reveals that he is wholly insane and that he intends to drive himself off the line at Topeka and kill them all with him. With nothing else to bargain, Roland proposes a Fair-Day riddling contest - their lives against safe passage to the end of the line - and Blaine, who loves riddles, accepts.
POV: Roland Deschain·On page: Eddie Dean, Susannah Dean, Jake Chambers, Oy, Blaine the Mono·Mentioned: Gasher, Cuthbert Allgood, Walter o'Dim