Journey step started: Nov 6, 2024
Journey step ended:
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The Book
Day 1041: Nov 6, 2024
The only positive thing about today is that I get to start the next book in my Stephen King Journey: Wizard and Glass.
I have read this twice before, but it’s been decades and my recollection of it is vague at best. I recall it being my favorite of the DT series, but The Waste Lands surprised me with how much I enjoyed it. Can’t wait to see what awaits!
I started reading the Introduction to Wizard and Glass and I had a sense of deja vu.
I then checked back to the Introduction to The Waste Lands, and yep, its the exact same, word for word.
I get that these were re-releases prior to the fifth through seventh novels, but to have the exact same intro for each? That’s odd.
The subtitle to Wizard and Glass is “REGARD”.
Just to recap the prior books:
The Gunslinger: RESUMPTION
The Drawing of the Three: RENEWAL
The Waste Lands: REDEMPTION
The book opens with an “Argument” – a recap of the previous three books. I don’t know how one goes about summarizing the complex contents of those works, but King did a respectable job!
There is only one chance of survival: Blaine’s love of riddles. Roland of Gilead proposes a desperate bargain. It is with this bargain that The Wastelands ends; it is with this bargain that Wizard and Glass begins.
Given that The Waste Lands ended on such a cliffhanger, I’m eager to see how they riddle themselves out of the dilemma they found themselves in.
“ASK ME A RIDDLE,” Blaine invited.
“Fuck you,” Roland said. He did not raise his voice.
Wait… Are we now completely repeating in Wizard and Glass this ending section of The Waste Lands?
Who approved of this? First, a completely rehashed Introduction and now a repeat of the previous book. That’s a lot of wasted paper & ink…
Well, I was all excited to start on a new book and instead, I was treated to a lengthy repeat of the end of the last book.
I’m a bit disappointed, but at least tomorrow I know I’ll encounter some new material!
I am currently 3% of the way through Wizard and Glass.
Day 1042: Nov 7, 2024
It’s my second day on Wizard and Glass with the first day disappointingly spent reading THE EXACT SAME PAGES that began and ended The Drawing of the Three.
I suppose it makes some sense given the number of years that sit between their two publications, but given that I finished the previous book just over a month ago, seeing entire sections reprinted was annoying.
Anyhow, here’s some interesting artwork that opens Part One.
A bloated rat, blind and dragging its guts behind it in a sac like a rotten placenta, struggled over the posse robot’s feet.
Well, during those intervening years, King certainly did NOT lose his skills in making you nauseous with just a few words.
In Gilead, before the world had moved on, the full moon of Year’s End had been called the Demon Moon, and it was considered ill luck to look directly at it.
Now, however, such did not matter. Now there were demons everywhere.
“There are forces at work here, big ones, and not all of them are working to keep us away from the Tower.”
I don’t know if it ought to feel comforting or disturbing to know that you are just pawns in the games of otherworldly forces.
“You’ll go last, Eddie. Pick one from the book that looks hard… but none of your foolishness, mind. This is life and death. The time for foolishness is past.”
Eddie looked at him—old long, tall, and ugly, who’d done God knew how many ugly things in the name of reaching his Tower—and wondered if Roland had any idea at all of how much that hurt.
It’s not as if Eddie didn’t EARN his reputation!
Her heart was pounding, her armpits were damp…
Susannah is set to offer the first riddle to Blaine the Mono and all I can think of is Eminem.
“What has four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon, and three legs at night?”
“THAT IS INDEED HANDSOME,” Blaine allowed. “SIMPLE BUT HANDSOME, JUST THE SAME. THE ANSWER IS A HUMAN BEING, WHO CRAWLS ON HANDS AND KNEES IN BABYHOOD, WALKS ON TWO LEGS DURING ADULTHOOD, AND WHO GOES ABOUT WITH THE HELP OF A CANE IN OLD AGE.”
Ah, the classic Riddle of the Sphinx.
“Well,” Eddie said, “I don’t know how hard it’ll seem to you, but it struck me as a toughie.”
“I SHALL HEAR AND ANSWER.”
“No sooner spoken than broken. What is it?”
“SILENCE, A THING YOU KNOW LITTLE ABOUT, EDDIE OF NEW YORK,” Blaine said with no pause at all
Damn… getting roasted by a talking train is quite a low point.
“Riddle me this, Blaine: If you break me, I’ll not stop working. If you can touch me, my work is done. If you lose me, you must find me with a ring soon after. What am I?”
“THE HUMAN HEART,” Blaine said. Still with not a whit of hesitation. “THIS RIDDLE IS BASED IN LARGE PART UPON HUMAN POETIC CONCEITS; SEE FOR INSTANCE JOHN AVERY, SIRONIA HUNTZ, ONDOLA, WILLIAM BLAKE, JAMES TATE, VERONICA MAYS, AND OTHERS.”
This closely resembles output of modern AI chatbots!
And Blaine the Mono ran on, southeast under the Demon Moon.
And with that, I stop at the end of Part One, Chapter I. I am now 6% of the way through Wizard and Glass.
Day 1043: Nov 8, 2024
I pause reading Wizard and Glass to listen to Dark Tower Palaver‘s coverage of the beginning parts of this book.
Day 1044: Nov 9, 2024
Finished off Dark Tower Palaver‘s first episode about Wizard and Glass. It’s so good to be working through a new book again!
Day 1045: Nov 10, 2024
Back to reading Wizard and Glass, Pt. 1, Ch 2. The kat-tet began their riddling challenge against Blaine the Mono.
They know the winning riddle will come out of Jake’s book, but which one?
“ANOTHER BENEFIT OF TRAVELLING BARONY CLASS,” Blaine went on in his smug voice. It crossed Jake’s mind that Blaine would fit in perfectly at the Piper School. The world’s first slo-trans, dipolar nerd. “THE HAND-SCAN SPECTRUM MAGNIFIER IS A DIAGNOSTIC TOOL ALSO CAPABLE OF ADMINISTERING MINOR FIRST AID, SUCH AS I HAVE PERFORMED ON YOU. IT IS ALSO A NUTRIENT DELIVERY SYSTEM, A BRAIN-PATTERN RECORDING DEVICE, A STRESS-ANALYZER, AND AN EMOTION-ENHANCER WHICH CAN NATURALLY STIMULATE THE PRODUCTION OF ENDORPHINS. HAND-SCAN IS ALSO CAPABLE OF CREATING VERY BELIEVABLE ILLUSIONS AND HALLUCINATIONS. WOULD YOU CARE TO HAVE YOUR FIRST SEXUAL EXPERIENCE WITH A NOTED SEX-GODDESS FROM YOUR LEVEL OF THE TOWER, JAKE OF NEW YORK? PERHAPS MARILYN MONROE, RAQUEL WELCH, OR EDITH BUNKER?”
Those last two sentences slayed me! Edith Bunker? 😆
Jutting from the center of the falls, perhaps two hundred feet below the point where the river actually went over the drop, were two enormous stone protrusions. Although Jake had no idea how a sculptor (or a team of them) could have gotten down to where they were, he found it all but impossible to believe they had simply eroded that way. They looked like the heads of enormous, snarling dogs.
The Falls of the Hounds, he thought.
Needs to be on the big screen!
“Thankee-sai,” Roland said, and his sai sounded like a sigh. “Your answer is true, Blaine, and undoubtedly what you believe of the riddle’s origins is true as well. That Cort knew of other worlds is something I long suspected. I think he may have held palaver with the manni who lived outside the city.”
I suspect there might be entire novels’ worth of stories that could be told about Cort.
Roland sat down across from Jake… “I’m running out of riddles,” he said.
“If you’d asked me yesterday or the day before, I would have told you that I had at least a thousand riddles stored up in the junkbin I keep at the back of my mind. But . . .”
“It’s not like forgetting. It’s as if they were never there in the first place. What’s happening to the rest of the world is happening to me, I reckon.”
“You’re moving on,” Susannah said
So depressing! Not Roland!
The killer was the way Blaine came back with the answer so damned promptly each time. No matter how hard the riddle might seem to her, Blaine served it right back to their side of the court, ka-slam.
“Blaine, what has eyes yet cannot see?”
“THERE ARE FOUR ANSWERS,” Blaine replied. “NEEDLES, STORMS, POTATOES, AND A TRUE LOVER.”
When I first read this book in my early 20s, I recall getting impatient and racing to the end of this section for the winning riddle.
“AT THIS POINT,” Blaine resumed in his normal voice, “I INTEND TO BEGIN WHAT I LIKE TO THINK OF AS MY KAMIKAZE RUN. THIS WILL QUICKLY DRAIN MY BATTERIES, BUT I THINK THE TIME FOR CONSERVATION HAS PASSED, DON’T YOU? WHEN I STRIKE THE TRANSTEEL PIERS AT THE END OF THE TRACK, I SHOULD BE TRAVELLING AT BETTER THAN NINE HUNDRED MILES AN HOUR—FIVE HUNDRED AND THIRTY IN WHEELS, THAT IS. SEE YOU LATER, ALLIGATOR, AFTER AWHILE, CROCODILE, DON’T FORGET TO WRITE. I TELL YOU THIS IN THE SPIRIT OF FAIR PLAY, MY INTERESTING NEW FRIENDS. IF YOU HAVE BEEN SAVING YOUR BEST RIDDLES FOR LAST, YOU MIGHT DO WELL TO POSE THEM TO ME NOW.”
Stephen King is the master at inducing anxiety in the reader.
And with this, I end my reading for the day. I am 7% of the way through Wizard and Glass.
Day 1046: Nov 11, 2024
Today I’m listening to The Cast of Ka discuss the first two chapters of Wizard and Glass.
They got off on the wrong foot with me when they state that Stephen King ‘s was hit by a van prior to this book being published, which was a cause for delay between this and Drawing of the Three. That accident occurred after Wizard and Glass, not before. I think a Stephen King podcaster would know that.
Day 1047: Nov 12, 2024
On to Chapter 3 of Wizard and Glass. The ka-tet appears to be running out of riddles and Blaine has told them they’re running out of time!
By then it was around to Henry Dean. He gave the question the weighty consideration it deserved, then put his arm around his surprised brother’s shoulders. Eddie, he said. My little bro. He’s the man.
They all stared at him, stunned—and none more stunned than Eddie. His jaw had been almost down to his belt-buckle. And then Jimmie Polio said, Come on, Henry, stop fuckin around. This a serious question. Who’d you want watching your back if the shit was gonna come down?
I am being serious, Henry had replied.
Why Eddie? Georgie Pratt had asked, echoing the question which had been in Eddie’s own mind. He couldn’t fight his way out of a paper bag. A wet one. So why the fuck?
Henry thought some more—not, Eddie was convinced, because he didn’t know why, but because he had to think about how to articulate it. Then he said: Because when Eddie’s in that fuckin zone, he could talk the devil into setting himself on fire.
It’s flashback time, right when you are eagerly anticipating the outcome of a stressful plot situation.
So we dive back into Eddie’s history with his brother for poignant little story that touches our hearts.
Eddie Dean blew breath into the keyhole of his memory. And this time the tumblers turned.
An extraordinarily poetic line. Can’t wait to see what Eddie comes up with to save the day!
“With no wings, I fly. With no eyes, I see. With no arms, I climb. More frightening than any beast, stronger than any foe. I am cunning, ruthless, and tall; in the end, I rule all. What am I?”
The gunslinger had looked up, blue eyes gleaming. Susannah began to turn her expectant face from Jake to the route-map. Yet Blaine’s answer was as prompt as ever: “THE IMAGINATION OF MAN AND WOMAN.”
That was the last riddle in Jake’s riddle book. Guess the story ends here!
Why did the dead baby cross the road? Eddie had asked. Because it was stapled to the chicken, nyuck-nyuck-nyuck!
Later, when Eddie had tried to defend his riddle, arguing that it was tasteless but not pointless, Roland’s response had been strangely like Blaine’s: I don’t care about taste. It’s senseless and unsolvable, and that’s what makes it silly. A good riddle is neither.
Please, oh please, don’t let the solution to this impossible dilemma they’ve found themselves in be a “dead baby” joke!
I will have to wait for another day to see what Eddie comes up with to defeat Blaine as I’m done reading for the day. I am now 9% of the way through Wizard and Glass.
It was a relatively short read today, so I have time to start hearing from Dark Tower Palaver about this section of the book.
Day 1048: Nov 13, 2024
Finishing off this episode about Wizard and Glass from Dark Tower Palaver.
Day 1049: Nov 14, 2024
I’m reading the rest of Chapter 3 today. While the rest of the ka-tet is despondent having run out of riddles with which to challenge Blaine, Eddie has an idea that’s given him some cocky confidence.
And I swear… if it’s along the lines of “What have I got in my pocket?” I’m outta here…
“It doesn’t like silly questions,” Eddie said. “It doesn’t like silly games. And we knew that. We knew it from Charlie the Choo-Choo. How stupid can you get? Hell, that was the book with the answers, not Riddle-De-Dum, but we never saw it.”
This at least partially answers why the riddle book was… useless. Why make such a big deal around it in the plot when ultimately, it was not going to factor into things?
Eddie said: “Answer this one, Blaine: the big moron and the little moron were standing on the bridge over the River Send. The big moron fell off. How come the little moron didn’t fall off, too?”
“THAT IS UNWORTHY OF OUR CONTEST. I WILL NOT ANSWER.”
Maybe not in the same ballpark as “What have I got in my pocket” but it is in the same zip code. Let’s see where this goes.
It was followed by the longest pause yet; three seconds, at least. Then: “THE LITTLE MORON DID NOT FALL OFF BECAUSE HE WAS A LITTLE MORE ON.” Blaine sounded sulky. “MORE PHONETIC COINCIDENCE. TO EVEN ANSWER SUCH AN UNWORTHY RIDDLE MAKES ME FEEL SOILED.”
OK. I actually liked that one. I like where this is heading. Eddie’s going to beat him in that blurry line between riddles & jokes, one established in a conversation between Eddie & Roland back in The Waste Lands.
“Okay, Blaine. You asked for it. Here comes the cruncher. Why did the dead baby cross the road?”
And crashing down with disappointment I go. Here’s what I posted just a few days ago.
Please, oh please, don’t let the solution to this impossible dilemma they’ve found themselves in be a “dead baby” joke!
“I cry your pardon, Eddie,” he said. “How the wheel of ka turns! Once I had to ask the same of my friend Cuthbert . . . and for the same reason. There’s a kind of blindness in me. An arrogant blindness.”
“I hardly think there’s any need of pardon-crying,” Eddie said. He sounded uncomfortable.
“There is. I held your jokes in contempt. Now they have saved our lives. I cry your pardon. I have forgotten the face of my father.”
A touching moment.
“Hurting again, is it?” the gunslinger asked.
“Yeah. Whatever Blaine did to it is wearing off. I don’t care, though—I’m just glad to still be alive.”
“Yes. Life is good. So is astin. There’s some of it left.”
“Aspirin, you mean.”
Roland nodded. A pill of magical properties, but one of the words from Jake’s world he would never be able to say correctly.
Someone mentioned the inconsistency of Roland being able to speak many languages yet can’t learn THIS word!
The kat-tet walks out of Blaine and into Topeka. And that’s where I end my reading for today. I am now 10% of the way through Wizard and Glass.
(note: The AI image generator would not produce Susannah without legs!)
Day 1050: Nov 15, 2024
Two Guys to the Dark Tower Came begin their own journey into Wizard and Glass.
Day 1051: Nov 16, 2024
Next are the Kingslingers who discuss the beginning part of Wizard and Glass.
(On a sad note, Kingslingers just this week released their final episode ever. I’m glad I still have most of their backlog to work through, but they’ll be missed as one of the finer King podcasts out there.)
Day 1052: Nov 17, 2024
In the second half of this episode, the Kingslingers cover chapters 2 & 3 of Wizard and Glass.
Day 1053: Nov 18, 2024
I’m back to the text reading the beginning of Chapter 4 of Wizard and Glass. It is titled “Topeka”. However, I seriously doubt it looks like the image below.
He didn’t know what he had expected to see—a smaller and more provincial version of Lud, perhaps—but what he had not expected was what loomed above the trees of a nearby park. It was a green roadsign (against the dull gray autumn sky, it almost screamed with color) with a blue shield mounted on it:
I think I may have driven along 70 only twice in my life on business trips to St Louis and Kansas City. But I’ve never gotten to experience its cross-country path.
“There a Kansas in your world, Roland?”
“No,” Roland replied, looking at the signs, “we’re far beyond the boundaries of the world I knew. I was far beyond most of the world I knew long before I met you three. This place . . .”
As I stare at the Kansas Turnpike sign (another one the ka-tet observed) I am weirded out a bit by its otherworldly design. I mean, why couldn’t it have been a simple circle? Why the strange sun/flower flourish?
“Do you hear anything?” Roland broke in. “Any of you?”
God help us if they’re hearing the drum rhythms of ZZ Top’s “Sharp Dressed Man” in the distance. 😆
Jake wheeled toward the gunslinger and saw that his face had gone as white as cottage cheese above the dusty no-color of his shirt. His eyes were wide and blank. One corner of his mouth twitched spastically, as if an invisible fishhook were buried there.
“Jonas and Reynolds and Depape,” he said. “The Big Coffin Hunters. And her. The Cöos. They were the ones. They were the ones who—”
Standing on the roof of the mono in his dusty, broken boots, Roland tottered. On his face was the greatest look of misery Jake had ever seen.
“Oh Susan,” he said. “Oh, my dear.”
Ah… Now we get a glimpse of the purpose of Wizard and Glass
And brings me to the end of reading for today where I’m now 11% of the way through Wizard and Glass.
Now, I give some time over to Dark Tower Palaver who reviews the book up to this point.
Day 1054: Nov 19, 2024
Finishing off the second half of this episode from Dark Tower Palaver.
Day 1055: Nov 20, 2024
I’m finishing off Part 1, Ch 4 of Wizard and Glass. The ka-tet never gets a moment of relief. No sooner had they stepped out of the wreckage that was Blaine the Mono than Roland starts bugging out over a weird theremin-type sound they’re all hearing.
His heart had been broken. And now, all these years later, it seemed to him that the most horrible fact of human existence was that broken hearts mended.
Wow – what a deep statement. I’m going to be dwelling on this quite a bit today.
“But hear me well: this is very close to where Mid-World ends, very close to where End-World begins. The first great course of our quest is finished. We have done well; we have remembered the faces of our fathers; we have stood together and been true to one another.”
Roland sounds like a narrator of a video game right after a big boss battle is completed.
“But now we have come to a thinny. We must be very careful.”
“A thinny?” Jake asked, looking around nervously.
“Places where the fabric of existence is almost entirely worn away.”
Roland unslung his purse, rummaged, and removed the deerskin harness they used for carrying Susannah when the going got too rough for her wheelchair.
