by Bev Vincent
They are now in the geographic region called Mid-World. Roland remembers hearing about a huge city at the edge of Mid-World when he was young. That city, Lud, is 160 wheels (approximately 175 miles) down the Great Road. They see its skyline from the top of a ridge, and Eddie hopes they will find someone there who will tell them what they’re supposed to do. The ominous drumbeats they hear in the distance aren’t encouraging.
Before they get there, they arrive in River Crossing, a humble town consisting of a few dozen buildings, a church and a jail—the closest thing to civilization Roland has seen since he passed through, and eradicated, Tull. The town’s residents, when they decide to emerge from hiding, prove to be a handful of very old people—well beyond being octogenarians. They invite the gunslinger and his companions to dinner and tell them what they know about the conditions in Lud, where a civil war that spread from a distant Barony has been raging for more than a century.
The Great Old Ones built Lud many centuries ago, but most of the technology has failed. What little might remain is beyond the abilities of the residents to operate. The two factions, the Grays and the Pubes, don’t even remember what they’re fighting over. The Grays were harriers who besieged the city and the Pubes are Lud’s former residents, who used the weapons of the Great Old Ones to fend the Grays off until they ran out of ammunition. The matriarch of River Crossing, Aunt Talitha, recommends that the ka-tet go around Lud rather than through it, because Jake will be an attractive prize for the people of Lud, since there are few children born there anymore.
Roland ignores this advice for two reasons. He doesn’t want to get in the habit of making detours, prolonging his journey and taking him off the Path of the Beam. He also believes that they are meant to go to Lud and if they try to go around it, ka will push them back on track. He believes they will find a train that will take them closer to their final destination. Jake thinks that this train will be called Blaine, whose name he included in his term paper.
Aunt Talitha tries to discourage Roland from seeking the Dark Tower. For generations, anyone who pursued that goal never came back, she says. When she sees he won’t be dissuaded, she gives Roland her silver cross and asks him to lay it at the foot of the Tower should he ever get there.
During their visit, Susannah exhibits signs that she may be pregnant. Whether this is because of her relationship with Eddie or because of what happened with the demon in the Speaking Circle won’t be known for some time.
Though the ka-tet is invited to spend the night, Roland knows that leaving won’t get any easier if they stay. Tull was a trap and he doesn’t want River Crossing to be another, even if it is more benevolent. When Jake says he doesn’t think it’s right to leave without helping, Roland says that if you look too hard at the small rights close at hand, you lose sight of the bigger ones that stand farther off. This is a lesson Roland will have to unlearn someday.
To get to Lud, they first have to cross the Send Bridge. The three-quarter-mile span is a thousand years old and on the verge of collapse. Another bridge farther up the Mississippi-like river has already fallen. They pick a pedestrian walkway as the safest route, but even that has gaps and the wind makes the crossing risky. A strong gust threatens to sweep Oy away. Jake leaps after him, and Eddie, who is afraid of heights, comes to their rescue. Roland assists, too. Seeing Jake dangling from another bridge strikes a sensitive chord.
When they recover from this near miss, a man is standing nearby with a live grenade. Though Roland could shoot it from the man’s hand, it’s too big a risk. The explosion might bring the bridge down, and the man who calls himself Gasher seems ready to die. He offers a deal: he will let the others go free if they give him Jake. Eddie can’t believe Roland is seriously considering this, but the gunslinger knows a standoff when he sees one and he quietly promises Jake that he will find him. Jake, who now trusts the gunslinger with his life, steps forward and allows himself to be taken.
The ka-tet now has two missions in Lud. They have to get Jake back and find the train that will carry them out of the city. Roland divides the group—in part out of necessity. Susannah can’t navigate the rubble-filled (and booby-trapped) streets of Lud fast enough to keep up with Jake and Gasher. Eddie and Susannah are dispatched to find the train station while Roland goes after Jake. He’s not alone. He has Oy, who can follow Jake’s scent in dark places where Roland’s tracking skills fail.
The streets of Lud are lined with thousands of bodies hanging from the speaker poles that broadcast war drums. The Pubes believe this sound comes from ghosts in the machine, a kind of dark god that demands sacrifice. When they hear them, they conduct a lottery to decide which of them will die next to appease the gods. This is a terrible trick perpetrated by the Grays, who have figured out how to make the Great Old Ones’ machinery play the drums.
