Hello and welcome back to the Constant Reader Podcast, with me Richard Sheppard. Thanks for your kind words about my last interview with James Michels, author of the Melody of Shattered Gold, which is now available on amazon. It’s well worth picking up, the ending is a real gut punch, and the journey is a wild ride. 

Speaking of wild rides, today we are going to be looking at the third volume in King’s Dark Tower Series, the Wastelands. If i complained last time that the Drawing of the Three didn’t really have Roland and ka-tet travelling very far, this volume more than makes up for it. It begins with Roland and Jake chambers fixing the psychic rupture caused by Roland abandoning Jake in the Gunslinger, and then going back to fix it by killing Jake’s assassins Jack Mort. It then moves on to the journey to the City of Lud, caught in a Civil War. This is resolved in apocalyptic fashion and the group barely manage to escape the cataclysm on a sentient, suicidal monorail. Heady stuff, and I am honored and privileged as always to have the first lady of Stephen King podcasters, Kim C herself, with me on the quest for the Dark Tower. Kim is a university lecturer in creative writing, who has been educating and entertaining the Stephen King fanbase for a while now with her podcast, The Year of Underrated Stephen King and it’s patreon, the Danse Macabre