Oh yeah. I had forgotten they had ditched Susannah’s wheelchair before they boarded Blaine. So, she’s just gonna be carried around for the next four novels, eh?
Her hand went to her stomach and rubbed there, as if it ached or griped her. He thought she would speak, but she shook her head and said, “Nothing.”
“I don’t believe that. Why do you rub your belly? Are you hurt? Were you hurt when we stopped?”
We needed this gentle reminder that Susannah is a bit preggers. But who’s the daddy?
He did, frowning down at her, hoping with all his heart that his first idea—the one that had come to mind as soon as he saw that restlessly rubbing hand—was wrong. Because she had been in the speaking ring, and the demon that denned there had had its way with her while Jake was trying to cross between the worlds. Sometimes—often—demonic contact changed things.
Roland is going to play the role of Maury Povich in this DNA test reveal.
“What about Beryl Evans, the woman who wrote Charlie the Choo-Choo? Do you think she’s part of this? That we might even meet her? I’d like to thank her. Eddie figured it out, but—”
Why yes! Here she is!
“Wait a minute . . . wait a minute . . .” Susannah had her purse open and was rummaging through it in a way that made Roland grin broadly in spite of all his preoccupations.
Pulled through a magic door onto a beach. Crawling through jungles and caves. Fighting monster robot bears. Dining in a town of ancient people. Crossing a bridge of death. Navigating the dangerous city of Lud. Surviving a murderous AI train.
And Susannah still has her purse???
Below the newspaper’s name, taking up most of the front page’s top half, were screaming black letters:
“CAPTAIN TRIPS” SUPERFLU RAGES UNCHECKED
Govt. Leaders May Have Fled Country Topeka Hospitals Jammed with Sick, Dying Millions Pray for Cure
Now where have I heard of “Captain Trips” before? 🤔
Jake read a lengthy AP article summarizing the fall of the United States from the superflu in the opening chapters of The Stand. It was a fascinating read and I look forward to more like it when this book releases next year (2025).
She looked up at Eddie, eyes accusing. Then she handed him the newspaper, one brown finger tapping the date at the top. It was June 24, 1986. Eddie had been drawn into the gunslinger’s world a year later.
Well, I guess we know they were drawn into the world of the original release of The Stand and not into the world of the Complete & Uncut edition which was shifted into the 90’s.
That’s it for my reading today. It was a lengthy, but very enjoyable read.
I am now 13% of the way through Wizard and Glass.
Day 1056: Nov 21, 2024
Spent the day with the Cast of Ka who covered Chapters 3 & 4 of Part 1 of Wizard and Glass.
Day 1057: Nov 22, 2024
Starting off this morning with a little bit of reading in the world of Wizard and Glass. The ka-tet has just encountered their first thinny and have learned some dark truths about this version of Topeka, Kansas that they’ve landed in.
(no idea why AI intentionally misspelled words from the prompt)
…scanning the row of “crip spaces,” Jake saw at least four more wheelchairs, most strapped to roof-racks, some stuffed into the backs of vans or station wagons, one (it looked ancient and fearsomely bulky) thrown into the bed of a pickup truck.
I had wondered how Susannah was going to navigate four more novels without a wheelchair. I’d hate to think that this “modern” Topeka was invented by the author as a plot convenience to get a new wheelchair introduced!
Susannah had propped herself on one hand—Jake thought she looked a little like the woman in this Andrew Wyeth painting he liked, Christina’s World—and was examining the chair with some wonder.
“Sorry, Suze. Really. This one’s a Cougar . . . another Chevy . . . and one more . . . Topeka loves General Motors, big fuckin surprise there . . . Honda Civic . . . VW Rabbit . . . a Dodge . . . a Ford . . . a—”
Eddie stopped, looking at a little car near the end of the row, white with red trim. “A Takuro,” he said, mostly to himself. He went around to look at the trunk. “A Takuro Spirit, to be exact. Ever hear of that make and model, Jake of New York?”
Jake shook his head.
“Me, neither,” he said. “Me fucking neither.”
They were looking at the cars in the parking lot for any signs that this Topeka was a different world than theirs. And they spotted one.
I wonder how long it took King to come up with the name “Takuro”. Did it compare with The Simpsons writers and “Canyonero”?
With his other hand he reached out and touched the sticker, as if to verify its reality. KANSAS CITY MONARCHS, it said. The O in Monarchs was a baseball with speedlines drawn out behind it, as if it were leaving the park.
Eddie said: “Check me if I’m wrong on this, sport, because I know almost zilch about baseball west of Yankee Stadium, but shouldn’t that say Kansas City Royals? You know, George Brett and all that?”
So…. What’s this, then?
They walked across the street together. Toward Gage Park and one of the greatest shocks of Jake’s life.
It’s a good tradition to stop reading on a major tease like this. I am now 14% of the way through Wizard and Glass.
Since I only read one subchapter today, I have time to begin listening to this episode from Dark Tower Palaver.
Day 1058: Nov 23, 2024
Finished off this episode from Dark Tower Palaver.
Day 1059: Nov 24, 2024
Reading PART ONE, Chapter V of Wizard and Glass today. The ka-tet is still learning about this post-apocalyptic version of Topeka, Kansas. Susannah has received some upgraded 1980’s wheels.
A sign just inside the arch proclaimed this to be the Reinisch Rose Garden, and there were roses, all right; roses everywhere. Most had gone over, but some of the wild ones still throve, making Jake think of the rose in the vacant lot at Forty-sixth and Second with a longing so deep it was an ache.
Looks like this is (here in the real world) a beautiful place to visit.
The train was parked fifty feet up, by a toy station that mimicked the one across the street. Hanging from its eaves was a sign which read TOPEKA. The train was Charlie the Choo-Choo, cowcatcher and all; a 402 Big Boy Steam Locomotive.
Oh for crying out loud! I want to move on to new things already, not retread items that have been the primary focus of two books now.
For the record, this is the photo of the actual train at Gage Park, Topeka, KS.
Some marking the gang saw as the left the park and approached the highways. Great to see the first reference of some of the iconic phrases and symbols The Dark Tower universe!
They approached it steadily, and she knew exactly when they entered it. A kind of tingling shudder ran through her body, making her draw her shortened legs up, and the wheelchair stopped for a moment. When she turned around she saw Roland, Eddie, and Jake holding their stomachs and grimacing. They looked as if they had all been stricken with the bellyache at the same time.
Who thought it would be a good idea to walk into and through the thinny???
…he [Eddie] roused himself and looked at Roland. “You had something you were going to tell us,” he said. “A thrilling tale of your youth, I believe. Susan—that was her name, wasn’t it?”
Thank you, Eddie. We constant readers are getting a bit impatient to hear Roland’s story as well!
“I’m not sure you need to hear, but I think I need to tell. Our future is the Tower, and to go toward it with a whole heart, I must put my past to rest as best I may. There’s no way I could tell you all of it—in my world even the past is in motion, rearranging itself in many vital ways—but this one story may stand for all the rest.”
“even the past is in motion, rearranging itself”
“I’m not sure you need to hear, but I think I need to tell. Our future is the Tower, and to go toward it with a whole heart, I must put my past to rest as best I may. There’s no way I could tell you all of it—in my world even the past is in motion, rearranging itself in many vital ways—but this one story may stand for all the rest.”
“even the past is in motion, rearranging itself”
Whaaaaaat?
This is where I’ll end for the day. Looks like the ka-tet has another day of traveling ahead of them before Roland will finally spill the beans on his back story.
For now, I’m 16% of the way through Wizard and Glass.
Day 1060: Nov 25, 2024
Enjoyed listening to The Cast of Ka cover this part of of Wizard and Glass. I’ll always remember this episode for envisioning Rodney Dangerfield playing the part of Steven Deschain (Roland’s father).
Day 1061: Nov 26, 2024
I’m continuing into Part One, Ch 5 of Wizard and Glass today. After a disturbing walk through the parks of an alternate Topeka and yet another encounter with Charlie the Choo Choo, they approach the interstate and camp out for the night.
I had to laugh at what the AI engine spit out from that prompt!
Suddenly the boards on that side burst open, and a huge red bulldozer lunged through. Even the blade was red, although the words slashed across its scoop—ALL HAIL THE CRIMSON KING—were written in a yellow as bright as panic. Sitting in the peak-seat, his rotting face leering at them from above the controls, was the man who had kidnapped Jake from the bridge over the River Send—their old pal Gasher.
Eddie having a helluva dream. And I forgot about Gasher!
Still Eddie hesitated. “You’d never betray us, would you, Roland?”
“No man can say that for sure, Eddie, and I have already played the betrayer more than once. To my shame. But . . . I think those days are over. We are one, ka-tet. If I betray any one of you—even Jake’s furry friend, perhaps—I betray myself.”
That’s comforting to hear.
It was a very short read today, bringing me 17% of the way through The Dark Tower.
But now I get to visit with Dark Tower Palaver who discusses the book up to this point.
Day 1062: Nov 27, 2024
Finished the second half of this episode from Dark Tower Palaver.
Day 1063: Nov 28, 2024
I’m finishing off Part One of Wizard and Glass today.
I know Roland’s got a tale to tell, but it’s being delayed by more of Eddie’s freak dreams.
“We’ve got lots of glass buildings where I come from, but most of them are office buildings. That thing up ahead looks more like something from Disney World. Do you know what it is?”
“No.”
“Then why don’t you want to look at it?” Susannah asked.
Roland did take another look at the distant blaze of light on glass, but once again it was quick—little more than a peek.
“Because it’s trouble,” Roland said, “and it’s in our road. We’ll get there in time. No need to live in trouble until trouble comes.”
“No need to live in trouble until trouble comes.”
That’s either got to be the most annoying or the most wise thing Roland has said!
By the time they stopped for their noon meal, they could clearly see the building ahead—a many-turreted palace which appeared to be made entirely of reflective glass. The thinny lay close around it, but the palace rose serenely above all, its turrets trying for the sky. Madly strange here in the flat countryside of eastern Kansas, of course it was, but Susannah thought it the most beautiful building she had ever seen in her life; even more beautiful than the Chrysler Building, and that was going some.
It’s a shame that there isn’t any artwork in this edition I’m reading. This particular scene screams for a majestic rendering!
“I buried my hawk, the first weapon I ever wielded, and perhaps the finest. Then—and this part I’m sure I didn’t tell you before, Jake—I went into the lower town. That summer’s heat broke in storms full of thunder and hail, and in a room above one of the brothels where Cort had been wont to roister, I lay with a woman for the first time.”
He poked a stick thoughtfully into the fire, seemed to become aware of the unconscious symbolism in what he was doing, and threw it away with a lopsided grin. It landed, smoldering, near the tire of an abandoned Dodge Aspen and went out.
“It was good. The sex was good. Not the great thing I and my friends had thought about and whispered about and wondered about, of course—”
What a great story to be telling a young kid, Roland!
One boy in the final instants of his life’s last good sleep, one boy who will shortly be in motion, who will be falling as a dislodged pebble falls on a steep and broken slope of scree; a falling pebble that strikes another, and another, and another, those pebbles striking yet more, until the whole slope is in motion and the earth shakes with the sound of the landslide.
One boy, one pebble on a slope loose and ready to slide.
Pure poetry!
Neither the father standing by the bed nor the son lying naked upon the floor at his feet so much as looked at her.
Having your dad storm in the morning after you had just lost your virginity… Well, that just puts a damper on that special moment, doesn’t it?
“I’ve known since you toddled that you were no genius, but I never believed until yestereve that you were an idiot. To let him drive you like a cow in a chute! Gods! You have forgotten the face of your father! Say it!”
Therapists and other mental health professionals would have such a field day in Mid-World!
Roland got to his feet and went naked to his father, who embraced him fiercely. When Steven Deschain kissed him first on one cheek and then the other, Roland began to weep. Then, in Roland’s ear, Steven Deschain whispered six words.
…
“What?” Susannah asked. “What six words?”
“ ‘I have known for two years,’ ” Roland said. “That was what he whispered.”
Confrontations and dialogue – this is where King is at his most masterful!
He fetched a sigh—the deep sigh of a man who contemplates some arduous piece of work—and then tossed fresh wood on the fire. As the flames flared up, driving the shadows back a little way, he began to talk. All that queerly long night he talked, not finishing the story of Susan Delgado until the sun was rising in the east and painting the glass castle yonder with all the bright hues of a fresh day, and a strange green cast of light which was its own true color.
What a way to end this chapter! I finish reading for today knowing that the next time I pick up this story, I enter into Roland’s history and one of the finest tales Stephen King has ever told.
I am now 18% of the way through Wizard and Glass.
Day 1064: Nov 29, 2024
Letting my Thanksgiving meal from yesterday work its magic while listening to The Cast of Ka finish up Part One of Wizard and Glass.
Day 1065: Nov 30, 2024
Two Guys to the Dark Tower Came were critical of the second half of Part One of Wizard and Glass.
They made a good point, though: When the ka-tet went through the parking lot of alternate Topeka they had grabbed a new wheelchair for Susannah. Why didn’t they do some clothes & supplies shopping for themselves in the process?
Day 1066: Dec 1, 2024
The Kingslingers discuss the last two chapters of Part One of Wizard and Glass.
Day 1067: Dec 2, 2024
Listened to the second half of this episode from The Kingslingers about Wizard and Glass.
Day 1068: Dec 3, 2024
It’s been a while since I heard from Radio Free Mid-World but here they are to talk about Part One of Wizard and Glass.
Day 1069: Dec 4, 2024
I’m back to the text of Wizard and Glass and the beginning of Roland’s back story as a young man. On to Part Two!
Part Two of Wizard and Glass is titled, “SUSAN”. I can’t imagine what this sketch found on the opening page represents.
She snorted. Men were funny, aye, so they were, and the most amusing thing about them was how little they knew it. Men, with their swaggering, belt-hitching names for themselves. Men, so proud of their muscles, their drinking capacities, their eating capacities; so everlastingly proud of their pricks.
Welp, she’s certainly got us dead to rights on those points!
…the three men who called themselves the Big Coffin Hunters had brought her a marvel, and she would look at it; aye, fill up her eyes with it, so she would.
I like how we dive right into the fantasy aspect of this story. I already am visualizing a witch under the moonlight exploring some evil magic.
Rhea of Cöos Hill pulled the box from its hole with a grunt, rose to her feet with another grunt (this one from her nether regions), tucked the box under her arm, and left the room.
And so we are introduced to one of the main characters (if not the main villain) of this story: Rhea of Cöos.
Within the box, peeping out of a velvet drawstring bag, was a glass globe. It was filled with that rosy light; it flowed in gentle pulses, like the beat of a satisfied heart.
That must be the “Glass” in “Wizard and Glass” and yet another image that directly links to (if not outright copies) The Lord of the Rings and the “palantir”.
“But who are ye, cully?” she breathed. “And how shall I know ye? Ye’ve got yer hat pulled down so far I can’t see your God-pounding eyes, so ye do! By yer horse, mayhap . . . or p’raps by yer . . . get away, Musty! Why do yer trouble me so? Arrrr!”
“Cully” was used 25 times in The Waste Lands, both by Gasher and the Tick Tock Man. I wonder if there’s a relation here as she definitely sounds a lot like Gasher here.
And still from down the hill (the cursed wind was wrong or she would have heard it sooner), the sound of the girl singing, now closer than ever:
“Love, o love, o careless love,
Can’t you see what careless love has done?”
“I’ll give’ee careless love, ye virgin bitch,” the old woman said.
In addition to Lord of the Rings, I’m also picking up strong Snow White vibes.
I’m done with reading for now. I’m 99% sure the “virgin bitch” is Susan and I will learn what business she has with Rhea next time I pick up Wizard and Glass.
I am now 20% of the way through this book.
Day 1070: Dec 5, 2024
Pressed play on Dark Tower Palaver‘s sixth book club entry for Wizard and Glass.
Day 1071: Dec 6, 2024
Finished off the second half of this episode from Dark Tower Palaver.
Day 1072: Dec 7, 2024
Back to reading Wizard and Glass and the introductions of the main characters of Roland’s tale:
– Rhea of Cöos Hill (why do I keep thinking it’s “Rhea THE Cöos”?)
– Jonas & the Coffin Hunters
– Susan (although she’s not been specifically named yet)
On to Part Two, Chapter 2!
Behind her, the unlocked lid of the box clicked open. It came up less than an inch, but that was enough to allow a sliver of pulsing rosecolored light to shine out.
I suppose it’s an acceptable beating-you-over-the-head use of foreshadowing. But you just know young Susan is going to see this sphere and do something with it.
And when she reached the upland track leading to this high sinister, she had sung. Because her heart demanded it. And, she supposed, it really hadn’t been such a bad idea; if nothing else, it had kept the worst of her megrims away. Singing was good for that much, anyway.
I would have absolutely have challenged this word if someone used it on me in a game of Scrabble.
While Rhea’s attention was distracted by the coins, Susan happened to look through the open door to her left and into what she assumed was the witch’s bedchamber. And here she saw an odd and disquieting thing: a light under the bed. A pink, pulsing light. It seemed to be coming from some kind of box, although she could not quite…
A good. At least King didn’t drag that foreshadowing bit out too long. Got right to it, as a matter of fact.
I’m leaving the book here for now and perhaps tomorrow, I’ll see if Susan takes any action with that glowing rose-colored sphere.
I am 20% of the way through Wizard and Glass.
Day 1073: Dec 8, 2024
Continuing with Wizard and Glass. Susan Delgado notices something glowing under Rhea’s bed. And of course, she’s gonna go see what it is, launching the main plot of this book.
It was unlikely that Rhea would have seen Susan’s face through the dense overgrowth of pig ivy even if the old besom had been looking in that direction…
I swear, King must’ve compiled a list of obscure vocabulary words he had to incorporate into this book.
“Ye’ll see something ye like the look of even less, soon enough,” Rhea said, grinning her peculiar one-sided grin. “Out of old Thorin’s nightshirt it’ll come, stiff as a stick and as red as rhubarb! Hee!”
Ughhh… 🤮
“yer Aunt Rhea’s not too nice to say what yer Aunt Cordelia won’t. I’m to make sure that ye’re physically and spiritually intact, missy. Proving honesty is what the old ones called it, and it’s a good enough name. So it is. Step to me.”
This is one scene that’s going to be SUPER uncomfortable to watch when Mike Flanagan gets around to adapting this series.
“Like a little bud o’ silk,” the old woman crooned, and her meddling fingers moved faster. Susan felt her hips sway forward, as if with a mind and life of their own, and then she thought of the old woman’s greedy, self-willed face, pink as the face of a whore by gaslight as it hung over the open box; she thought of the way the drawstring bag with the gold pieces in it had hung from the wrinkled mouth like some disgorged piece of flesh, and the heat she felt was gone. She drew back, trembling, her arms and belly and breasts breaking out in gooseflesh.