Eddie and Susannah have a showdown with a group of Pubes. Susannah kills for the first time. The mob is relentless at first, akin to the people of Tull, but it dissipates after Eddie and Susannah shoot several more. One of their victims even apologizes to them once he discovers they are gunslingers and not Grays. Eddie and Susannah force two of the survivors to take them to the Cradle of Lud, the train station housing Blaine the Mono. The Pubes are terrified of Blaine, whom they consider a vengeful god, but Eddie and Susannah’s guns carry more weight. They enter a street guarded by a statue of a turtle and reach the immense square where the Cradle of Lud is situated. Statues of the Guardians of the Beam parade around the top of the structure, along with a sixty-foot golden statue of Arthur Eld.
Inside, they find Blaine the Mono and discover that he is as insane as Shardik was. He is suffering from a split personality—something Susannah identifies with. One voice is the original voice of the train: Little Blaine. The real intelligence controlling Blaine exists in the collection of computers under Lud. Blaine is simply the last operating machine that can manifest the personality of these computers, which used to run all of the city’s systems. Centuries of solitude and boredom have driven this artificial sentience mad. He is delighted to find people who might play a game of riddles with him. After he accepts the possibility that one last gunslinger might exist and learns about Roland, who knows many riddles from the Fair-Day contests in the days of Gilead, he is intrigued.
Gasher brings Jake to the inner sanctum of the Grays and their leader, the Tick-Tock Man, the great-grandson of the famed warrior David Quick. Quick led the last great army of the Grays against Lud and was successful in breaching their defenses. However, he died in a plane crash outside the city. The Tick-Tock Man rules his people with an iron fist, dispatching any who defy him.
Oy leads Roland to the inner sanctum and demonstrates his intelligence by going on reconnaissance missions through the ventilation shafts. The gunslinger tries to send a mental message to Jake but isn’t convinced it will work because he isn’t completely in ka-tet with them. Jake receives enough to know that Roland is nearby and wants him to create a distraction, which he does by turning some of Tick-Tock Man’s henchmen against one another.
Jake is supposed to open the door for Roland, but in the chaos that follows, he is prevented from doing so. However, the door opens anyway—Blaine opens it because he wants to meet Roland and his remembered riddles and Jake with his book of riddles.
Oy leads the charge. Other than one woman, whom Roland allows to escape, the only survivor is the Tick-Tock Man. Jake shoots him in the head, but his skull deflects the bullet. After Jake and Roland leave the Grays’ headquarters, guided by Blaine, a wizard who calls himself Richard Fannin appears before the Tick-Tock Man and converts him from a strong, essential leader into a sniveling minion. Fannin is determined that the ka-tet not get any closer to the Dark Tower than they are now.
Reunited, the ka-tet solves Blaine’s first puzzle, which permits them to board the train. Blaine agrees to take them to Topeka, where Mid-World ends and End-World begins. However, he decides to kill everyone remaining in Lud with poison and nerve gas. Since he was c
reated to serve, he argues that he is doing what the people wanted. They turned him into a god through their desires, and he is acting as one now, deciding when they live and die. Susannah is forced to abandon her wheelchair in the rush to leave before the gas attack obliterates everyone.
Jake realizes that Blaine intends to commit suicide. Blaine is bored and his circuits are failing in ways that he can no longer repair. He has already talked his only companion, Patricia the Mono, into killing herself. He accelerates to a speed that is in the red zone for the tracks and switches off the sensors that would tell him if there are any breaches. It’s been a decade since he last ran this route, and there’s a good chance the track has failed since then. He uses computer-generated images to make himself invisible as he speeds up. His route takes them through postapocalyptic landscapes, some of which are the result of the Great Poisoning, places where the world is trying to heal, and some of which are so alien that they may not be in Mid-World at all. In a dream, Eddie was told that Blaine could travel across all universes.
Blaine demands riddles from the ka-tet, but Roland refuses, enraging the petulant train. It turns into a classic Western showdown, with Roland adopting the stance of a gunslinger ready to draw. Blaine comes to see reason. He isn’t offering anything in return. He agrees to save their lives if they can stump him with a riddle before they cover the eight thousand miles to Topeka, which should take eight hours. He even apologizes when Roland accuses him of being rude.
Though King knew something of what came next, he ended the book on that cliffhanger. It would be several years before he returned to his ka-tet.
