"The Waste Lands" is a stunning novel, close in atmosphere and spirit to a dystopia, fully revealing to us Roland’s post-apocalyptic world. The novel has a very complex, multi-layered composition—intersecting worlds, shifting layers of time—and S. King demonstrates truly masterful writing skill, bringing all the plot lines together to the single point he needs.
As the story unfolds, we are presented with various testimonies to the destruction of Roland’s world. Shardik the bear, one of the Beam’s guardians left behind by the Ancients; the little robots in the forest, also left by those same Ancients; River Crossing with its already aged inhabitants; a plane that crashed long ago with its dead pilot; the lair of Tick-Tock, Gasher, and their ilk; and, of course, the ruined city of Lud with the madmen living in it... Lud is a topic unto itself! The famous words of Dante from The Divine Comedy, the inscription on the Gates of Hell, come irresistibly to mind: "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here!" All this is such a vivid imagery of a world that has moved on, that one can literally feel destruction and decay, decomposition and death, and at the same time grief and sorrow...