This was the most uncomfortable scene I’ve had to read yet and probably will read until I get to THAT scene at the end of IT.
“Aye. There’s something ye’ll do after he takes yer virginity. Ye’ll do it right away, without even thinking about it. Now listen to me, Susan, daughter of Patrick, and hear me very well.”
Still stroking the girl’s hair, Rhea put her wrinkled lips to the smooth cup of Susan’s ear and whispered in the moonlight.
Rhea’s last act was to hypnotize Susan and implant a command. One that King does not reveal, leaving this cliffhanger.
I’m 22% through Wizard and Glass.
Day 1074: Dec 9, 2024
The Dark Tower Palaver is down one host but carries forward with their book club review of Wizard and Glass.
Day 1075: Dec 10, 2024
The Cast of Ka provide their initial impressions of Rhea of the Cöos in this episode about Wizard and Glass.
Day 1076: Dec 11, 2024
Back to the text of Wizard and Glass, picking up at Part Two, Ch 3.
Susan Delgado had a lovely gyno exam with an ancient witch and discovered a glowing orb hidden in Rhea of Coos’s bedroom. Let’s hope THAT was the most uncomfortable section of this novel that we’ll have to deal with. All rainbows and kittens from here on out, right?
Mostly what she thought of was how Thorin would look with his pants off, his legs white and skinny, like the legs of a stork, and how, as they lay together, she would hear his long bones crackling: knees and back and elbows and neck.
And knuckles. Don’t forget his knuckles.
Yes. Big old man’s knuckles with hair growing out of them.
Well, that hope didn’t last but a page. What imagery to wake up to on this rainy morning!
By starlight she saw that he was young indeed, close to her own age on one side or the other. His clothes were those of a working cowboy, although new.
“Will Dearborn, at your service,” he said, then doffed his hat, extended a foot on one bootheel, and bowed…
Guessing “Will Dearborn” is actually Roland who took on a fake name as he was sent away from Gilead by his father.
Not unlike how Frodo took on the name “Underhill” in Fellowship of the Ring.
“I’ll walk with you, however,” he repeated, and now his face was somber. “These are not good times, Miss Delgado. Here in Mejis you are far from the worst of the troubles, but sometimes trouble reaches out.”
This little dance of Roland offering to accompany Susan and Susan refusing is going on a bit long. Get going already!
They were passing Citgo now, and she was glad for Will Dearborn’s presence, even if his silence was a little irritating. She had always found the oilpatch, with its skeletal forest of gantries, a little spooky. Most of those steel towers had stopped pumping long since, and there was neither the parts, the need, nor the understanding to repair them. And those which did still labor along—nineteen out of about two hundred—could not be stopped.
They went toward town, a young walking man in a flat-crowned hat, a young riding woman with a poncho spread over her lap and legs. The starlight rained down on them as it has on young men and women since time’s first hour, and once she looked up and saw a meteor flash overhead—a brief and brilliant orange streak across the vault of heaven. Susan thought to wish on it, and then, with something like panic, realized she had no idea what to wish for. None at all.
On this romantic and tragic paragraph, I end my reading for today. I am 23% of the way through Wizard and Glass.
Day 1077: Dec 12, 2024
Ka steers Susan into a chance meeting with Roland as she leaves behind a nightmarish interaction with the witch Rhea.
We’ve entered into the romantic fantasy phase of Wizard and Glass.
“Tomorrow we ride into town and present our compliments to My Lord Mayor, Hart Thorin. He’s a bit of a fool, according to what we were told before leaving New Canaan.”
“Were ye indeed told so?” she asked, raising one eyebrow.
“Yes—apt to blabber, fond of strong drink, even more fond of young girls,” Will said. “Is it true, would you say?”
It’s been many pages of dialog so far, but it has gone by quickly, to King’s credit. Twists like this make it riveting.
“No more questions. We’ve nearly come to the place where we must part ways, and I want to give ye a warning—fair payment for the ride on this nice mount of yours, mayhap. If ye dine with Thorin and Rimer, ye’ll not be the only new folk at his table. There’ll likely be three others, men Thorin has hired to serve as private guards o’ the house.”
“Not as Sheriff’s deputies?”
“Nay, they answer to none but Thorin . . . or, mayhap, to Rimer. Their names are Jonas, Depape, and Reynolds. They look like hard boys to me . . . although Jonas’s boyhood is so long behind him that I imagine he’s forgot he ever had one.”
“Jonas is the leader?”
“Aye. He limps, has hair that falls to his shoulders pretty as any girl’s, and the quavery voice of an old gaffer who spends his days polishing the chimney-corner . . . but I think he’s the most dangerous of the three all the same. I’d guess these three have forgot more about helling than you and yer friends will ever learn.”
A great introduction of who, I suppose, will be the main bad guy of this story.
“If you say we must, we must. Yet I wish—” Just then the wind shifted, as it sometimes did in the summer, and blew a strong gust out of the west. The smell of sea-salt was gone in an instant, and so was the sound of the drunken, singing voices. What replaced them was a sound infinitely more sinister, one that never failed to produce a scutter of gooseflesh up her back: a low, atonal noise, like the warble of a siren being turned by a man without much longer to live.
Will took a step backward, eyes widening, and again she noticed his hands take a dip toward his belt, as if reaching for something not there.
“What in gods’ name is that?”
“It’s a thinny,” she said quietly. “In Eyebolt Canyon. Have ye never heard of such?”
“Heard of, yes, but never heard until now. Gods, how do you stand it? It sounds alive!”
I suspect this thinny is going to play a pivotal role in the plot!
“Eyebolt’s a box canyon, very short and steep-walled. Almost like a chimney lying on its side, you see?”
Another foreshadowing of a major plot point being laid out for us, I’m sure.
She felt she could talk to him all night—about the thinny, or Citgo, or her irritating aunt, or just about anything—and the idea dismayed her. Why should this happen to her now, for the gods’ sake? After three years of dismissing the Hambry boys, why should she now meet a boy who interested her so strangely? Why was life so unfair?
Awww…..
She looked at Will Dearborn, who stood in the road, shuffling his dusty boots and gazing at her unhappily. The hard look was gone from his face, now; he looked her age again, or younger. “We were well met, weren’t we?” he asked.
She stepped forward, and before she could let herself think about what she was doing, she put her hands on his shoulders, stood on her toes, and kissed him on the mouth. The kiss was brief but not sisterly.
“Aye, very well met, Will.” But when he moved toward her (as thoughtlessly as a flower turning its face to follow the sun), wishing to repeat the experience, she pushed him back a step, gently but firmly.
I think I’m going to cry!
I’ve reached the end of Chapter III of Part Two of Wizard and Glass.
I am now 25% of the way through this book.
Day 1078: Dec 13, 2024
The Cast of Ka covers the budding romance between Roland and Susan in this episode about Wizard and Glass.
They had a rather humorous segment at the end of this episode called “Dark Tower Pick-up Lines” in honor of Roland and Susan’s sparking romance.
My favorite was:
“Are you the Dark Tower because you’re the center of MY universe!”
Day 1079: Dec 14, 2024
Just a tiny bit of reading this morning as I enter Part II, Chapter 4 of Wizard and Glass.
King’s romantic storytelling is in full form as he ended the last chapter with a very pleasant meeting and conversation-filled walk for teenage Roland and Susan under a moonlit night.
Cuthbert was his oldest friend —the marks of their first teeth had been embedded on many of the same toys—but Roland had in some ways never understood him. Nor was it just his laughter; on the long-ago day when Hax, the palace cook, was to be hung for a traitor on Gallows Hill, Cuthbert had been in an agony of terror and remorse. He’d told Roland he couldn’t stay, couldn’t watch . . . but in the end he had done both. Because neither the stupid jokes nor the easy surface emotions were the truth of Cuthbert Allgood.
That last sentence… It could perfectly describe Eddie as well.
His mind turned back a month, to the whore’s room, to his father sitting on the whore’s bed and watching him dress. The words his father had spoken—I have known for two years—had reverberated like a struck gong in Roland’s head. He suspected they might continue to do so for the rest of his life.
Roland continues thinking back on that intense moment with his father with additional thoughts of some very interesting politics of Mid-world.
I’m going to send you away, Steven had said, sitting there on the bed and looking somberly at his only son, the one who had lived. There is no true safe place left in Mid-World, but the Barony of Mejis on the Clean Sea is as close to true safety as any place may be these days . . . so it’s there you’ll go, along with at least two of your mates. Alain, I suppose, for one. Just not that laughing boy for the other, I beg of you. You’d be better off with a barking dog.
The original Ka-Tet: Cuthbert (the laughing boy), Roland and Alain.
Was the Tower what all of this was really about? Not a jumped-up harrier with dreams of ruling Mid-World, not the wizard who had enchanted his mother, not the glass ball which Steven and his posse had hoped to find in Cressia . . . but the Dark Tower?
He hadn’t asked.
He hadn’t dared ask.
I think this might’ve been the first mention about the Dark Tower from Roland’s early days. It feels a little shoe-horned in here.
Roland turned over on his other side, closed his eyes, and fell asleep. His rest was thin and lit by the crudely poetic dreams only adolescent boys have, dreams where sexual attraction and romantic love come together and resonate more powerfully than they ever will again. In these thirsty visions Susan Delgado put her hands on Roland’s shoulders over and over, kissed his mouth over and over, told him over and over to come to her for the first time, to be with her for the first time, to see her for the first time, to see her very well.
Well, I have to say King served up this description of a young bag of hormones very well! 😂
And with Prince Charming asleep, I finish reading Wizard and Glass for today. I am now 26% of the way through this book.
I now turn my ears and attention to Dark Tower Palaver who reviews Chapter 3 and this beginning part of Chapter 4 in Part II of Wizard and Glass.
Day 1080: Dec 15, 2024
Finished off this book club episode from Dark Tower Palaver about Wizard and Glass.
Day 1081: Dec 16, 2024
Picking up Wizard and Glass in Part Two, Chapter IV in the aftermath of Roland and Susan’s lovelorn first encounter.
Aunt Cord’s voice had reminded her of the sound the thinny made. “Who tells ye to speak so to the woman who raised a motherless girl? To the sister of that girl’s poor dead father?”
I bet Aunt Cord (Susan’s manipulative aunt) and Margaret White would’ve made quite the duo.
This chapter introduces us to Traveller’s Rest, a dirty & dank bar not much different than the bar in Tull, the town Roland eliminated in The Gunslinger.
He was deeply tanned, except for his neck, where he always burned; the flesh there hung in scant wattles. He wore a mustache so long the ragged white ends hung nearly to his jaw—a sham gunslinger’s mustache, many thought it, but no one used the word “sham” to Eldred Jonas’s face.
“We’ll know better when we see em, but I tell you one thing: we can’t just put guns to the backs of their heads and drop them like broke-leg hosses if they see the wrong thing. Their daddies might be mad at em alive, but I think they’d be very tender of em dead—that’s just the way daddies are.”
Jonas and the Coffin Hunters are aware of Roland & his compatriots. He also is likely the sharpest one in that evil bunch.
He [Jonas] started up the stairs, chuckling a little, his limp quite pronounced—it got worse late at night. It was a limp Roland’s old teacher, Cort, might have recognized, for Cort had seen the blow which caused it. Cort’s own father had dealt it with an ironwood club, breaking Eldred Jonas’s leg in the yard behind the Great Hall of Gilead before taking the boy’s weapon and sending him west, gunless, into exile.
What an interesting connection to Roland’s world!
I end my reading here today, 28% of the way through Wizard and Glass.
Day 1082: Dec 17, 2024
===
The Cast of Ka covers Part Two Chapter IV of Wizard and Glass.
Day 1083: Dec 18, 2024
I’m spending the next two days with Kingslingers and their discussion about Part Two, Chapters 1-4 of Wizard and Glass.
Day 1084: Dec 19, 2024
Wrapping up the second half of this episode with Kingslingers and their deep-dive into Part Two, Chapters 1-4 of Wizard and Glass.
Day 1085: Dec 20, 2024
I’m back to the book to kick off my birthday! 🥳
The chess pieces in Wizard and Glass have been laid out. We’ve got Reah the witch, beautiful young Susan, Jonas and the Coffin Hunters, Mayor Throrin, and young Roland and his childhood ka-tet.
Now it’s time to see some moves made.
So far everyone had greeted them happily, even the carters they had passed on their way into town, and that alone made Roland feel suspicious and on his guard.
I keep drawing comparisons between the town of Hambry (in the barony of Mejis) and Tull (from The Gunslinger). I can just feel a Carrie-level event is going to wipe out this town!
Alain shook his glass slightly—just enough to make the ice tinkle—and Roland responded with the barest sliver of a nod. He had expected cool tea from a jug kept in a nearby springhouse, but there were actual chunks of ice in the glasses. Ice in high summer. It was interesting.
I love this attention to detail. In a world that no longer had working electricity, how did they come by ice?
“Ye’re wondering about the ice, Master Stockworth.”
Alain started. “Well, I . . .”
“Ye expected no such amenity in a backwater like Hambry, I’ll warrant,” Avery said, and although there was a joshing quality on top of his voice, Roland thought there was something else entirely underneath.
He doesn’t like us. He doesn’t like what he thinks of as our “city ways.” He hasn’t known us long enough to know what kind of ways we have, if any at all, but already he doesn’t like them. He thinks we’re a trio of snotnoses; that we see him and everyone else here as country bumpkins.
“Not just Hambry,” Alain said quietly. “Ice is as rare in the Inner Arc these days as anywhere else, Sheriff Avery. When I grew up, I saw it mostly as a special treat at birthday parties and such.”
I love how so so much was said without being said.
“I’m surprised you haven’t found use for the oil,” Roland said. “No generators in town, Sheriff?”
“Aye, there be four or five,” Avery said. “The biggest is out at Francis Lengyll’s Rocking B ranch, and I recall when it useter run. It’s HONDA. Do ye kennit that name, boys? HONDA?”
“I’ve seen it once or twice,” Roland said, “on old motor-driven bicycles.”
I wonder if this is something like what Roland had seen.
Roland nodded, then saw that the bird’s skull was back on the horn of Cuthbert’s saddle. “And get rid of that!”
Looking guilty, Cuthbert stuffed “the lookout” hurriedly into his saddlebag.
[… less than an hour later …]
Avery was looking suspiciously at the rook’s skull on the horn of Cuthbert’s saddle. Cuthbert saw him looking, but for once managed to keep his mouth shut.
How did that skull find its way out of the saddlebag? 🤔
That’s all the reading for today. I like this new character of Sheriff Avery and his phony sweetness that Roland saw right through.
I can feel the tension building and I’m only 30% of the way through Wizard and Glass.
Day 1086: Dec 21, 2024
Continuing to read Wizard and Glass, Part Two, Chapter V.
Roland and his ka-tet just met with the sheriff of Hambry and his deputies. Both sides were playacting, concealing their true intentions. Something’s not right in town and we’re gonna soon find out what.
The moment the Affliation brats mounted on their fathers’ expensive horseflesh were around the corner and headed downhill to the High Street, the sheriff and the deputies stopped waving. Avery turned to Dave Hollis, whose expression of slightly stupid awe had been replaced by one marginally more intelligent.
“What think ye, Dave?”
“Soft,” Dave said. “Soft as eggs just dropped out of a chicken’s ass.”
Oh, they are in for quite a surprise!
“I have no opinion,” Cuthbert said brightly. “No, none at all. Opinion is politics, and politics is an evil which has caused many a fellow to be hung while he’s still young and pretty.”
One of the wisest sayings I’ve ever come across in this series!
It was a short read today. Roland, Cuthbert and Alain have arrived at Mayor Thorin’s house for a huge party which I’m sure will end up being anything but festive.
I am now 31% of the way through Wizard and Glass.
I’m now listening to the first half of this episode from Dark Tower Palaver where they cover Wizard and Glass up to the point where I left off.
Day 1087: Dec 22, 2024
On to the second half of this episode from Dark Tower Palaver.
Day 1088: Dec 23, 2024
Now listening to this episode from The Cast of Ka about Part Two of Wizard and Glass.
Day 1089: Dec 24, 2024
I’ll be travelling for a few days after Christmas, so I’m going to front-load up on some reading and use my travel time for the podcasts.
But for this Christmas Eve, I’m back into Part Two, Chapter V of Wizard and Glass where young Roland and his ka-tet have arrived at Mayor Thorin’s mansion for a fancy dinner.
Old Doctor Death turned out to be Kimba Rimer, Thorin’s Chancellor and Minister of Inventory (Roland suspected the title had been made up special for their visit). He was easily five inches taller than Roland, who was considered tall in Gilead, and his skin was pale as candlewax. Not unhealthy-looking; just pale. Wings of iron-gray hair floated away from either side of his head, gossamer as cobwebs. The top of his skull was completely bald.
Reminds me of this guy…
And then he saw one who was very different.
It was Susan Delgado, of course, shimmering and almost too beautiful to look at in a blue silk dress with a high waist and a square-cut bodice which showed the tops of her breasts.
My heart leapt for Roland!
“Anything us in Mejis can do to help, lad, just ask—me, John Croydon, Hash Renfrew, Jake White, Hank Wertner, any or all.”
The name “Renfrew” stood out for some reason. Very familiar.
A bit of googling revealed there was a Renfrew in Children of the Corn, The Dead Zone and Doctor Sleep – minor characters all.
The hand over hers clamped down, hurting. “Play no fiddle with me, Miss Oh So Young and Pretty! Have ye ever seen that fine-turned row of pins before? Tell me the truth!”
“No, how could I? Aunt, you’re hurting me.”
Aunt Cord smiled balefully and clamped down harder. “Better a small hurt now than a large one later. Curb your impudence. And curb your flirtatious eyes.”
Someone mentioned the teacher from Little House on the Prairie is a great visual for Aunt Cord.
Renfrew laughed hard at that, nodding . . . but Roland found himself wondering if the man was really amused. In Hambry, the waters on top and the waters down below seemed to run in different directions.
“the waters on top and the waters down below”
What a line!
“Is the Mayor her uncle, or perhaps her cousin?” Roland asked.
And what followed was an extraordinarily uncomfortable scene in which the truth of Susan’s relationship with Mayor Thorin was revealed.
King perfectly relayed this discomfort and I took no pleasure in reading this part.
“She’s his gilly?” Roland asked through lips which felt as if they had been iced.
“Aye,” Coral said. “Not consummated, not until the Reap—and none too happy about that is my brother, I’ll warrant—but bought and paid for just as in the old days. So she is.” Coral paused, then said, “Her father would die of shame if he could see her.” She spoke with a kind of melancholy satisfaction.
Poor Roland!
She looked toward Roland and met his eyes, still laughing. He thought of Olive Thorin, sitting down there at the foot of the table, with the salt and spices, an untouched bowl of soup before her and that unhappy smile on her face. Seated where the girl could see her, as well. And he thought that, had he been wearing his guns, he might well have drawn one and put a bullet in Susan Delgado’s cold and whoring little heart.