Characters (in order of mention): Susannah Dean, Roland Deschain, Eddie Dean, Cort, Sarah Holmes, Jack Mort, Enrico Balazar, the Great Old Ones, Henry Dean, Gloria Dean, Jake Chambers, Alain Johns, Cuthbert Allgood, Hax, Jamie DeCurry, Marten Broadcloak, Zoltan, Susan Delgado, Sheb, Allie, Nort, Sylvia Pittston, Jack Andolini, John Farson, Laurie Chambers, Elmer Chambers, Greta Shaw, Leonard Bissette, Joanne Franks, Mr. Harley, Bonita Avery, Mr. Knopf, Stan Dorfman, Calvin Tower, Wayne D. Overholser, Aaron Deepneau, Bango Skank, Mr. Hotchkiss, Engineer Bob Brooks, Raymond Martin, Mr. Briggs, Susannah Martin, Oy, Tom Denby, Si, Mercy, Bill Tudbury, Till Tudbury, Aunt Talitha Unwin, Blaine the Mono, David Quick (Lord Perth), Ageless Stranger, Maerlyn, King Arthur, Jack Mort, Vannay, Uncle Reg, Gasher, Tick-Tock Man (Andrew Quick), Copperhead, Spankerman, Luster, Winston, Frank, Jeeves, Ardis, Maud, Arthur Eld, Hoots, Patricia the Mono, Little Blaine, Steven Deschain, Tilly, Brandon, Deidre the Mad, Dewlap, Richard Fannin, Gabrielle Deschain.
Places: The Shooting Gallery; Oxford, Mississippi; the Great West Woods; Out-World; Mystic, Connecticut; Granite City; Pricetown; Tull; Dragon’s Grave; House of Cards; Tom and Gerry’s Artistic Deli; the Dark Tower; the Portal of the Bear; Gilead; Downland Baronies; Western Sea; Dutch Hill; the Mansion; Reflections of You; Piper School; 70 Rockefeller Plaza; Sunnyvale Sanitarium; the Way Station; the Pushing Place; MidTown Lanes; Vassar; Manhattan Restaurant of the Mind; Chew Chew Mama’s; Tower of Power Records; the Paper Patch; Turtle Bay; United Nations Building; St. Louis, Missouri; Topeka, Kansas; Mid-World Amusement Park; Oz; Brooklyn; Co-Op City; Bleecker Street; Markey Avenue; Mid-World; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Times Square; Denby’s Discount Drug; Send River; Brooklyn Vocational Institute; Lud; Jimtown; River Road; Garlan; River Crossing; Porla; the Church of the Blood Everlasting; the Big Empty; Elizabeth, New Jersey; Send Bridge; Fifth Avenue (Lud); Street of the Turtle; Cradle of Lud; the Plaza of the Cradle; Kashmin; Send Basin Nuclear Plant; West River Barony; Candleton; Rilea; the Falls of the Hounds; Dasherville; End-World; the Hall of the Grandfathers.
Things: Old Star (Apon), Old Mother (Lydia), Great Book, docker’s clutch, gunslinger’s catechism, Mir, Shardik, Guardians of the Beam, slow mutants, North Central Positronics, portals, Watch Me, Speaking Demon, the Drawers, ka-tet, tet, Beams, Charlie the Choo-Choo, Riddle-De-Dum!, Sombra Real Estate, the rose, Mid-World Railway Company, Charlie (train), lobstrosities, khef, billy-bumblers, gunslinger burritos, the Oracle, David, Keflex, wheel, the White, graf, dockey, Sellian, Watership Down, khef-mate, char, younkers, Fair-Day Riddling, Winter, Wide Earth, Sowing, MidSummer, Full Earth, Reaping, Year’s End, wenberry, Old War, Great Fire, Cataclysm, Great Poisoning, LaMerk Foundry, mandrus, grenado, cradle, sigul, dipolar circuits, unipolar circuits, firedim tubes, transitive circuits, the Imperium, slo-trans engines, way-gog.
Continuity Errors and Mistakes: Susannah’s mother’s name is Sarah in this book, whereas it was Alice before. Eddie’s sister was Selena in The Drawing of the Three, but now it’s Gloria. Co-Op City is really in the Bronx, not in Brooklyn. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is on the east side of Central Park, not near Times Square.
Crossovers to Other Works: Rose Madder, the book published immediately after The Waste Lands, refers to the bodies hanging from poles in Lud. Richard Fannin is another aspect of Randall Flagg from The Stand. He forces the Tick-Tock Man to adulate him in the words of Trashcan Man: My life for you.
