Me”), and while she didn’t expect me to finish Roland’s tale in that time just for her, she wanted to know if I couldn’t please (please) just tell her how it came out. The line that wrenched my heart (although not quite enough to start writing again) was her promise to “not tell a Single Soul.” A year later—probably after the accident that landed me in the hospital—one of my assistants, Marsha DiFilippo, got a letter from a fellow on death row in either Texas of Florida, wanting to know essentially the same thing: how does it come out? (He promised to take the secret to the grave with him, which gave me the creeps.)
I would have given both of these folks what they wanted—a summary of Roland’s further adventures—if I could have done, but alas, I couldn’t. I had no idea of how things were going to turn out with the gunslinger and his friends. To know, I have to write. I once had an outline, but I lost it along the way. (It probably wasn’t worth a tin shit, anyway.) All I had was a few notes (“Chussit, chissit, chassit, something-something-basket” reads one lying on the desk as I write this). Eventually, starting in July of 2001, I began to write again. I knew by then I was no longer nineteen, nor exempt from any of the ills to which the flesh is heir. I knew I was going to be sixty, maybe even seventy. And I wanted to finish my story before the bad Patrol Boy came for the last time. I had no urge to be filed away with The Canterbury Tales and The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
The result—for better or worse—lies before you, Constant Reader, whether you reading this are starting with Volume One or are preparing for Volume Five. Like it or hate it, the story of Roland is now done. I hope you enjoy it.
As for me, I had the time of my life.
Stephen King
January 25, 2003
REDEMPTION
ARGUMENT
The Waste Lands is the third volume of a longer tale inspired by and to some degree dependent upon Robert Browning’s narrative poem “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.”
The first volume, The Gunslinger, tells how Roland, the last gunslinger in a world which has “moved on,” pursues and finally catches the man in black, a sorcerer named Walter who falsely claimed the friendship of Roland’s father in the days when the unity of Mid-World still held. Catching this half-human spell-caster is not Roland’s ultimate goal but only another landmark along the road to the powerful and mysterious Dark Tower, which stands at the nexus of time.
Who, exactly, is Roland? What was his world like before it moved on? What is the Tower and why does he pursue it? We have only fragmentary answers. Roland is clearly a kind of knight, one of those charged with holding (or possibly redeeming) a world Roland remembers as being “filled with love and light.” Just how closely Roland’s memory resembles the way that world actually was is very much open to question, however.
We do know that he was forced to an early trial of manhood after discovering that his mother had become the mistress of Marten, a much greater sorcerer than Walter; we know that Marten orchestrated Roland’s discovery of his mother’s affair, expecting Roland to fail his test of manhood and to be “sent West” into the wastes; we know that Roland laid Marten’s plans at nines by passing the test.
We also know that the gunslinger’s world is related to our own in some strange but fundamental way, and that passage between the worlds is sometimes possible.
At a way station on a long-deserted coach-road running through the desert, Roland meets a boy named Jake who died in our world, a boy who was, in fact, pushed from a mid-Manhattan street corner and into the path of an oncoming car. Jake Chambers died with the man in black—Walter—peering down at him, and awoke in Roland’s world.
Before they reach the man in black, Jake dies again . . . this time because the gunslinger, faced with the second most agonizing choice of his life, elects to sacrifice this symbolic son. Given a choice between the Tower and the child, Roland chooses the Tower. Jake’s last words to the gunslinger before plunging into the abyss are: “Go, then—there are other worlds than these.”
The final confrontation between Roland and Walter occurs in a dusty golgotha of decaying bones. The man in black tells