I can only imagine Roland’s rage.
“Thank you for your discretion and your propriety,” she whispered.
…
“I can be discreet, sai,” he said. “As for propriety? I’m amazed you even know the word.”
She looked up into his cold face, her smile fading. He saw anger come in to fill it, but before anger there was hurt, as if he had slapped her. He felt both glad and sorry at the same time.
With that very cold face-to-face encounter between Roland & Susan, I stop for the day, 33% through Wizard and Glass.
Day 1090: Dec 25, 2024
🎄 Merry Christmas!🎄
I’ve received the wonderful gift of some time alone with Wizard and Glass, picking up at Part Two, Chapter VI.
Roland and Susan have had a falling out (if only after the briefest of “falling ins”) when Roland learns the nature of her relationship with Mayor Thorin.
Mayor Thorin had taken it back from her himself. In the hallway just off from the reception room, that had been, by the tapestry showing Arthur Eld carrying his sword out of the pyramid in which it had been entombed.
I would love to see a work dedicated to fleshing out this mythology of Mid-World, much like what George R. R. Martin did for a Song of Ice and Fire.
At the room’s other end, Sheb McCurdy was pounding out jagged boogie, right hand flying, left hand pumping, the sweat pouring down his neck and pale cheeks.
I didn’t catch this initially, but on one of the podcast episodes they mentioned this was the same Sheb who was playing “Hey Jude” in Tull back in The Gunslinger.
Sheemie was bustling toward the passthrough from which the steamers had just appeared, now holding the camel bucket out before him in both hands. Later, when the Travellers’ began to empty out, his job would be to clean up. For now, however, it was simply to circulate with the camel bucket, dumping in every unfinished drink he found. This combined elixir ended up in a jug behind the bar. The jug was labelled fairly enough—CAMEL PISS—and a double shot could be obtained for three pennies. It was a drink only for the reckless or the impecunious, but a fair number of both passed beneath the stern gaze of The Romp each night; Stanley rarely had a problem emptying the jug. And if it wasn’t empty at the end of the night, why, there was always a fresh night coming along. Not to mention a fresh supply of thirsty fools.
This may be the most disgusting thing that King has ever written.
“Lick em,” Depape said in that same patient voice. “That’s what I want. You lick my boots until they’re dry again, and so clean you can see your stupid rabbit’s face in em.”
This reminds me of one of the most uncomfortable scenes in my favorite movie of all time, “The Ninth Configuration”.
“Stop it, stop it, stop it,” a voice said. It was shocking in the silence—not because it was sudden, and certainly not because it was angry. It was shocking because it was amused. “I simply can’t allow that. Nope. I would if I could, but I can’t. Unsanitary, you see. Who knows what disease might be spread in such fashion? The mind quails! Ab-so-lutely cuh-wails!”
Standing just inside the batwing doors was the purveyor of this idiotic and potentially fatal screed: a young man of middling height, his flat-crowned hat pushed back to reveal a tumbled comma of brown hair. Except young man didn’t really cover him, Depape realized; young man was drawing it heavy. He was only a kid. Around his neck, gods knew why, he wore a bird’s skull like an enormous comical pendant. It was hung on a chain that ran through the eyeholes. And in his hands was not a gun (where would an unwhiskered dribble like him get a gun in the first place? Depape wondered) but a goddam slingshot. Depape burst out laughing.
I’m gonna stand up and cheer out loud if/when this scene appears in Mike Flanagan’s adaptation!
They talked about it in Hambry for years to come; three decades after the fall of Gilead and the end of the Affiliation, they were still talking. By that time there were better than five hundred old gaffers (and a few old gammers) claiming that they were drinking a beer in the Rest that night, and saw it all.
What a masterful way of getting you pumped up before a scene before you even tell it!
He had made some indefinable but powerful connection between Olive Thorin… and his own mother. Hadn’t some of that same woeful, rueful look been in his mother’s eyes on the day when he had come upon her and his father’s advisor? Marten in an open-throated shirt, Gabrielle Deschain in a sacque that had slipped off one shoulder, the whole room reeking of what they had been up to that hot morning?
Incredible psychological insight!
“Holster the gun,” the voice behind the sharp tip of metal said. It was empty, somehow—not just calm, but emotionless. “Do it now, or this goes in your heart. No more talk. Talking’s done. Do it or die.”
Jonas heard two things in that voice: youth and truth. He holstered his gun.
Youth and truth!
I stop here for today, just completely appreciative of the wonderful gift of this suspenseful scene between Roland’s ka-tet and the Coffin Hunters at Traveller’s Rest.
I am now 36% of the way through Wizard and Glass.
Day 1091: Dec 26, 2024
Starting my long road trip with Two Guys to the Dark Tower Came and their discussion about the first half of Part Two of Wizard and Glass.
Day 1092: Dec 27, 2024
Continuing my road trip with Dark Tower Palaver and the first half of this episode about Wizard and Glass.
Day 1093: Dec 28, 2024
I’m visiting with family today, so no opportunity to move forward on my journey. Thankfully, I got ahead in reading so I’m not falling behind.
Day 1094: Dec 29, 2024
Travelling home today listening to the second half of this episode from Dark Tower Palaver.
Day 1095: Dec 30, 2024
In a recent “March Madness” bracket event, Dark Tower Palaver ranked the Traveler’s Rest confrontation between Roland’s ka-tet and the Coffin Hunters as the best scene in the entire Dark Tower series.
Can’t disagree with that assessment. It’s certainly been the highlight for me so far!
In this episode, they discuss that portion of Wizard and Glass in more detail.
Day 1096: Dec 31 2024
Finishing out Year 3 of my journey with the second half of this episode from Dark Tower Palaver covering Wizard and Glass.
Day 1097: Jan 1, 2025
Kicking off the new year with Wizard and Glass! I pick up the book just after Roland & friends got the better of the Coffin Hunters at Traveler’s Rest. I’m picking up the story in Part Two, Chapter VI, Subsection 8.
Herk Avery swept them slowly with his eyes, from Reynolds on his far right to Alain—“Richard Stockworth”—on his far left. “Eh, boys? We’ve got the Mayor’s men on one side and the Affiliation’s . . . men . . . on the other, six fellows at the point of murder, and over what? A halfwit and a spilled bucket of slops.” He pointed first at the Big Coffin Hunters, then to the Affiliation’s counters. “Two powderkegs and one fat sheriff in the middle. So what’s yer thoughts on’t? Speak up, don’t be shy, you wasn’t shy in Coral’s whoreden down the road, don’t be shy in here!”
No one said anything. Avery sipped some more of his foul drink, then set it down and looked at them decisively. What he said next didn’t surprise Roland much; it was exactly what he would have expected of a man like Avery, right down to the tone which implied that he considered himself a man who could make the hard decisions when he had to, by the gods.
“I’ll tell yer what we’re going to do: We’re going to forget it.”
And with that, all parties indeed did “forget it” and the book ends there.
Right?
When they stepped outside, the moon was down and the first lightening in the sky had begun to show at the far edge of the Clean Sea.
“Mayhap we’ll meet again, sai,” Jonas said.
“Mayhap we will,” Roland said, and swung up into his saddle.
I suppose the story doesn’t end with the handshakes and promises to forget after all.
🤷
“They may be rich boys, but that’s not all they are,” Depape said. “The way they were tonight . . . they were like . . .” He trailed off, not quite willing to finish the thought. It was too absurd.
Jonas was willing. “They acted like gunslingers.”
I’ve said this before in his other novels: King writes confrontation scenes better than anyone else I’ve encountered! And he’s not so shabby with the aftermath either.
“What do you see, Roland?” Alain asked, almost timidly.
“Trouble,” Roland said, “and in our road.” Then he gigged his horse and rode on. Before they got back to the Bar K bunkhouse, he was thinking about Susan again. Five minutes after he dropped his head on his flat burlap pillow, he was dreaming of her.
I stop here at the end of Chapter VI. I am 37% of the way through Wizard and Glass
Day 1098: Jan 2, 2025
The Cast of Ka was also excited to discuss the standoff at Traveler’s Rest in this episode about Wizard and Glass.
Day 1099: Jan 3, 2025
Finishing off this episode from The Cast of Ka.
Day 1100: Jan 4, 2025
Kingslingers takes us through Chapters V and VI of Part Two of Wizard and Glass.
Day 1101: Jan 5, 2025
Listening to the second half of this episode from Kingslingers about Wizard and Glass.
Day 1102: Jan 6, 2025
Picking up the text for Wizard and Glass for the first time in 2025! The monumental clash between Roland’s young ka-tet and the Coffin Hunters understandably spawned quite a few podcast episodes.
Now it’s time for the aftermath and Part Two, Chapter VII.
Three weeks had passed since the welcoming dinner at Mayor’s House and the incident at the Travelers’ Rest.
On a midmorning as beautiful as any that summer, Susan Delgado galloped a two-year-old rosillo named Pylon north along the Drop […] dressed in jeans and the faded, oversized khaki shirt (one of her da’s) that had caused all the trouble…
Was scratching my head trying to remember what trouble a shirt had caused then realized this was a King foreshadow.
The issue with the shirt was an argument Susan got in with her Aunt Cord about what to wear while riding. It quickly escalated to this:
“Why do ye have to be such a stiff-kins, girl? Why always so unwilling, so unfair?”
“What does it matter to ye, one way or t’other?” Susan had asked. “Ye have the money, don’t ye? And ye’ll have more yet. After he fucks me.”
he knew that. And however fast she rode Pylon along the Drop, she could not outrace her knowing. She had agreed, and no matter how horrified Pat Delgado might have been at the fix she had gotten herself into, he would have seen one thing clear—she had made a promise, and promises must be kept. Hell awaited those who would not do so.
“and promises must be kept”.
I’ll be looking for others aspects of this story where this adage must apply.
That’s all the reading I have time for today. I expect another encounter between Susan and “Will Dearborn” when I return to the book.
I am now 38% of the way through Wizard and Glass.
Day 1103: Jan 7, 2025
Dark Tower Palaver reviews the Travelers Rest aftermath in this episode about Wizard and Glass.
Day 1104: Jan 8, 2025
Finishing the second half of this episode from Dark Tower Palaver.
Day 1105: Jan 9, 2025
Back to the book as I continue reading Part Two, Chapter VII of Wizard and Glass.
Susan Delgado has just had a major blowup with her Aunt Cord.
About a week after the welcoming dinner and Dearborn’s disastrous, hurtful remark to her, the retarded slops-fella from the Travellers’ Rest—Sheemie, folks called him—had appeared at the house Susan and her aunt shared. In his hands he held a large bouquet, mostly made up of the wildflowers
…
“They from my third-best friend,” Sheemie said. “I got three different friends now. This many.”
Awwww…. Looks like Roland sent “I’m sorry” flowers! ❤️
Her cheeks and forehead burned at the thought of that, and another hot ring seemed to go slipping down her body.
Ok, this is about the 37th time Stephen King has referred to hotness within Susan’s body. It’s getting a little creepy, to be honest! 😆
Then Sheemie recognized her. “Hello, Susan Delgado from out there by the edge of town,” he said companionably. “It’s a good day I wish you, sai.”
He bowed—an amusing imitation of the Inner Baronies bow favored by his three new friends. Smiling, she dropped him a bit of curtsey…
“See my flowers, sai?”
There’s a graphic novel dedicated to Sheemie. I can’t wait to get to it!
She didn’t run. She stood with Pylon’s reins in one hand, and murmured to him when the rosillo looked up and nickered a greeting to the big bay-colored gelding coming down the hill.
Then Will was there, first above her and looking down, then dismounted in an easy, liquid motion she didn’t think she could have matched, for all her years of horsemanship. This time there was no kicked-out leg and planted heel, no hat swept over a comically solemn bow; this time the gaze he gave her was steady and serious and disquietingly adult.
They looked at each other in the Drop’s big silence, Roland of Gilead and Susan of Mejis, and in her heart she felt a wind begin to blow. She feared it and welcomed it in equal measure.
You can practically hear the majestic and romantic orchestral soundtrack as you read this scene!
But his eyes never left hers, and in them she saw some of Roland’s truth: the deep romance of his nature, buried like a fabulous streak of alien metal in the granite of his practicality. He accepted love as a fact rather than a flower, and it rendered her genial contempt powerless over both of them.
POETRY!
“In any case, Will, Hart’s opinion of you and yer friends can hardly concern ye, can it? Ye have a job to do, that’s all. If he helps ye, why not just accept and be grateful?”
“Because something’s wrong here,” he said, and the serious, almost somber quality of his voice frightened her a little.
Excellent foreshadowing!
That’s all the time I have for reading today. I am now 40% of the way through Wizard and Glass.
Day 1106: Jan 10, 2025
Roland and Susan finally meet face-to-face after their unfortunate exchange at Thorin’s party several weeks prior.
The conversation between them continues as I read Wizard and Glass, Part Two, Chapter VII, Section 8!
“I can’t believe Fran Lengyll would lie about how my da died, let alone that he had . . . anything to do with it.”
Yet she looked doubtfully down at the running horses. So many. Too many. Her da would have seen. And her da would have wondered what she was wondering now: whose brands were on the extras?
Roland planting some very dark seeds in Susan’s mind. He’s sees so much!
“I’m so ashamed,” she said. “I’m so ashamed and so frightened and I’m sorry. I’ve forgotten my father’s face and . . . and . . .”
And I’ll never be able to find it again, she wanted to say, but she didn’t have to say anything. He stopped her mouth with his kisses. At first she just let herself be kissed . . . and then she was kissing him back, kissing him almost furiously.
Ooooh boy… This most certainly is NOT going to end well!
I had time only for this one subsection today. I’m now 40% of the way through Wizard and Glass.
I now turn my attention to Dark Tower Palaver who has something to say about this reunion between Roland and Susan!
Day 1107: Jan 11, 2025
Listened to the second half of this episode from Dark Tower Palaver about Wizard and Glass.
Day 1108: Jan 12, 2025
Finishing off Part Two, Chapter VII of Wizard and Glass today.
The romance between Roland and Susan is now in full bloom.
“Then if you love me, go away from me. Please, Will!”
“Another kiss.”
She stepped forward at once, raising her face trustingly up to his, and he understood he could do whatever he wanted with her.
At some point, he’s gonna have to tell her his name isn’t really “Will”, right?
“Yessir,” Sheriff Avery said, lifting one massive cheek a bit out of his rocker and letting off a noisy pre-luncheon fart. “Yessir, I do. Aye.”
Is a pre-luncheon fart distinguishable from a post-luncheon fart? Or a pre-dinner fart?
Maybe I’ll look that question up in The Dark Tower Concordance…
Roland and Cuthbert were studying the unrolled strip of paper the pigeon had delivered from Gilead. On it was a line of tiny geometric shapes:
I paused at this graphic for a while to see if I could determine how to decode it. I think it might have to do with utilizing a mirror image, or folding the image in half to tease out the letters, but I couldn’t come up with anything quickly.
I suppose that WOULD be the point of an encrypted message, wouldn’t it?
“ ‘Farson moves east,’ ” Cuthbert read. “ ‘Forces split, one big, one small. Do you see anything unusual.’ ”
Yeah, I supposed I NEVER would have been able to teach THAT phrase out from that message.
The message was put in the capsule and attached to the pigeon’s leg. Alain went down the steps, stood beside Rusher (still waiting patiently to be unsaddled), and held the bird up toward the fading sunset. “Hile!”
I like the use of carrier pigeons to communicate with home base.
The two boys’ eyes met. In Bert’s Alain saw dismay and laughter in equal measure.
Uh-oh. Roland’s fellow ka-tet members are aware of his interactions with Susan (Alain found a strand of her hair on his collar).
I finish reading for the day at the end of this chapter. I am now 41% of the way through Wizard and Glass.
Day 1109: Jan 13, 2025
Listening to the Cast of Ka discuss Part Two, Chapter VII of Wizard and Glass.
Day 1110: Jan 14, 2025
Finished off this episode from Cast of Ka discussing Part Two, Chapter VII of Wizard and Glass.
Day 1111: Jan 15, 2025
Onto Part Two, Chapter VIII of Wizard and Glass! We’re in the thick of the plot now. We’ve got conflict. We’ve got romance. We’ve got mystery. The tension in Hambry is building and you can feel something explosive is coming down the pike.
One thing he had no trouble remembering at all—his recollection was refreshed by the miserable flare of pain he suffered each time he bumped his wounded finger. That one thing was a promise to himself that he would see Dearborn, Stockworth, and Heath laid out dead in a row, hand to outstretched hand like a little girl’s paper dolls. He intended to unlimber the part of him which had longed so bootlessly for Her Nibs these last three weeks and use it to hose down their dead faces. The majority of his squirt would be saved for Arthur Heath of Gilead, New Canaan. That laughing chatterbox motherfucker had a serious hosing-down coming.
One thing King is especially good at: Describing the hatred one individual builds up for another. How many times have we been inside an antagonist’s headspace and feeling his/her blind yet focused rage towards another?
They may be rich boys, but that’s not all they are. Depape had said that himself. The question was, what else were they? And finally, in the shit-and-sulfur stench of Ritzy, he had found out. Not everything, perhaps, but enough to allow him to turn his horse around before he found himself all the way back in fucking New Canaan.
Depape, one of the coffin hunters, is backtracking along the journey Roland and his ka-tet took to get to Hambry.
Did they slip up?
The old bastard looked around, offended. “I know, all right,” he said. “I’ve forgot more than you’ll ever learn, so I have. One of them at least came from the Eld line, for I saw his father in his face…”
Busted! Here’s one artist’s rendition of Roland’s father, Stephen Deschain.
“Tell me about the three young lords, old dad.” Depape rapped on the wall of Hattigan’s. “Them in there may not be interested, but I am.”
The old bastard looked at him with a bleary, calculating eye. “Might there be a bit o’ metal in it for me?”
“Yar,” Depape said. “If you tell me what I want to hear, I’ll give you metal.”
Nothing more trope-y than the “bad guy curling moustache double-meaning”. 🙄
“Three young men, one the son of a lord. Of a gunslinger, you think. Steven of Gilead.” And the name was familiar to him, aye, it was.
“Steven Deschain of Gilead, that’s it.”
“And what name did he give, this young lord?”
The old bastard had screwed his face up alarmingly in an effort to remember. “Deerfield? Deerstine? I don’t quite remember—”
“That’s all right, I know it. And you’ve earned your metal.”
Poor Will Dearborn!
Lords they might be, sons of gunslingers they might be, but in these latter days, even such as those could die.
Now that the true identities of the boys has been determined, I stop reading for the day. I am now 42% of the way through Wizard and Glass.
I turn to Dark Tower Palaver for discussion about the book up to this point.