Foreshadowing and Spoilers: The fact that the knees Jake scraped in his dream were scraped when he awoke is a sign that he went todash. Susannah’s sexual encounter with the demon in the Speaking Circle will have far-reaching implications for the future of the ka-tet. Jake’s key has the same hypnotic power as a certain turtle figurine that will appear later in the series. Aunt Talitha’s cross will play a part in the story, too, and might even end up where she intended. The array of colored lights inside the Tick-Tock Man’s lair is reminiscent of the oriel window atop the Dark Tower. “The wheel which turns our lives is remorseless; always it comes around to the same place again” is as close to a thematic statement as there is in the series. When Eddie asks Roland to tell them how he learned about the Dark Tower in the first place, Roland responds that it’s a very long story that he will tell only once. This sets the stage for Wizard and Glass. Calvin Tower and Aaron Deepneau will become important secondary characters in the series starting with Wolves of the Calla.
WIZARD AND GLASS: REGARD
Though King promised in the afterword to The Waste Lands that the fourth volume in the series would appear in the not-too-distant future, years passed with no sign that he had returned to the series. Many of his other novels had Dark Tower tie-ins, though, so the series was clearly on his mind. As early as 1994, he expressed a plan to write the final four books back-to-back to finish the series.
The fans grew increasingly demanding. Every week, his assistants put on his desk all the angry letters he received demanding the next book in the series. One of the more creative pleas had a Polaroid of a teddy bear in chains, threatening to execute the bear unless King released the next Dark Tower book. At once. In 1996, he promised fans they would have to wait only another year or so. He simply had to summon his courage to start. Plus he had to review the first three novels, armed with a highlighter and sticky notes.
He started writing in motel rooms while driving from Colorado to Maine after finishing work on The Shining miniseries. Ads announcing the book’s upcoming publication appeared in the back of the final four installments of his serial novel, The Green Mile.
The first two chapters of Wizard and Glass were released as a promotional booklet that accompanied bundles of his twin novels, Desperation and The Regulators. Though this delighted fans, there was some complaining, too, as many people had already purchased the books. King chastised the complainers in a harshly worded message posted by his publisher on the Usenet newsgroup alt.books.stephenking. Penguin released the chapters on their Web site two months later.
King read from the novel at a conference in October, stating that the first draft was more than fourteen hundred pages long. Wizard and Glass, dedicated to his personal assistants and published in August 1997, proved to be the longest book of the series. The Donald M. Grant limited-trade edition was the first book from a small press publisher to ever appear on the New York Times hardcover bestseller list. The trade paperback appeared a few months later.
<
br /> The novel picks up where The Waste Lands left off, repeating the final section of the earlier book to bring readers up to speed. In terms of the contemporary action, the book covers a four-or five-day period, although there is some uncertainty due to the slippage of time when Roland is telling his story and because of an adventure inside a magical orb. The backstory set in Mejis spans a period of several months, from the day after Roland’s test of manhood until he and his friends return from Mejis.
The first part of Wizard and Glass resolves the cliffhanger involving the suicidal Blaine the Mono. The second part finds Roland and his followers in Topeka, Kansas, in a version of America that is similar to the ones the New Yorkers came from, except in this reality a superflu virus has killed almost everyone. Before they visit a mysterious green palace that has materialized across the interstate, Roland needs to tell his companions a story from his youth. Then the ka-tet enters the palace and has a showdown with a wizard who goes by many names, including Marten and Randall Flagg.
As the monorail hurtles across Mid-World at breakneck speed, Blaine behaves like a petulant child. He hates being corrected or contradicted and demands to be entertained. When crossed, he metes out punishment, as when he amplifies the sound of the Falls of the Hounds.
Ka has provided Roland and his followers with a couple of clues about how to handle Blaine. The book of riddles Jake got at the Manhattan Restaurant of the Mind is a red herring—a fact hinted at by the missing answers section at the back. The real clue to cracking Blaine is in Charlie the Choo-Choo, and it is Eddie who figures it out. After watching Roland spend hours exhausting all the riddles from Fair-Day contests and after Jake tests Blaine with the hardest entries in Riddle-De-Dum!, Eddie starts zinging Blaine with stupid, illogical joke-riddles, shooting with his mind like a gunslinger firing bullets. Though Blaine knows the answers to many of them, it pains him to be forced to respond to these unworthy riddles. His circuits blow, his engines cease and the train coasts into Topeka instead of crashing into the barrier at the terminus. The train derails, but at a slow enough speed that the ka-tet survives uninjured.