While the story remains vitally tethered to the Robert Browning poem "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came," the title of the third book is intended to envoke T. S. Eliot's 1922 poem The Waste Land. King quotes the poem in the opening pages of the book, the infamous stanza that ends "I will show you fear in a handful of dust." And so King does, linking the bleakness of Browning's poem, in which the landscape is both an object and a presence, with the grotesqueries of Eliot's gelded cyclicality. Like the land and its Fisher King in The Waste Land, Roland's world has suffered a fundamental breach, a mythical cleaving of lord from land (a sickened king and the blight upon his body), culminating in the pollution of the earth itself. We learn in Robin Furth's The Dark Tower: A Concordance that Roland is thirtieth in a side bloodline descended from Arthur Eld of the White. Arthur Eld is an analogue for the legendary British King Arthur (or someone much like him; he is depicted in King's mythology as "riding a white stallion and brandishing his great sword Excalibur"). Taken with Eliot, the intimation is that Roland -- his world's Fisher King -- will remain unable to heal his world until he at last somehow manages to heal himself. Given his trail of murder and sacrifice, his plodding and tenacious acceptance of ka, "fate," the prognosis is not encouraging.

In The Gunslinger, a boy named Jake is pushed by a serial killer in front of a car in our world, dies, and wakes in Roland's world miraculously healed. Found by Roland at a way station in the middle of the Mohaine desert, Jake accompanies Roland in his pursuit of Walter, the man in black. Near the end, Roland sacrifices Jake, who falls from an underground rail trestle ("Go then... there are other worlds than these"), to secure palaver with Walter. In The Drawing of the Three, Roland kills Jake's killer in our world at a temporal moment chronologically occurring before the killer would have pushed Jake, resulting in a time paradox: both Roland in his world, and Jake in ours, remember two simultaneous pasts, one in which Jake lived and one in which he died; it is slowly driving each of them mad.

"All right," Eddie said at last. "I understand the basic paradox. Your memory is divided-"

"Not divided. Doubled."

As Jake neared this clump of alien grass, the rose began to open before his eyes. It disclosed a dark scarlet furnace, petal upon secret petal, each burning with its own secret fury.

The second section propels Roland's party along the beam, into Mid-World toward a gargantuan, crumbling city called Lud, a name ironically derived from a word that means opposition to technological change. Along the way more questions are answered, and symbolic dreams had (King uses dream sequences frequently in the series to foreshadow, working in some of the extra-sensory motifs that graced his earlier books). The journey is punctuated by encounters with weird technology (strange variations on dipolar and unipolar circuits) and relics from our world like a crashed World War II Focke-Wulf bearing the Nazi swastika. As the group approaches the city, Eddie recognizes the drumbeat from ZZ Top's "Velcro Fly" blasted intermittently through the streets of Lud. At one point we discover that one of King's most notorious characters from other novels has found his way into the central story here; the encounter is brief but tantalizing, and this is probably the book (first published in 1991 by Donald M. Grant) that got King thinking The Dark Tower would also be his narrative linchpin, drawing together at least fifteen of his books formally. The final confrontation between a deranged sentient monorail culminates in, of all things, a riddling contest, and is among one of the finest sequences in the series. The ending is the sort of cliffhanger one loves for its thrills and tolerates in spite of its audacity (recall there was a six year lapse between The Waste Lands and Wizard and Glass).

The new Viking edition collects all of the original interior illustrations by artist Ned Dameron, who brings a kind of rugged, painted realism to the series that makes his depictions of the creatures in the waste lands twice as fearsome. There are roughly double the paintings here versus the previous two books, many of them brilliant two-page spreads that open up the landscape and flesh out Roland's strange world. The only problem is that the pictures are spaced so far out of alignment with the story that you're occasionally given an image from some important scene literally hundreds of pages in advance. No doubt this was done to accommodate a font change that drops the page count from the original's 509 to just 422 (the new font is also a bit disappointing, probably owing more to my fondness for the Donald M. Grant original than a legitimate criticism).