Day 1112: Jan 16, 2025
Completed this episode from Dark Tower Palaver about Wizard and Glass.
Day 1113: Jan 17, 2025
The Coffin Hunter Depape learned some truths about Roland and his companions while sleuthing backwards along their path.
I continue reading Wizard and Glass wrapping up Part Two, Ch VIII.
A mile or so from the bluffs, the strong sea breeze which had been at their backs for the whole ride suddenly dropped, and they heard the low, atonal squalling from the cleft that was Eyebolt Canyon. Alain pulled up, grimacing like a man who has bitten into a fruit of extravagant sourness. All he could think of was a handful of sharp pebbles, squeezed and ground together in a strong hand.
I had forgotten about the thinny there.
They rode into the sound, and although none of them liked it, no one suggested they go back. They had come all the way out here, and Roland was right—this was their job. Besides, they were curious.
…
“Are we going in?” Cuthbert asked. “Let the Recording Angel note that I’m against, although I’ll offer no mutiny.”
Yes! Go in! Perhaps they’ll land in 19th century New York City!
Up to that crook, the canyon floor looked ordinary enough; even the litter of bones the moon showed them was not extraordinary. Many animals which wandered into box canyons hadn’t the wit to find their way back out again, and with Eyebolt the possibility of escape was further reduced by the choke of brush piled at the canyon’s mouth. The sides were much too steep to climb except maybe for one place, just before that crooked little jog. There Roland saw a kind of groove running up the canyon wall, with enough jutting spurs inside it to—maybe!—provide handholds. There was no real reason for him to note this; he just did, as he would go on noting potential escape-routes his entire life.
All that detail given about the canyon. I bet it’s going to play a pivotal role later in the story.
Roland and his ka-tet saw some very disturbing things around that thinny in Eyebolt Canyon.
The note curled against the pigeon’s leg was short, but it explained a good deal of what they hadn’t understood.
I’ll have to see her again, Roland thought after reading it…
And that ends the chapter. Damn King and his cliffhangers! Well, I’m done reading for the day. I am now 43% of the way through Wizard and Glass.
Now it’s time for the Kingslingers to share their thoughts about these recent chapters.
Day 1114: Jan 18, 2025
Finishing off this lively episode from the Kingslingers.
Day 1115: Jan 19, 2025
I enter into Wizard and Glass, Part Two, Chapter IX. I didn’t expect a chapter titled, “CITGO” to appear in a high fantasy novel, but here we are!
Feeling the leather bag bang against her hip brought back her father in a way so fresh and clear that grief pricked her again and made her feel like crying. She thought he would have been appalled at her current situation, perhaps even disgusted. And he would have liked Will Dearborn, of that she was sure—liked him and approved of him for her. It was the final miserable touch.
What a sad, sad way to open the chapter. My heart breaks for Susan!
Half an hour later, as she took the new iron from her da’s shoebag, she found out. There was a folded scrap of paper tucked between two of the shoes, and even before she unfolded it, she understood that her collision with Mr. Stockworth hadn’t been an accident.
She recognized Will’s handwriting at once from the note in the bouquet.
Susan,
Can you meet me at Citgo this evening or tomorrow evening? Very important. Has to do with what we discussed before. Please.
W.
A clever “accidental” bumping into!
Let ka mind itself, the voice in her mind said. It will, anyway; it always does. If ka should overrule your honor, so it will be; in the meantime, Susan, there’s no one to mind it but yourself. Let ka go and mind the virtue of your promise, hard as that may be.
“All right,” she said. In her current state she discovered that any decision—even one that would cost her another chance to see Will—was a relief. “I’ll honor my promise. Ka can take care of itself.”
In the gathering shadows, she clucked sidemouth to Felicia and turned for home.
Oh boy… Susan is going to stand up Will (Roland) on his request to meet her.
The next day was Sanday, the traditional cowboys’ day of rest.
Ah… so the days of the calendar are different in Mid-world. I wonder what everyone does on “Manday”?
You somehow didn’t expect cleverness from a girl this beautiful; beautiful girls did not, as a rule, have to be clever. So far as Bert could tell, all beautiful girls had to do was wake up in the morning.
Ah, Cuthbert is so knowledgeable about the ways of women!
We’ll wait a bit longer,” he said. “Perhaps she’ll change her mind.”
“Roland—” Alain began, and his tone was deadly in its gentleness.
Roland raised his hands before Alain could go on. “Doubt me not, Alain—I speak as my father’s son.”
I’m gonna have to try that line, “I speak as my father’s son” at my next business meeting. See how far that’ll get me.
“In any case, it’s too late to worry about it now. We’ll wait and hope for Susan. I’d rather not go near Citgo without someone from Hambry who knows the lay of the place . . . but if Depape comes back, we’ll have to take our chance.”
Not much happened in this first part of this chapter, but the quote above sums it up perfectly. The chess pieces are still slowly moving about the board.
I am now 45% of the way through Wizard and Glass.
Day 1116: Jan 20, 2025
Had a great time listening to Dark Tower Palaver cover how Roland, Alain and Cuthbert are starting to figure out the mystery of the town they’ve been sent to investigate.
Day 1117: Jan 21, 2025
Listened to the second part of this episode from Dark Tower Palaver.
Day 1118: Jan 22, 2025
Continuing into the lore of Mid-World and the legend of Roland Deschain, its last gunslinger!
I’m picking up in the middle of Part Two, Chapter IX where the young gunslingers are planning to visit the Citgo terminal to help tease out the mystery of the Town of Hambry and its connection to John Farson’s revolt.
“Hello, there, you Little Coffin Hunters!” he cried cheerfully, and made a bow which was an amusingly good imitation of their own. Cuthbert particularly enjoyed seeing such a bow done in gardening sandals. “How be you? Well, I’m hoping, so I do!”
“Right as rainbarrels,” Cuthbert said, “but none of us enjoys being called Little Coffin Hunters, so maybe you could just play soft on that, all right?”
I suppose it would be like being called “Little Nazis”. I get it.
The orange grove was a neatly kept rectangle of about a dozen rows…
As the boy wandered along one of the rows, listening to the somehow skeletal sounds from the oilpatch to the north… he was struck by deep homesickness. It was the fragile fragrance of orange-blossoms… There was the same feeling of dignity and civilization here, of much time devoted to something not strictly necessary.
I love that last line!
“Will Dearborn, we are met both fair and ill,” she said in a trembling voice, and then he was kissing her; they burned against one another as the Peddler rose in the famine of its last quarter.
[onto Section 10]
Inside her lonely hut high on the Cöos, Rhea sat at her kitchen table, bent over the glass the Big Coffin Hunters had brought her a month and a half ago.
WOW – what a mood-killer to bring up THAT nearly-forgotten character!
Ermot twined around one of her scrawny legs, hissing with agitation, but she barely noticed him. Instead she bent even closer into the ball’s poison pink glow, enchanted by what she saw there.
It was the girl who had come to her to be proved honest, and the young man she had seen the first time she’d looked into the ball.
A peeping Tom!
“Aye—Kimba’s brother. Nor are those the only treasures hidden away in Hambry these days. There are extra wagons, extra tack hidden in barns belonging to members of the Horsemen’s Association, extra caches of feed—”
“Will, no!”
The plot thickens!
They had reached a smoothwire fence. Beyond it, the gantries of the oil wells stood against the sky like sentinels the size of Lord Perth. How many had she said were still working? Nineteen, he thought.
NINETEEN!
To the east of Citgo, the ground dropped sharply down a thickly wooded slope with a lane cut through the middle of it… Not far from the bottom of the slope was a crumbling building surrounded by rubble. The tumble-and-strew was the detritus of many fallen smokestacks—that much could be extrapolated from the one which still stood. Whatever else the Old People had done, they had made lots of smoke
What a damning observation about our era!
“How do ye know so much, so young?” she asked. “Who are ye, Will?”
He stood up and looked down into her eyes. He didn’t have to look far; she was tall for a girl. “My name’s not Will but Roland,” he said. “And now I’ve put my life in your hands. That I don’t mind, but mayhap I’ve put your own life at risk, as well. You must keep it a dead secret.”
“Roland,” she said wonderingly. Tasting it.
“Aye. Which do you like better?”
“Your real one,” she said at once. “ ’Tis a noble name, so it is.”
I may have stopped breathing for a little bit during this exchange.
She opened her mouth to tell him so, and then a queer but utterly persuasive sensation enfolded her: they were being watched. It was ridiculous, but it was there; she even felt she knew who was watching. She stepped back from Roland, her booted heels rocking unsteadily on the half-eroded oxen tracks. “Get out, ye old bitch,” she breathed. “If ye be spying on us in some way, I know not how, get thee gone!”
15
On the hill of the Cöos, Rhea drew back from the glass, spitting curses in a voice so low and harsh that she sounded like her own snake. She didn’t know what Susan had said—no sound came through the glass, only sight—but she knew that the girl had sensed her. And when she did, all sight had been wiped out.
Busted!
That’s all the reading I have time for today, but it feels like the story has progressed quite nicely with the mystery at Citgo uncovered, the romance between Roland and Susan catching on fire, and the return of the original villain of the story.
I am now 47% of the way through Wizard and Glass.
Day 1119: Jan 23, 2025
Pressed play on this episode from Dark Tower Palaver about Wizard and Glass.
Day 1120: Jan 24, 2025
Finished off this Dark Tower Palaver episode that brings us almost to the halfway point of Wizard and Glass.
Day 1121: Jan 25, 2025
Roland has shown Susan the mysterious goings on at the Citgo terminal then tried to get it on with each other while Reah peeped in on them via the security cam wizard ball she has in her possession.
Today I wrap up reading Part Two, Chapter IX of Wizard and Glass.
There was a kind of rough path behind the tankers. Roland walked slowly along it, pacing like a preacher with his hands clasped at the small of his back, reading the incomprehensible words writ upon the tankers’ rear decks: CITGO. SUNOCO. EXXON. CONOCO.
If King wanted to be precise, he would’ve written CONOCOPHILLIPS. Sure, it became that 15 years after he published the book, but he has spooky powers to know the future, doesn’t he?
“But why?” She took him by the arm and asked her question again. “What are they for?”
“For Farson,” Roland said with a calm he didn’t feel. “For the Good Man. The Affiliation knows he’s found a number of war-machines; they come either from the Old People or from some other where. Yet the Affiliation fears them not, because they don’t work. They’re silent. Some feel Farson has gone mad to put his trust in such broken things, but . . .”
Wow… “some other where”
He took her in his arms and kissed her. When he released her lips, she put them to his ear and whispered, “If you love me, then love me. Make me break my promise.”
For a long moment when her heart didn’t beat, there was no response from him, and she allowed herself to hope. Then he shook his head—only the one time, but firmly. “Susan, I cannot.”
“If you love me, then love me”
When this is put to film, there will be many tears flowing from the viewers, I think!
That ends the reading for today. I am still 47% of the way through Wizard and Glass.
But I now turn my attention to The Cast of Ka who review these two last chapters.
Day 1122: Jan 26, 2025
Finished off this episode from The Cast of Ka discussing a pair of chapters from Wizard and Glass.
Day 1123: Jan 27, 2025
I begin the final chapter of Part Two of Wizard and Glass. When we last left our heroes, Roland discovered secret oil production at the Citgo to benefit John Farson, “The Good Man”. As he heads back, he sees Depape return from his investigation of the boy gunslingers and knows their covers are blown.
Now onto Chapter X: BIRD AND BEAR AND HARE AND FISH
Then, on a day between the passing of the Peddler’s Moon and the rise of the Huntress, ka finally came and blew her away—house and barn and all. It began with someone at the door.
The passage of time as told by the various phases of the moon significantly adds to the romanticism.
And here also is the signature King foreshadow hook – nothing subtle about it. More like hooks in your skin to draw you into the plot.
This daydream was so strong that at first Susan responded to the arms which curled around her waist from behind, arching her back as they first caressed her stomach and then rose to cup her breasts. Then she heard a kind of plowing, snorting breath in her ear, smelled tobacco, and understood what was happening. Not Roland touching her breasts, but Hart Thorin’s long and skinny fingers. She looked in the mirror and saw him looming over her left shoulder like an incubus. His eyes were bulging, there were big drops of sweat on his forehead in spite of the room’s coolness, and his tongue was actually hanging out, like a dog’s on a hot day. Revulsion rose in her throat like the taste of rotten food. She tried to pull away and his hands tightened their hold, pulling her against him. His knuckles cracked obscenely, and now she could feel the hard lump at the center of him.
Talk about a romance-killer!
“Balls to her and all witches!” His cultured politician’s tones had been replaced by an accent as thick as that in the voice of any back-country farmhand from Onnie’s Ford. “I must have something, a bonbon, aye, so I must. Balls to the witch, I say! Owlshit to ’er!” The smell of tobacco a thick reek around her head. She thought that she would vomit if she had to smell it much longer. “Just stand still, girl. Stand still, my temptation. Mind me well!”
A bonbon! 😂
“Oh, aye, get out, ye damned poison!”
Hearing Frank Muller read this line in the audiobook caused me to snort-laugh!
So she turned and stumbled from the house without saying anything, her streaming eyes blurring her vision and filling the late summer world with rueful color.
Poor Susan was humiliated and is now at her wits end. I’ll have to leave her in this predicament until the next time I pick up the book.
I am now 49% of the way through Wizard and Glass.
Day 1124: Jan 28, 2025
Listening to the first half of this Dark Tower Palaver episode covering some of the middle part of Wizard and Glass.
Day 1125: Jan 29, 2025
Finished off this Dark Tower Palaver episode taking us into Part Two, Chapter X of Wizard and Glass.
Day 1126: Jan 30, 2025
Back to the text as I crack open Wizard and Glass and finish of Part Two with the conclusion of Chapter X: BIRD AND BEAR AND HARE AND FISH. I’m already halfway through this chapter and haven’t seen ANY of these critters yet!
p.s. ChatGPT sucks at following instructions. Where’s my fish? (see AltText in each image for prompts)
Where’s the fish?
Since when is a groundhog a fish?
WHERE’S MY FISH???
But the figure—she could now see it—kept coming. When she saw who it was, she at first thought that Will Dearborn (Roland, she thought, his real name is Roland) must be a figment of her overstrained imagination. She wasn’t entirely sure he was real until he knelt and put his arms around her. Then she hugged him with panicky tightness.
Uh-oh. Susan crying beside a secret creek. Roland alone with her… This is hwo baby gunslingers are made!
She seemed to feel the ground move beneath her, and later she would think that for the first and only time in her life she had actually felt ka, a wind that came not from the sky but from the earth. It has come to me, after all, she thought. My ka, for good or ill.
Is that what the kids are calling it these days? Ka?
So were lovers joined in the Barony of Mejis, near the end of the last great age, and the green moss beneath the place where her thighs joined turned a pretty red as her virginity passed; so were they joined and so were they doomed.
King can be such a buzzkill at time!
“Roland?” Her voice, distant. Sweet, as well.
“Yes?”
“Will thee take care of me?”
“Yes.”
I bet Jake would have a word or two of comment on this exchange.
“I might already be carrying your child,” she said. “Has thee thought of that?”
He hadn’t.
Yep. Been there, done that, Roland!
…he asked her: “That feeling you had out at Citgo, Susan—of being watched. Did you have it this time?”
She looked at him long and thoughtfully. “I don’t know. My mind was in other places, ye ken.”
[NEXT SECTION]
All of this Rhea saw in the glass
But of course she did!
Is our business done? the girl had asked.
Mayhap there’s one more little thing, Rhea had responded, and then she told the impudent trull what to do.
Oh yeah, Rhea had implanted a hypnotic suggestion into Susan’s brain at the beginning of this tale. I supposed now we’re about to find out what it was!
Some of the hair she had cut off lay on her thigh like gold wire; most had fallen into the stream and been carried away. Susan pulled against Roland’s hand, trying to get the sharp edge back to her hair, wanting to continue her mad barbering. The two of them strove together like arm-wrestlers in a barroom contest. And Susan was winning. He was physically the stronger, but not stronger than the enchantment which held her. Little by little the white triangle of quartz moved back toward her hanging hair. That frightening sound—Nnnnnnnnnn—kept drifting from her mouth.
“Susan! Stop it! Wake up!”
So THAT was the hypnotic command! Susan was to cut off her own hair after she’d been “deflowered”.
“Good. I’m going to say a rhyme. You’ll wake up as I say it. When I’m done, you’ll be wide awake and remember everything we’ve said. Do you understand?”
“Aye.”
“Listen: Bird and bear and hare and fish, Give my love her fondest wish.”
Roland himself hypnotized her to determine what had happened. And this is the phrase he used to pull her out. How sweet!
“No need, no need. Thank you. Thank you, Eldred.” The blush which crept up her neck and cheeks felt as hot as fire, but his smile was worth every degree of heat.
What a cruel way to follow-up the beautiful story of the young lovers with the gross crush Aunt Cordelia has on Jonas Eldred.
And I’m stopping here for the time being. It was a good chunk of the book that took me to 51% of the way through Wizard and Glass!
Day 1127: Jan 31, 2025
Pausing to hear Dark Tower Palaver‘s take on this portion of Wizard and Glass.
Day 1128: Feb 1, 2025
Listening to the 2nd half of Dark Tower Palaver‘s episode about Part Two, Chapter X of Wizard and Glass
Day 1129: Feb 2, 2025
The Cast of Ka has a few words about the plot that’s revolved around Susan’s virginity in Chapter X of Part Two of Wizard and Glass.
Day 1130: Feb 3, 2025
Completed this episode from The Cast of Ka about Chapter X of Part Two of Wizard and Glass.
Day 1131: Feb 4, 2025
Two Guys to the Dark Tower Came give a whirlwind tour of the latter half of Part Two of Wizard and Glass. They asked the probing question: Where did the elastic come from in Cuthbert’s slingshot in this post-apocalyptic world?
Day 1132: Feb 5, 2025
I immerse myself back into the world of Wizard and Glass where King briefly takes us out of the story of Roland and Susan and pulls us back into the “present” with an Interlude that reminds us that he, Eddie, Susannah, Jake and Oy are on the side of the road somewhere in Weird Topeka.
“How can you know every corner of this story?”
Roland seemed amused. “I don’t think that’s what you really want to know, Eddie.”
He was right about that—old long, tall, and ugly made a habit of being right. It was, as far as Eddie was concerned, one of his most irritating characteristics. “All right. How long have you been talking? That’s what I really want to know.”
It’s taken me months to get halfway through Wizard and Glass. I appreciate Eddie’s question!
“Go on, Roland. Tell your tale. All the way to the end.”
“All the way to the end,” Susannah said dreamily. “Cut the vein.” Her eyes were full of moonlight.
“All the way to the end,” Jake said.
“End,” Oy whispered.
