Just Finished Rereading The Waste Lands by Stephen King

The Waste Lands, from 1991,  is the third volume of Stephen King's seven-volume The Dark Tower fantasy series.  The series, ostensibly based on a narrative poem by Robert Browning, features Roland Deschain, the Gunslinger, whose mission and quest lead him...with the aid of his ka-tet of fellow travelers...to that fabled dark tower through which all of reality is spun and governed.  Before I go on, let me warn you that this article is going to contain some plot spoilers.  Something is amiss in the Tower and Roland is determined to follow his ka, or "destiny" as four special characters...Eddie, Susannah, Jake, and Jake's little animal friend Oy (a "billy-bumbler") make up that group.  The first part of The Waste Lands, which I initially read in 2009, concerns the effort to bring in Jake from his old world, an alternative universe that is, in essence, our own...Roland's world (and most of the story's setting) is from a different reality.  That being accomplished, after much struggle naturally, the group goes to the run-down, post-apocalyptic metropolis of Lud, where Jake claims an insane train named Blain is there to take them to a portal that can lead to the Tower...no, I don't get it, either. There's a really bad, bad man in Lud named the Tick-Tock Man that they have to get past, and a nefarious character named Richard Fannin is later introduced.  The biggest impact the book made on me was its depiction of Lud and what happens to a society and its culture when the world has "moved on": the population loses its earlier connection with its legacy of technology and, worse, forgets the crucial social institutions that held it all together as a civilized, cultured and rationally-based society.  Now the people are governed by fear, violence and greed, quick to subscribe to the latest conspiracy theory around and to follow charismatic and ruthless strongmen...starting to sound familiar?  I'd recommend anyone read the second part of this book about Lud to see the direction we're going as a society and pause to reflect on how to turn it all back around.  Of course, a series like this builds open itself and you'd probably be lost if you didn't read the preceding material first, not knowing what had transpired in the narrative up to that point.  The next book in the series, titled Wizard and Glass and which was my favorite one the first time I read through The Dark Tower, would come out in 1997.  For now, though, I will take a short break from rereading this interesting if not rather confusing series to read Ken Follett's latest novel Never, which Stephen King wholeheartedly recommended recently on his Twitter feed...