The Waste Lands by Stephen King

Title:  The Waste Lands
Author:  Stephen King
Pages:  422
Genre:  Fantasy
Publisher:  Plume, 1992
Series:  The Dark Tower, Book 3

...the voice of Yes; the voice of White; the voice of Always.

Synopsis:  With The Waste Lands, the third masterful novel in Stephen King's epic saga The Dark Tower, we again enter the realm of the mightiest imagination of our time.  King's hero, Roland, the Last Gunslinger, moves ever closer to the Dark Tower of his dreams and nightmares -- as he crosses a desert of damnation in a macabre world that is a twisted mirror image of our own.

With him are those he has drawn to this world, street-smart Eddie Dean and courageous wheelchair-bound Susannah.  Ahead of him are mind-rending revelations about who he is and what is driving him.  Against him is arrayed a swelling legion of fiendish foes both more and less than human.

And as the pace of action and adventure, discovery and danger pulse-poundingly quickens, the reader is inescapably drawn into a breathtaking drama that is both hauntingly dream-like....and eerily familiar.

"YOU ARE KA-TET; ONE MADE FROM MANY. SO AM I. WHOSE KA-TET IS THE STRONGER WE MUST NOW PROVE."

Review:  I really need a new copy of this book.  It's in even worse condition than the The Drawing of the Three, which I thought was just about impossible.  It's got a slit in the middle of the front cover that goes all the way through the pages, all the way to page 105.  I have no idea how it happened, but at least it's small enough that I could still read the words on the pages.

Jake, a child from New York City in 1977, has been drawn.  He and his new-found friend, Oy the billy-bumbler, are a great addition to the ka-tet.  I love Oy.  He's something like a large, smart racoon creature with golden eyes....and he talks, sort of.  
The group continues to follow the beam to find the Dark Tower and they must pass through the mostly-destroyed city of Lud to get there.  It's a harrowing tale.  I love this story almost as much as I love the previous one.  It's full of great quotes and high adventure and really horrible bad guys and monsters.  It's pretty much everything I love and I'm giving it a perfect rating because it's kept my interest each and every time I've read it.

Rating:  10 / 10