And so ends this interlude and my time reading today. There’s quite a few podcasts lined up talking about the first half of Wizard and Glass, so I’ll be back to the text next week.
I am now 52% of the way through Wizard and Glass.
Day 1133: Feb 6, 2025
The Kingslingers chat about the final two chapters of Part Two and the Interlude of Wizard and Glass.
Day 1134: Feb 7, 2025
Listened to the second half of The Kingslingers discussion about Roland & Susan’s consummation of their love in Wizard and Glass.
Day 1135: Feb 8, 2025
I’m at the halfway point of Wizard and Glass and now tune in to Radio Free Mid-World‘s coverage of Part Two.
Day 1136: Feb 9, 2025
Finished off this rather humorous episode from Radio Free Mid-World.
Day 1137: Feb 10, 2025
Buried my car in the wastelands of Virginia. Drove 350 miles home in a rental while listening to this episode from Radio Free Mid-World where they wrapped up reviewing Book Two of Wizard and Glass.
Day 1138: Feb 11, 2025
I start into Part Three: Come, Reap of Wizard and Glass. All the setup is done. Now it’s time for the dominos to fall.
CHAPTER I
BENEATH THE HUNTRESS MOON
I should go back and put into a calendar all of the different “moons” of Mid-World. I bet one of these Dark Tower concordances has it.
In Mejis the time of reaping had begun, while overhead, clearer and clearer on each starry night, the Huntress pulled her bow and looked east over those strange, watery leagues no man or woman of Mid-World had ever seen.
But what is being reaped?
Cuthbert and Alain watched Roland’s descent into addiction first with disbelief, envy, and uneasy amusement, then with a species of silent horror. They had been sent to what was supposed to have been safety and had discovered a place of conspiracy, instead; they had come to take census in a Barony where most of the aristocracy had apparently switched its allegiance to the Affiliation’s bitterest enemy; they had made personal enemies of three hard men who had probably killed enough folks to populate a fair-sized graveyard. Yet they had felt equal to the situation, because they had come here under the leadership of their friend, who had attained near-mythic status in their minds by besting Cort—with a hawk as his weapon!—and becoming a gunslinger at the unheard-of age of fourteen. That they had been given guns themselves for this mission had meant a great deal to them when they set out from Gilead, and nothing at all by the time they began to realize the scope of what was going on in Hambrytown and the Barony of which it was a part. When that realization came, Roland was the weapon they counted on. And now—
A perfect summary of where Roland and his ka-tet currently sit halfway through this story.
Alain said: “Where’s the lookout? Gone to bed early for once, has he?”
This only irritated Cuthbert more. He hadn’t seen the rook’s skull in days—he couldn’t exactly say how many—and he took its loss as an ill omen.
Ahhh… the old Chekhov’s Rook’s Skull trick. You just know King is bringing it up here because it’s going to play in a major plot point later. Where, oh where, did Cuthbert lose his “lookout”?
Jonas put the Chancellor—it was Paul—above his run of cards. The next draw uncovered Luke, whom he put next to Paul. That left Peter and Matthew still lurking in the bush.
A very interesting use of the Gospel writers as names of cards in this came Jonas and Rimer are playing.
“The final battle may take place as much as two hundred wheels northwest of their borders, but when Farson uses his fire-carriages and robots to wipe out their army, trouble will come south fast.”
Fire-carriages and WHAT???
“Gems is nice, and for gold that goes twice, but there’s nothing like having folk bow and scrape before ye, is there?”
What a great line!
“I’ll have a look around out at the Bar K,” Jonas said at last. “By myself—I won’t have Clay and Roy tramping along behind me.”
…
Going out to the Bar K would be a bit risky, but he didn’t expect any real problem—especially if he went alone. They were only boys, after all, and gone for much of each day.
We see the plot tension beginning to rise!
“Never had she been so angry. She had given the girl a command, and the girl, for whatever reasons, had disobeyed. For standing against Rhea of the Cöos, the bitch deserved to die.”
Stephen King is truly lining up all of the enemies against Roland and Susan!
That’s all of the reading for today having finished Chapter I of Part Three.
I am now 54% of the way through Wizard and Glass.
Day 1139: Feb 12, 2025
Entering into the second half of Wizard and Glass with Dark Tower Palaver.
Day 1140: Feb 13, 2025
Finished off this episode from Dark Tower Palaver.
Day 1141: Feb 14, 2025
The Cast of Ka enters into the endgame of Roland and Susan’s story in Wizard and Glass.
Day 1142: Feb 15, 2025
Finished this episode from The Cast of Ka.
Day 1143: Feb 16, 2025
I crack open Part Three, Chapter II of Wizard and Glass in which Roland and Susan have initiated an intricate network of spy signals between them just to allow them to hook up with each other in private. Meanwhile both Jonas Eldred and Rhea of the Cöos learned some truths about these kids and are biding their time to strike.
Summer had slipped away with a final flirt of her greengown; harvest-time had arrived.
The opening section of this chapter described Mejis getting ready for Reaping Night. Stephen King layered these few paragraphs with such vivid and beautiful imagery. His writing style needs to be taught in schools alongside the other masters of English literature.
Thinking of cats, there was Musty, standing on the stoop in the moonlight, looking at her with a mixture of hope and mistrust. Rhea, grinning hideously, opened her arms. “Come to me, my precious! Come, my sweet one!”
Musty, understanding all was forgiven, rushed into his mistress’s arms and began to purr loudly as Rhea licked along his sides with her old and yellowing tongue.
Ummm… Was this passage absolutely necessary? Gross!
“A little harvest of my own,” she said to Ermot, who now came slithering up her leg toward the place where she liked him best. There weren’t many men who could do you like Ermot could do you, no indeed. Sitting there with a lapful of snake, Rhea began to laugh.
And King tops himself with an even more disgusting paragraph! I wonder how much of this is going to make it into Mike Flanagan’s adaptation! If he doesn’t boldly go there… It’ll be a missed opportunity.
“Cuthbert has a plan.”
Roland’s gaze—mild, interested, already starting to be not there again—shifted to Cuthbert. Cuthbert the joker. Cuthbert the ’prentice, who had in no way earned the gun he’d carried east to the Outer Crescent. Cuthbert the virgin and eternal second. Gods, I don’t want to hate him. I don’t, but now it’s so easy.
The boys are getting fed-up with Roland’s apparent distractions with Susan, Cuthbert especially. King has us so clearly in his head
“She’s tranced him,” Cuthbert said. “Whether she means to or not, she’ll kill us all in the end. Wait and see if she don’t.”
“You shouldn’t say such, even in jest.”
This is a line we’ll be revisiting later in this story, I think.
sharp splinter of suspicion whispered its way into Cordelia’s heart. Susan’s change of temperament—from alternating bouts of sorrow and fearful anger to a kind of dazed but mainly cheerful acceptance—had been so sudden. Mayhap it wasn’t acceptance at all.
I had almost forgotten Cordelia was also a protagonist in this story.
I finish reading here with a quick check-in across various characters in Mejis. I am now 55% of the way through Wizard and Glass.
Day 1144: Feb 17, 2025
I wrap up Chapter II of Part Three of Wizard and Glass today.
Roland’s ka-tet are getting very concerned about (if not pissed off at) Roland over his distracted focus on Susan. Jonas, Rhea and Cordelia are circling in on our young heroes. All of Mejis prepares for a fall-festival (Reaping Night) while the tension under this powder keg of a situation continues to grow.
Jonas smiled, then pushed back from the desk to include the others in his regard. “You want to remember, Dave, that I play to win. I can’t help it; it’s just my nature.” He turned his full attention to Roland. His smile broadened. “Like the scorpion said to the maiden as she lay dying, ‘You knowed I was poison when you picked me up.’ ”
In OUR world, it’s a frog, not a maiden.
“It’s with thy mouth thee mostly hits nowadays,” Susan said. “I’ve put up with it—more fool me—but am done with it now. I’ll have no more. If I’m old enough to be sent to a man’s bed for money, I’m old enough for ye to keep a civil tongue when ye speak to me.”
The time for blunt talk with Aunt Cordelia has long passed.
“Do ye swear to me, Susan—on your father’s name—that ye’ve not been meeting this boy Dearborn?”
…
“I will swear to nothing,” she said. “Ye’ve no right to ask it of me.”
“Swear!” Cordelia cried shrilly. She groped out for the table again and grasped it, as if for balance. “Swear it! Swear it! This is no game of jacks or tag or Johnny-jump-my-pony! Thee’s not a child any longer! Swear to me! Swear that thee’re still pure!”
Is this the moment the truth comes out?
Cuthbert’s good cheer collapsed in a puff, and he once more found himself having to restrain a flood of recrimination, all whirling around two basic ideas: that Roland was shirking his duty so he could continue to wallow in the undeniable charms of a certain young lady, and—more important—that Roland had lost his wits when all of Mid-World needed them the most.
Will this ka-tet collapse just as things are coming to a head?
Roland and Cuthbert had a conversation with Jonas and the Sheriff. Cordelia confronted Susan about a suspected tryst with “Will Dearborn”.
And with that, I’m done reading for the day. I am now 56% of the way through Wizard and Glass.
Day 1145: Feb 18, 2025
Listening to Dark Tower Palaver enter into the second half of Wizard and Glass.
Day 1146: Feb 19, 2025
Finished off this episode from Dark Tower Palaver.
Day 1147: Feb 20, 2025
It’s the Cast of Ka‘s turn to discuss the ongoing (and dangerous) romance between Roland and Susan.
Day 1148: Feb 21, 2025
Finished off this episode from the Cast of Ka‘s. In addition to talking about Wizard and Glass, they’re also reviewing each episode of the regrettable series The Stand (2020) as they released back in the day!
Day 1149: Feb 22, 2025
I’m reading the first half of Part Three, Chapter III of Wizard and Glass.
Aunt Cordelia suspicions about Roland and Susan grows. Jonas Eldred’s suspicions about Roland and his friends grows. Rhea of the Coos’ addiction to the pink glowing ball grows. Alain’s and Cuthbert’s impatience with Roland grows.
The tension continues to mount!
Out on the part of the Drop closest to Mayor’s House, Roland, Cuthbert, and Alain rode with renewed purpose, counting the horses which ran with the Barony brand on their flanks. The bright skies and brisk winds filled them with energy and good cheer, and for a course of days—three, or perhaps four—they galloped together in a whooping, shouting, laughing line, their old good fellowship restored.
Oh good! Glad to see the gang is back in good spirits.
“Mr. Jonas? Eldred?”
He turned, smiling, to the owner of the voice. No dewy-complexioned flower-girl with wide eyes and moist, parted lips stood there, but a skinny woman edging into late middle age—flat chest, flat bum, tight pale lips, hair scrooped so tight against her skull that it fair screamed. Only the wide eyes corresponded with his daydream. I believe I’ve made a conquest, Jonas thought sardonically.
I just HAD to give Chat GPT a shot at that description
Rhea loved everything about the glass ball, but what she especially loved was the way it unfailingly showed her people at their vilest. Never in its pink reaches did she see one child comforting another after a fall at play, or a tired husband with his head in his wife’s lap, or old people supping peacefully together at the end of the day; these things held no more interest for the glass, it seemed, than they did for her.
Interesting insight into that pink orb.
“Thank’ee, Eldred! Oh, thank’ee!” And she had hugged him before hurrying in, her tiny breasts pressing like stones against the front of his shirt. “Mayhap I’ll sleep tonight, after all!”
King’s fixation on Cordelia’s “attributes” (or lack thereof) is quite distracting!
And there was John Farson to consider. Jonas had never spoken to the Good Man himself (and never wanted to; Farson was reputed to be whimsically, dangerously insane), but he had had dealings with George Latigo, who would probably be leading the troop of Farson’s men that would arrive any day now. It was Latigo who had hired the Big Coffin Hunters in the first place
Can’t forget about the greater Mid-World politics!
I tried to do a search on an image of John Farson hoping to get at least some fan-artist’s rendering. But instead, I stumbled across an historical figure with that name: A John Farson Starr with a good face and a dull biography.
And that’s it for today’s reading of Wizard and Glass. I am now 57% of the way through this novel.
Day 1150: Feb 23, 2025
Finishing off Part Three, Chapter III of Wizard and Glass.
Cordelia has shared with Jonas her suspicions about Susan’s trysts with Roland (Will Dearborn). One might think that this book is just one large soap opera, and they wouldn’t be entirely wrong.
Jonas rode for Citgo instead.
…
First he checked the tankers. They were just as had been and should be—lined up in a neat row with their new wheels ready to roll when the time came, and hidden behind their new camouflage.
And THIS, I bet, is where Cuthbert’s missing “lookout” is found.
It lay in the grassy ditch less than a dozen paces from the place where the old road joined the Great Road. At first he saw only a smooth white shape in the weeds and thought it was a stone. Then he saw a black roundness that could only be an eyehole. Not a stone, then; a skull.
And there it is…
Coral had her doubts; despots had such a convenient way of forgetting their promises..
Such a timely statement given current events.
“Where did I go wrong?” she asked herself, and laughed. “Oh dear Man Jesus, where did this straying sinner-child go wrong? Can you say hallelujah.” She sounded so much like the wandering preacher-woman that had come through town the year before—Pittston, her name had been, Sylvia Pittston—that she laughed again, this time almost naturally.
A call-back to the first book!
She grasped the bottle, but before she could pour, a spidery monstrosity with gray-green eyes leaped, hissing, onto the bar.
At first, I didn’t realize it was Rhea’s cat, Musty.
(Forgive the AI image below. Apparently AI can’t count “six-legs” when prompted)
“Go to Lengyll,” he said. “Tell him we want to put about a dozen men—no less than ten—out at yon oilpatch. Good men who can get their heads down and keep them down and not snap the trap too soon on an ambush, if ambushing’s required.
…
I intend to press them a little more tomorrow. I want them angry, and I want them confused.”
In this story, knowledge is the chief weapon: Who know what about whom with everyone trying to keep their secrets close to their vests.
And that’s where I end my reading for the day.
I am now 59% of the way through Wizard and Glass.
Day 1151: Feb 24, 2025
Dark Tower Palaver plows forward in the second half of Wizard and Glass.
Day 1152: Feb 25, 2025
Finished off this episode from Dark Tower Palaver.
Day 1153: Feb 26, 2025
The Cast of Ka jokes about Roland & Susan’s secret love shack!
Day 1154: Feb 27, 2025
Finished off this episode from The Cast of Ka.
Day 1155: Feb 28, 2025
I return to Mid-World where everyone seems to be learning the truth about Roland and his friends. Meanwhile, Roland seems dangerously aloof as he falls down the rabbit hole of passionate young love with Susan.
I pickup reading at Part Three, Chapter IV.
There was always an edge to Cuthbert’s teasing these days; the old sense of fun had been replaced by something that was mean and unpleasant. Alain kept expecting Roland to flash up at one of Cuthbert’s jibes, like steel that has been struck by sharp flint, and knock Bert sprawling. In a way, Alain almost wished for it. It might clear the air.
Chapter IV is titled “Roland and Cuthbert”. I anticipate things indeed will blow up between them.
Jonas waited on the flank of a ridge, belly-down in the tall grass, until the brats were an hour gone from the Bar K. He then rode to the ridgetop and picked them out, three dots four miles away on the brown slope. Off to do their daily duty. No sign they suspected anything.
Jonas is now snooping around where the young ka-tet had been staying. Will he discover Roland’s hidden guns?
Here the boys had left some washing to dry. Jonas stripped the pants and shirts off the low branches upon which they had been hung, made a pile of them, pissed on them, and then went back to his horse.
Well, that was completely unnecessary! What a jerk!
[EDIT: OMG – Jonas gets even worse!]
The pigeons were upset now; they were incapable of scolding like jays or rooks, but they tried to flutter away from him when he opened their cages. It did no good, of course. He caught them one by one and twisted their heads off. That much accomplished, Jonas popped one bird beneath the strawtick pillow of each boy.
Did Roland anticipate this would happen when he promised Cuthbert that he could send message by pigeon in the morning?
With the pigeons seen to, he could hear better. He began walking slowly back and forth on the board floor, head cocked, listening.
He’s gonna find the guns!
But… If Roland anticipated the demise of the pigeons, wouldn’t he have also anticipated the hunt for his hidden guns?
“Oh, I might have seen something,” Roland said. “A reflection, perhaps, but . . . do you trust me, Al? That’s what matters, I think. Do you trust me, or do you think I lost my wits when I lost my heart? As he does?” He jerked his head in Cuthbert’s direction.
Alain was freaked out by his premonition that something was happening back at their residence. But Roland’s calm demeanor tipped the fact that the young leader was indeed already aware it was happening.
Jonas poked the end of the severed dog’s tail into one of the pigeon-cages, so it stuck up like a huge, mocking feather. He used the paint to write such charmingly boyish slogans as…
So Jonas indeed found the hidden guns in the floorboard (but NOT Roland’s gunslinger guns, it seems). Then Jonas is trying to pin the vandalism on the boys he had encountered in town.
“Ma’am? Nice old lady that wouldn’t hurt a fly? You therey-air? It’s good old Sheemie with your graf.” He smiled and held out his free hand, palm up, to demonstrate his exquisite harmlessness, but from the hut there was still no response.
Poor Sheemie was sent to Rhea’s house to deliver booze from the bar.
Rhea was holding out an old and stained envelope. The flap had been sealed with a blob of red wax. Sheemie dreaded to think what might have been rendered down to make wax such as that.
“Take this and give it to Cordelia Delgado. Do ye know her?”
Poor Sheemie, the doomed messenger boy!
And what sort of letter could Rhea be sending Cordelia Delgado, anyway? Sheemie thought back to the day he’d seen sai Delgado’s face all covered with cobwebbies, and shivered.
“Face all covered with cobwebs”? I don’t recall that at all.
That’s all the reading for today. I am now 60% of the way through Wizard and Glass!
Day 1156: Mar 1, 2025
Aiming to reach the midpoint of Part Three, Chapter IV in my read of Wizard and Glass today.
Jonas Eldred went snooping around where Roland & pals were staying. The witch Rhea is getting extra creepy with poor Sheemie.
All thoughts of fellowship and ka-tet left his mind, which sank back into his body and was at once obliterated by simple red fury. Jonas had been here. Jonas had pissed on their clothes, called Alain’s mother a cunt, torn up their most treasured pictures, painted childish obscenities on their walls, killed their pigeons. Roland had known . . . done nothing . . . intended to continue doing nothing. Except fuck his gilly-girl.
Wow – Cuthbert is M-A-D mad!
“Why do you always excuse him? Why?”
“Out on the Drop, he asked if I trusted him. I said I did. And I do.”
“Then you’re a fool.”
“And he’s a gunslinger. If he says we must wait longer, we must.”
“He’s a gunslinger by accident! A freak! A mutie!”
Alain stared at him in silent shock.
Wow – Cuthbert is right on the line of saying/doing something unforgiveable.
The farmers’ market was booming, the street-stalls were crowded, children were laughing at a Pinch and Jilly show (Jilly was currently chasing Pinch back and forth and bashing the poor old longsuffering fellow with her broom)…
At the sound of “Arthur Heath’s” kind voice and the sight of his concerned face, Sheemie began to weep. Rhea’s strict command that he should tell no one flew out of his head. Still sobbing, he recounted everything that had happened since that morning. Twice Cuthbert had to ask him to slow down, and when Bert led the boy to a tree in whose shade the two of them sat together, Sheemie was finally able to do so. Cuthbert listened with growing unease. At the end of his tale, Sheemie produced an envelope from inside his shirt.
Cuthbert broke the seal and read what was inside, his eyes growing large.
Oh wow! Way to go, Sheemie!
“What’s this fellow’s name?”
“I didn’t ask, he didn’t say. He showed me Farson’s sigul, though. You know.” Depape lowered his voice a little. “The eye.”
Jonas knew, all right. He hated that wide-open staring eye, couldn’t imagine what had possessed Farson to pick it in the first place.
Depape hesitated a moment and said: “He laughs like a dead person. I could barely stand to hear him do it.”
“What do you mean, like a dead person?”
Roy Depape shook his head. “Can’t rightly say.”
And that’s all the reading for today! I am now 61% of the way through Wizard and Glass.
Day 1157: Mar 2, 2025
It’s my final time with Dark Tower Palaver as I will have surpassed the progress of their book clubs. But it’s not surprising: They’ve taken over 9 years to only get halfway through Wizard and Glass.
But still, I’ve enjoyed their deep dive banter and will enjoy this one as well.
Day 1158: Mar 3, 2025
Finished off this episode from Dark Tower Palaver and have now moved past their “Book Club” series. Long days and pleasant nights, Podslingers!
Day 1159: Mar 4, 2025
Covering the latest portion of Wizard and Glass is The Cast of Ka.
Day 1160: Mar 5, 2025
Finished this episode of The Cast of Ka where they get halfway through Part Three, Chapter IV. They also cover Episode 4 of the 2020 TV series adaptation of The Stand.
Day 1161: Mar 6, 2025
I’m back to the text and with Dark Tower Palaver out of the way, the reading pace for Wizard and Glass should pick up a little bit!
“Come in, my friend,” a voice—not Rimer’s—called. It was followed by a tittery laugh that made Jonas’s flesh creep. He laughs like a dead person, Roy had said.
It’s pretty much the consensus at this point that this is Randall Flagg (aka Martin, aka The Man in Black) who has sought audience with Eldred Jonas.
He turned. Looked into the mirror again. This time he saw the man in black standing there and smiling at him, big as life. Gods, had he been there all along?
This scene between Jonas and the Man in Black is riveting!
“Don’t go out there,” Alain said. “He’s lost his wits.”
“If our fellowship is broken, any chance we might have of getting out of Mejis alive is gone,” Roland said. “That being the case, I’d rather die at the hands of a friend than an enemy.”
Cuthbert has returned with a devastating secret and demanded to speak with Roland with a highly agitated manner. But that line from Roland… wow.
Brilliant light—starshine times a thousand—exploded in his head as Cuthbert’s fist drove against the point of his chin.
Well, I certainly didn’t see THAT coming! Who knew Roland, with his heightened senses and all, could even BE sucker-punched!
Roland picked it up, feeling the fine point of his developing rage lose its edge. “What is it?”
“Open and see. There’s enough starlight to read by.”
Slowly, with reluctant fingers, Roland unfolded the sheet of paper and read what was printed there.
No chapter since the standoff at Traveler’s Rest has been this compelling.
Roland began to cry. They were partly tears of gratitude, but mostly those of mingled shame and confusion; there was even a small, dark part of him that hated Cuthbert and always would. That part hated Cuthbert more on account of the kiss than because of the unexpected punch on the jaw; more for the forgiveness than the awakening.
Glad to see the ka-tet has been repaired!
Roland smiled a little, and turned toward the northwest. “Rhea,” he said. “Whatever else she is, she’s a first-class troublemaker, is she not? And troublemakers must be put on notice.”
Good! I’m itching for a little revenge myself!
“Are we going to kill her?”
Roland thought, and thought hard. At last he looked up, biting his lip. “We should.”
“Aye. We should. But are we going to?”
“Not unless we have to, I reckon.” Later he would regret this decision…
Ah, King with his patented foreshadow bomb!
That’s it for reading today! Tomorrow, I’ll finish off this chapter. But what a great read!
I am now 63% of the way through Wizard and Glass.
Day 1162: Mar 7, 2025
Diving again into Wizard and Glass, finishing off Part Three, Ch IV. Cuthbert and Roland punch out their differences and are once again unified. They then set out to teach Rhea of the Cöos a lesson.
Walter (aka Randall Flagg, aka The Man in Black) has stepped into the story with a one-on-one with Eldred Jonas.
The sun was just over the horizon when Roland and Cuthbert left the next morning. […] For the first time in their lives they went forth wearing holstered revolvers; for the first time in their lives they went into the world as gunslingers.
Play the majestic, spaghetti western music!
“Hear me well, Rhea, daughter of none, and understand me well. I have come here under the name of Will Dearborn, but Dearborn is not my name and it is the Affiliation I serve. More, ’tis all which lies behind the Affiliation—’tis the power of the White. You have crossed the way of our ka, and I warn you only this once: do not cross it again. Do you understand?”
“The power of the white” and all I could think of is this:
“Roland look out! Snake!” Cuthbert screamed, but before the second word had left his mouth, Roland had drawn one of his guns.
He fell sideways in the saddle, holding with his left leg and heel as Rusher jigged and pranced. He fired three times, the thunder of the big gun smashing through the still air and then rolling back from the nearby hills.
I have to imagine the sound of gunfire was not common in those parts and will draw significant attention.
From within the hut came a wail of grief and rage so awful that Roland’s spine turned to a cord of ice.
“You bastard!” screamed a woman’s voice from the shadows. “Oh, you murdering cull! My friend! My friend!”
Considering where that snake’s been… It a good thing Roland shot it into pieces. Ewwww…
When she was sure the boys were gone, Rhea crept out of her door and into the hateful sunshine. She hobbled across to the tree and fell on her knees by the tattered length of her snake, weeping loudly.
“Ermot, Ermot!” she cried. “See what’s become of ye!”
There was his head, the mouth frozen open, the double fangs still dripping poison
I decapitated a snake’s head once by accident with a lawnmower. Still creeps me out to this day seeing the body sill slithering.
With that disturbing confrontation out of the way, I finish reading for today. I am now 64% of the way through Wizard and Glass.
Day 1163: Mar 8, 2025
The Cast of Ka recounts Roland and Cuthbert’s “visit” to Rhea’s place.
Day 1164: Mar 9, 2025
Finished off this episode from The Cast of Ka.
Day 1165: Mar 10, 2025
Kingslingers weighs in on Roland & Cuthbert’s confrontation.
Day 1166: Mar 11, 2025
Listened to the second half of this Kingslingers episode.
Day 1167: Mar 12, 2025
Two Guys to the Dark Tower Came had a fun time reviewing Chapters 1-4 of Part 3 of Wizard and Glass.
Day 1168: Mar 13, 2025
It’s back to the book as I crack open Wizard and Glass, Part Three, Chapter V: “Wizard’s Rainbow”.
Things are really heating up as The Man in Black has made his entrance into this tale while on the other side of town, Roland and Cuthbert really pissed off a witch.
The first thing Depape saw upon entering was sai Thorin herself, in a rocker by the window. She wore a foamy nightdress of white silk and a red bufanda on her head.
What is a Spanish bufanda?
scarf [noun] a long strip of material to wear round one’s neck.
Latigo sat on the end of the bed, produced a sack of tobacco from beneath his serape, and began rolling a cigarette.
“I won’t stay long,” he said. He spoke in the abrupt, clipped tones of northern In-World, where—or so Depape had heard—reindeer-fucking was still considered the chief sport. If you ran slower than your sister, that was.
😂 Well, that’s a helluva stereotype to be carrying around!
Latigo said. “We’ve brought radios, but they’re either broken or can’t work at this distance. No one knows which. I hate all such toys, anyway. The gods laugh at them. We’re on our own, my friend. For good or ill.”
Radios in Mid-World? I guess it’s not all that surprising if we’re also hearing about tanks & robots in Farson’s army.
Jonas favored Latigo with a wintry smile. “As a concept, treason might be a bit of a reach for the common folk, even when the mob’s drunk and the core’s been bought and paid for by the Horsemen’s Association. Murder, though . . . especially that of a much loved Mayor—”
So here’s the plot twist – no, that’s not correct. The plot “clarity”. The Coffin Hunters are going to frame Roland & friends for murder.
“You won’t bless anything if the Wizard’s Rainbow gets hold of you,” Latigo said grimly, and swung his attention back to Jonas. “You’ll want to be even more careful taking it back than you were in giving it over. The old witch-woman’s likely under its glam by now.”
Oh yeah, this is gonna be fun.
“I hope you don’t hate me,” she said. “I’d understand it if you did—I’ve come into your plans . . . and between the three of you, as well—but I couldn’t help it.” Her hands were still out at her sides. Now she raised them to Alain and Cuthbert, palms up. “I love him.”
“We don’t hate you,” Alain said. “Do we, Bert?”
For a terrible moment Cuthbert was silent, looking over Susan’s shoulder, seeming to study the waxing Demon Moon. She felt her heart stop. Then his gaze returned to her and he gave a smile of such sweetness that a confused but brilliant thought (If I’d met this one first—, it began) shot through her mind like a comet.
“Roland’s love is my love,” Cuthbert said. He reached out, took her hands, and drew her forward so she stood between him and Alain like a sister with her two brothers. “For we have been friends since we wore cradle-clothes, and we’ll continue as friends until one of us leaves the path and enters the clearing.” Then he grinned like a kid. “Mayhap we’ll all find the end of the path together, the way things are going.”
What a beautiful scene!
“There’s a good deal of machinery left over from the days of the Old People in those mountains,” Alain said. “Most is up in the draws and canyons, they say. Robots and killer lights—razor-beams, such are called, because they’ll cut you clean in half if you run into them.”
Razor beams!
“How can the four of us kill two hundred soldiers?”
“We can’t. But if we can start one or two of the clustered tankers burning, we think there’ll be an explosion—mayhap a fearful one. The surviving soldiers will be terrified, and the surviving leaders infuriated. They’ll see us, because we’ll let ourselves be seen . . .”
Alain and Cuthbert were watching him breathlessly. The rest they had either been told or had guessed, but this part was the counsel Roland had, until now, kept to himself.
“What then?” she asked, frightened. “What then?”
“I think we can lead them into Eyebolt Canyon,” Roland said. “I think we can lead them into the thinny.”
Eldred Jonas may have plans. But Roland’s got plans of his own too!
And that’s all the time I have for reading today. I am now 65% of the way through Wizard and Glass.
Day 1169: Mar 14, 2025
Continuing to read Wizard and Glass, Part Three, finishing off Chapter V: “Wizard’s Rainbow”.
Plans from various parties have been revealed to the reader. Jonas is going to frame the young gunslingers for murder. Roland plans to send Jonas and hundreds of other traitorous men into a thinny. Sheemie plans to hide from all this chaos.
Alain’s quiet voice stopped him. “There’s another matter. Very important.”
Roland sank back down on his hunkers, looking at Alain curiously.
“The witch.”
Susan started, but Roland only barked an impatient laugh. “She doesn’t figure in our business, Al—I can’t see how she could.”
Hah! What a horrible prediction!
All the humor had washed out of the latter young man’s face, leaving a ruthless and calculating bedrock his own mother might not have recognized . . . or might not have wanted to.
“Pink,” Cuthbert said. “Isn’t that interesting—the same word your father happened to mention just before we left, Roland, wasn’t it? He warned us about the pink one. We thought it was a joke.”
I searched the book for every instance of “pink”. Not one warning found. This was ret-conned!
“Not all the old stories are true, but I think that of Maerlyn’s Rainbow is,” Steven replied. “It’s said that once there were thirteen glass balls in it—one for each of the Twelve Guardians, and one representing the nexus-point of the Beams.”
So now this flashback to the warning Roland’s father gave to the group. I don’t like the sudden plot convenience, but I do like the insertion of some otherworldly lore. I enjoy the mythology of Mid-world.
“If the other balls in the Wizard’s Rainbow did exist, most are broken now. Such things never stay in one place or one pair of hands for long, you know, and even enchanted glass has a way of breaking. Yet at least three or four bends o’ the Rainbow may still be rolling around this sad world of ours. The blue, almost certainly. A desert tribe of slow mutants—the Total Hogs, they called themselves—had that one less than fifty years ago, although it’s slipped from sight again since. The green and the orange are reputed to be in Lud and Dis, respectively. And, just maybe, the pink one.”
OK – now I need to read all about the Total Hogs. Where is their story to be found?
The boys looked at her in mounting horror as her voice became Rhea’s—the growling, whining cadences of the old woman of the Cöos. Even the face—except for the coldly dreaming eyes—had become a hag’s face.
“ ‘Cut it all, girl, every whore’s strand of it, aye, and go back to him as bald as ye came from yer mother! See how he likes ye then!’ ”
Susan’s second hypnotism and Alain is able to push her through the memory block Rhea had set. Compelling stuff!
“Whatever comes, we’ll be together,” he said, but above them, Demon Moon grinned into the starry dark above the Clean Sea, as if he knew a different future.
And on that ominous note, I take leave of reading for the day. I am now 67% of the way through Wizard and Glass.
Day 1170: Mar 15, 2025
The Cast of Ka reviews Part Three, Chapter V of Wizard and Glass.
Day 1171: Mar 16, 2025
The second half of this episode primarily dealt with Episode 6 of the disappointing 2020 “The Stand” TV series.
Day 1172: Mar 17, 2025
I’m excited to be back to the text today as I start reading Wizard and Glass, Part Three, Chapter VI “CLOSING THE YEAR”.
Everybody’s got plans to do everyone else in. Roland’s plan is especially dark as he wants to lead half of Mejis into a thinny.
Reap-charms hang everywhere, and although women often kiss and are kissed in the streets and in both marketplaces—often by men they do not know—sexual intercourse has come to an almost complete halt. It will resume (with a bang, you might say) on Reap-Night. There will be the usual crop of Full Earth babies the following year as a result.
Abstinence is a rather odd custom for an annual tradition. In our world, what holiday would be the likeliest to have the same?
Leaves are burned in town yards, and as the week goes on and Old Demon’s face shows ever more clearly, red-handed stuffy-guys are thrown on the pyres more and more frequently. In the fields, cornshocks flare like torches, and often stuffies burn with them, their red hands and white-cross eyes rippling in the heat. Men stand around these fires, not speaking, their faces solemn. No one will say what terrible old ways and unspeakable old gods are being propitiated by the burning of the stuffy-guys, but they all know well enough. From time to time one of these men will whisper two words under his breath: charyou tree.
This has severe cult-like Midsommar vibes.
There is a sense—inarticulate but very much there—that things have gone amiss this season. It is the closing of the year; it is also the closing of the peace. For it is here, in the sleepy Out-World Barony of Mejis, that Mid-World’s last great conflict will shortly begin; it is from here that the blood will begin to flow. In two years, no more, the world as it has been will be swept away. It starts here. From its field of roses, the Dark Tower cries out in its beast’s voice. Time is a face on the water.
One of the most ominous passages King has ever written!
“Ye’ll know soon enough. Don’t mind it now, Sheemie. Go on—best be on your way.”
Yet he lingered.
“What?” she asked, trying not to be impatient. “Sheemie, what is it?”
“I’d like to take a fin de año kiss from ye, so I would.” Sheemie’s face had gone an alarming shade of red.
Susan laughed in spite of herself, then stood on her toes and kissed the corner of his mouth. With that, Sheemie floated out to the Bar K with his load of fire.
How sweet!
Reynolds rode out to Citgo the following day, galloping with a scarf wrapped around his face so only his eyes peered out. He would be very glad to get out of this damned place… there was a brooding quality to Hambry and all of Mejis as the days wound down toward the Reap; a haunted feeling he didn’t care for a bit.
I really enjoy these echoes of an older, more familiar world.
All that pre-Fair week, Rhea sat in front of the glass, peering into its depths. She had taken time to sew Ermot’s head back onto his body with clumsy stitches of black thread, and she sat with the decaying snake around her neck as she watched and dreamed, not noticing the stench that began to arise from the reptile as time passed.
Oh, that’s disgusting!
By the third day of the week before Reaping, she had ceased her trips to the privy, even though she could carry the ball with her when she went, and the sour stench of urine began to rise from her.
By the fourth day, Musty had ceased coming near her.
Rhea dreamed in the ball and lost herself in her dreams, as others had done before her…
I wonder who is going to sign up to play the role of Rhea in Mike Flanagan’s adaptation!
“Do you think we’ll get away with it, Bert?”
“Dunno,” Cuthbert said. Then he thought of the gunpowder trenches lying beneath the dry rolls of brush, and grinned. “But I’ll tell you one thing, Al: they’ll know we were here.”
With that, I finish reading for the day. I am now 69% of the way through Wizard and Glass.
Day 1173: Mar 18, 2025
I am finishing off Wizard and Glass, Part Three, Chapter VI “CLOSING THE YEAR”.
The plans move forward as Cuthbert and Alain lay gunpowder down near the thinny in Eyebolt Canyon. Mejis is under the spell of the season leading towards Reaping Day and we finally heard the ominous words “charyou tree” uttered out loud.
Rhea has gone off the deep end (not that the witch was every stable to begin with). This story has gone into uneasy territory.
In a dark hour of the following morning, Olive Thorin crept from the room where she now slept to the one she had shared for almost forty years with her husband…
She didn’t dare wake him of her own—all her courage had been exhausted just getting here
Why would she do this, especially how he’s publicly flaunted his new “gilly” in front of her for these past months?
“If anything happens to thee, Roland, I won’t be able to do anything. Except die.”
His hands were still on her face. Now he used them to make her head shake slowly, from side to side. “You won’t die,” he said.
Oh man, I can’t TAKE IT!
“Aye, I know all that, but something’s wrong.” She looked at him, touched the side of his face. “I fear for thee and me, Roland, and know not why.”
“All will work out,” he said. “Ka—”
“Speak not to me of ka!” she cried. “Oh please don’t! Ka like a wind, my father said, it takes what it will and minds the plea of no man or woman. Greedy old ka, how I hate it!”
“Speak not to me of ka!” – that’s a phrase I will need to use at some point today.
“No more talking,” she said. “Talking’s done. If you love me, then love me.”
And for the last time, Roland did.
WHY DOES KING DO THIS???
“And for the last time…”
It almost makes me not want to move forward in this tragedy. Yes, I know what the outcome will be – King has all but beat us over the head with it. Doesn’t mean I have to like it, though.
“The moon, Stanley!” she whispered. “Oh, look at the moon, would ye!”
…
Above them, Demon Moon grinned and winked one eye through what appeared to be a shifting scrim of blood.
That concludes this chapter of Wizard and Glass. I am now 71% of the way through it.
Day 1174: Mar 19, 2025
The Cast of Ka reviews the ominous atmosphere that have settled over Hambry as Reaping Days draws nigh.
Day 1175: Mar 20, 2025
Finished this episode from The Cast of Ka.
Day 1176: Mar 21, 2025
Picking up Wizard and Glass at Part Three, Chapter VII: Taking the Ball.
Both Aunt Cord and Rhea of the Cöos have gone off the deep end. Susan has left home for good and put her fate into Roland’s hands. They spent one final night together (thanks, King, for the spoiler that it was their last!)
Now comes Reaping Day.
While a certain whore and certain bartender were still gaping up at the bloody moon, Kimba Rimer awoke sneezing.
Damn, a cold for Reaping, he thought. As much as I have to be out over the next two days, I’ll be lucky if it doesn’t turn into—
Should I cross my fingers and hope that Captain Trips decided to spread through Mejis interrupting everyone’s plans?
The lamp lit, and in the thin circle of its radiance, he saw not a fluttering bird but Clay Reynolds sitting on the edge of the bed.
…
He took out the hand which had been under his cloak. In it was a keenly honed cuchillo… He raised it now and drove the twelve-inch blade into Rimer’s chest. It went all the way through, pinning him like a bug. A bedbug, Reynolds thought.
And with that, we moved from planning to executing.
Before Thorin could scream, Roy Depape brushed off the mayoral nightcap, seized the gauzy remains of the mayoral mane, and yanked the mayoral head back. The knife Depape held in his other hand was much humbler than the one Reynolds had used, but it cut the old man’s throat efficiently enough. Blood sprayed scarlet in the dim room. Depape let go of Thorin’s hair, went back to the drapes he had been hiding behind, and picked something up off the floor. It was Cuthbert’s lookout. Depape brought it back to the chair and put it in the dying Mayor’s lap.
This is how it is with King. He spends hundreds of pages climbing you to the top of the roller coaster. But once you’ve crossed over that apex…
Roland, Cuthbert, and Alain came out of the bunkhouse at quarter past six that morning, and stood a-row on the porch. Alain was finishing his coffee. Cuthbert was yawning and stretching. Roland was buttoning his shirt and looking southwest, toward the Bad Grass.
Wow – ChatGPT took this raw paragraph and just about nailed it!
They set off across the dooryard, sensing the eight pairs of eyes on them not at all. They walked into the stable past the two men flanking the door, one hidden behind an ancient harrow, the other tucked behind an untidy stack of hay, both with guns drawn.
King is not going to let us catch a breath from this point onwards, is he?
Cuthbert, still fighting tears, did as he was told. Esposas were put on him by Deputy Bridger. The other two men yanked Alain to his feet. He reeled a little, then stood firm as he was handcuffed. His eyes met Roland’s, and Al tried to smile. In some ways it was the worst moment of that terrible ambush morning. Roland nodded back and made himself a promise: he would never be taken like this again, not if he lived to be a thousand years old.
Little did Roland know at the time that he INDEED was going to live to be a thousand years old.
The gunslinger used his knees to turn Rusher . . . and there, standing by the gate between the Bar K’s dooryard and the lane leading to the Great Road, was Jonas himself.
…
He doffed his hat and held it out to Roland in courtly greeting. “A good game,” he said. “You played very well for someone who was taking his milk out of a tit not so long ago.”
“Old man,” Roland said, “you’ve lived too long.”
I felt Roland’s response way down to my bones!
Roland squeezed Rusher’s sides; the horse trotted toward Jonas. And suddenly Roland knew something. As with all his best and truest intuitions, it came from nowhere and everywhere—absent at one second, all there and fully dressed at the next.
“Who sent you west, maggot?” he asked as he passed Jonas. “Couldn’t have been Cort—you’re too old. Was it his father?”
The look of slightly bored amusement left Jonas’s face—flew from his face, as if slapped away. For one amazing moment the man with the white hair was a child again: shocked, shamed, and hurt.
“Yes, Cort’s da—I see it in your eyes. And now you’re here, on the Clean Sea . . . except you’re really in the west. The soul of a man such as you can never leave the west.”
I remember the gunslinger’s creed ending with,
“I do not kill with my gun; he who kills with his gun has forgotten the face of his father.
I kill with my heart.”
And did Roland ever deliver a fatal shot with these words!
I stop reading for the day, halfway through the chapter. I am now 72% of the way through Wizard and Glass and I can’t WAIT to get back to it tomorrow!
Day 1177: Mar 22, 2025
Finishing off Chapter VII of Part Three of Wizard and Glass.
It was a devastating loss for Roland, Cuthbert and Alain as the three young men were caught unaware and were captured by Jonas and gang.
Meanwhile both Thorin and Rimer were murdered and the boys were framed for it.
We’re in the climax now and the pages are gonna fly!
“Whatever you think, Eldred,” Reynolds said.
“I said what I think. We’re the devils now, and by God, that’s how we’ll behave. What about Quint and that lot down there?” He cocked his head toward the forested slope where the ambush had been laid.
“Still there, pending your word,” Reynolds said.
“No need of em now.” He favored Reynolds with a dark look.
I’ve a feeling releasing that is going to prove a tactical mistake. I doubt Roland’s going to be locked up long
Jonas turned and looked toward the lumpy swell of hills to the northwest.
“We have business of our own,” he said. “Soonest begun, boys, soonest done. I want to shake the dust of fucking Mejis off my hat and boots as soon as I can. I don’t like the way it feels anymore. Not at all.”
I’m guessing a return visit to Rhea’s place is in order to retrieve the Wizard’s Glass?
Theresa O’Shyven poked her head forward to the full length of her neck, opened her mouth, stuck out her tongue, and began to lick the corner. She lapped it as Musty lapped his milk. Rhea watched this, slapping her knee and whooping, her face growing redder and redder as she rocked from side to side. Oh, Theresa was her favorite, aye! No doubt! For hours now she would crawl about on her hands and knees with her ass in the air, licking into the corners, praying to some obscure god—not even the Man-Jesus God—for forgiveness of who knew what as she did this, her penance. Sometimes she got splinters in her tongue and had to pause to spit blood into the kitchen basin. Up until now some sixth sense had always gotten her to her feet and back into her dress before any of her family returned, but Rhea knew that sooner or later the woman’s obsession would take her too far, and she would be surprised. Perhaps today would be the day—the little girl would come back early, perhaps for a coin to spend in town, and discover her mother down on her knees and licking the corners. Oh, what a spin and raree! How Rhea wanted to see it! How she longed to—
Rhea is lost in the pink grapefruit watching the secrets kinks and shames of the townfolk.
But this particular scene? WTF?
“Rhea! Rhea of the Cöos!”
No, not the boys.
“Come out here, and bring what you were given!”
Worse.
“Farson wants his property! We’ve come to take it!”
Not the boys but the Big Coffin Hunters.
“Never, ye dirty old white-haired prick,” she whispered. “Ye’ll never take it.”
Ah – an unexpected (but very enticing) confrontation to distract the reader from Roland’s plight for a few pages.
Who’s going to win this battle, I wonder!
“But look at her!” Depape almost moaned. “Look at her, Eldred!”
He was. The thing inside the black dress appeared to be wearing the corpse of a putrefying snake around its throat for a necklace. She was so scrawny that she resembled nothing so much as a walking skeleton. Her peeling skull was only tufted with hair; the rest had fallen out. Sores clustered on her cheeks and brow, and there was a mark like a spider-bite on the left side of her mouth. Jonas thought that last might be a scurvy-bloom, but he didn’t really care one way or another. What he cared about was the ball upraised in the dying woman’s long and shivering claws.
Reminds me of the “woman in the bathtub” scene from The Shining.
“Nevertheless, I’m under orders to take it.” Jonas’s voice became soft and conciliating… “Think a minute, and you’ll see my situation. Farson wants it, and who am I to stand against the wants of a man who’ll be the most powerful in Mid-World when Demon Moon rises next year?”
There is definitely an unwritten novel to be released from the perspective of Farson and his rise to power.
“Aye, Seafront, I’ve never been there,” Rhea said, moving forward again. When she reached Jonas’s horse (which tried to shy away from her), she opened the bag. After a moment’s further consideration, Jonas dropped the ball in. It bulged round at the bottom, making a shape like a teardrop.
I never would’ve guessed it, but somehow Jonas convinced Rhea to give up the Wizard’s Glass. Rhea also found herself as a travel companion to the Coffin Hunters.
With that, I’ve finished Chapter VII. I am now 74% of the way through Wizard and Glass!
Day 1178: Mar 23, 2025
Listening now to The Cast of Ka talk about the unravelling of Roland’s plans.
Day 1179: Mar 24, 2025
Finishing off this episode from The Cast of Ka about Wizard and Glass.
Day 1180: Mar 25, 2025
The Kingslingers return with this epic episode about the last two chapters I read from Wizard and Glass.
Day 1181: Mar 26, 2025
Listened to the second half of this episode from The Kingslingers.
Day 1182: Mar 27, 2025
I am back to the text as I pick up Wizard and Glass Part Three, Chapter VIII: The Ashes.
And I don’t like the sound of this chapter’s title!
She rode straight down the High Street, thumping her spurless heels at Pylon’s sides until the big horse was fairly flying. Thoughts, questions, possible plans of action . . . none of those had a place in her head as she rode. She was but vaguely aware of the people milling in the street, allowing Pylon to weave his own path through them. The only thing she was aware of was his name—Roland, Roland, Roland!—ringing in her head like a scream. Everything had gone upside down. The brave little ka-tet they had made that night at the graveyard was broken, three of its members jailed and with not long to live (if they even were still alive), the last member lost and confused, as crazy with terror as a bird in a barn.
King captured Susan’s emotional state perfectly.
Cordelia laughed again, thin lips drawing back from big white teeth. Horse teeth, almost. Her eyes glared in the sunlight.
Her mind’s broken, Susan thought. Poor thing. Poor old thing.
I definitely had Aunt Cord going batshit on my bingo card.
“Where does thee think thee’s going?” Aunt Cord was pawing at the soot-mark on her face with one gloved hand […] “Not to him! Ye’ll not go to him now, ye mad goose!”
Susan turned her horse away. “None of yer business, Aunt. This is the end between us. But mark what I say: we’ll be married by Year’s End. Our firstborn is already conceived.”
Whaaaaat??? Is this new information or did Susan just make that statement to strike a blow against her aunt?
With faint but genuine curiosity, Susan wondered if Roland had really expected she would ride blithely off to Gilead with his unborn child in her belly while he and his friends were roasted, screaming and red-handed, on the Reap-Night bonfire.
Well, I guess that answers my question. Susan is legit preggers with the son of Roland (I have to assume its a boy). Wow – I had not recalled this little nugget of info from the previous times I read this book.
“You bastards,” she murmured. “You horse-thieving bastards.”
She turned Pylon and rode for the burned-out ranch. To her right, her shadow was growing long. Overhead, the Demon Moon glimmered ghostly in the daylight sky.
It’s a trope King uses, but an effective one: An entire town gone mad while bad actors work in the background to rile them up. And an ominous evil force is present throughout all of it.
I am now 76% of the way through Wizard and Glass.
Day 1183: Mar 28, 2025
Continuing through Chapter VIII of Part Three of Wizard and Glass.
Susan had a final confrontation with her manipulative aunt and the town of Hambry gathered to speak on the “murders” committed by Roland and his ka-tet. Things are definitely stacked against our heroes!
As she drew Pylon up in front of the saloon with a murmured word, a shape rose out of the shadows. She tensed, and then the first orangey light of the rising moon caught Sheemie’s face. She relaxed again—even laughed a little, mostly at herself. He was a part of their ka-tet; she knew he was. Was it surprising that he should know, as well?
“Susan,” he murmured, taking off his sombrera and holding it against his chest. “I been waiting for’ee.”
“Why?” she asked.
“ ’Cause I knew ye’d come.” He looked back over his shoulder at the Rest, a black bulk spraying crazy light toward every point of the compass. “We’re going to let Arthur and them free, ain’t we?”
Stand and cheer for good ole Sheemie!
Stuffy-guys seemed to peer from every shadow-thickened porch. Susan shivered at the sight of their blank white-cross eyes.
ChatGPT didn’t do too bad of a job rendering this exact phrase from the book!
The door opened—no one had bothered to lock it—while Dave Hollis was trying, for about the two hundredth time, to play the bridge of “Captain Mills, You Bastard.”
It’s not a real song (unlike “Hey Jude”) so I asked ChatGPT to create one for me. And to be honest, the lyrics are pretty good!
She shrank back against the wall, avoiding Dave’s first swipe at the oversized serape, and, without thinking, pulled the trigger again. There was another loud explosion, and Dave Hollis—a young man only two years older than she herself—was flung backward with a smoking hole in his shirt between two points of the star he wore. His eyes were wide and unbelieving. His monocle lay by one outstretched hand on its length of black silk ribbon. One of his feet struck his guitar and knocked it to the floor with a thrum nearly as musical as the chords he had been trying to make.
“Dave,” she whispered. “Oh Dave, I’m sorry, what did I do?”
I certainly didn’t have Susan Delgado on my bingo card as the first one to draw fatal blood with a gun.
She cocked Roland’s pistol with the side of her thumb, socked the muzzle deep into the flab hanging from the underside of Sheriff Herk Avery’s head, and pulled the trigger.
The mess was considerable.
Susan’s on a killing spree!
Susan seized Roland’s hand, and when he squeezed, she squeezed back. And as she looked up at Demon Moon, its wicked face now draining from choleric red-orange to silver, she thought that when she had pulled the trigger on poor, earnest Dave Hollis, she had paid for her love with the dearest currency of all—had paid with her soul.
I finished up Chapter VIII and am now 77% of the way through Wizard and Glass.
Day 1184: Mar 29, 2025
Listening to The Cast of Ka cover Part Three, Chapter VIII of Wizard and Glass.
Day 1185: Mar 30, 2025
The Cast of Ka finished off Chapter VIII of Part Three in Wizard and Glass. Then they gave their review of the final episode of 2021’s “The Stand” – a memory I did not care to revisit.
Day 1186: Mar 31, 2025
Two Guys to the Dark Tower Came admit they were on the edge of their seats during this section of Wizard and Glass.
Day 1187: Apr 1, 2025
I started reading Wizard and Glass back in November but now I finally arrive at the month in which I finish the text!
Which means April is going to be depressing af…
I pick up the book in Part 3, Chapter IX: The Reaping.
“We’ve got a job to do . . . and we’re going to let them know we’re doing it. Eldred Jonas most of all.” He offered a thin blade of smile. “I want him to know the game is over. No more Castles. The real gunslingers are here. Let’s see if he can deal with them.”
Roland is DONE playing games and is ready for some revenge.
To Roland, Citgo was far spookier than the graveyard, and while he doubted that the dead in that latter place awoke even when Old Demon was full, there were some very unquiet corpses here, squalling zombies that stood rusty-weird in the moonlight with their pistons going up and down like marching feet.
Helluva a way to describe an oilfield!
Further firecrackers dropped down further overflow pipes turned out not to be necessary. There was a network of inter-connected pipes under the oilpatch, most filled with natural gas that had leaked in through ancient, decaying seals. Roland and Cuthbert had no more than reached the others when there was a fresh explosion, and a fresh tower of flame erupted from a derrick to the right of the one they had set afire. A moment later, a third derrick—this one sixty full yards away from the first two—exploded with a dragon’s roar. The ironwork tore free of its anchoring concrete pillars like a tooth pulled from a decayed gum. It rose on a cushion of blazing blue and yellow, attained a height of perhaps seventy feet, then heeled over and came crashing back down, spewing sparks in every direction.
I know this will be rendered as a TV series, but damn it – THIS deserves to be seen in IMAX!
When they were together they made love like cats or ferrets, twisting and hissing and clawing; they bit at each other and cursed at each other, and so far none of it was even close to enough. When he was with her, Jonas sometimes felt as if he were being fried in sweet oil.
King was describing Eldred Jonas and Coral Thorin getting it on. And I can’t wait to use the phrase “like being fried in sweet oil” with my own wife!
“And keep Sheemie safe, too. He’s as much the reason we’ve got this far as anything I’ve done.”
Roland was counting on Sheemie for more than she knew. If he and Bert and Alain were killed, it was Sheemie who would stabilize her, give her reason to go on.
“When does thee leave?” Susan asked. “Do we have time to make love?”
OK – King is really fantasizing now. Major explosions behind them, bad hombres on their way to kill them – and THIS is what’s on her mind?
For a moment it trembled on her lips to tell him that she was kindled with his child, but at the last moment she kept silent. There was enough for him to think about without that added, mayhap . . . and she didn’t want to pass such happy news beneath such an ugly moon. It would surely be bad luck.
Oh man… what a horrible way to leave this section!
That’s it for reading today! I am now 79% of the way through Wizard and Glass.
Day 1188: Apr 2, 2025
I continue reading Wizard and Glass Part 3, Chapter IX: The Reaping (it’s a long chapter!).
Explosions fill the sky as Roland & gang execute the first part of their plan after being broken out of jail.
They rode slowly away from the hut. Before the grass closed behind them, hiding it from view, he looked back a final time.
“Sue, I love thee.”
She smiled. It was a beautiful smile. “Bird and bear and hare and fish,” she said.
The next time Roland saw her, she was caught inside the Wizard’s glass.
Dammit, King! Why do ye keep doing this to us!
“So,” she said. “Here y’are, big boy. I thought ye’d show up pretty smart.” She cackled, and as her face broke into its sour lines of laughter, Jonas again saw her as she really was—all but sucked dry by the thing in her lap. Then he looked down at it himself . . . and was lost. He could feel that pink glow radiating into all the deepest passages and hollows of his mind, lighting them up in a way they’d never been lit up before.
I hope it destroys his mind!
“No,” he said, his own voice seeming to come from that same distant place. His eyes were pinned to the ball. He could feel its light baking deeper and deeper into his brain. It was a good feeling, like a hot fire on a cold night. “She’s alone. Looks as if she’s waiting.”
Jonas sees Susan in a hut up ahead waiting for Roland. Jonas is now aware of a potential ambush in the Bad Grass and has altered his plans. My heart is pounding from the tension!
It wasn’t the strong light of midmorning that her eyes opened upon, but the ash-pallid glow of five o’clock. Not a woman’s voice but a man’s. And not a hand shaking her shoulder but the barrel of a gun against her neck.
She looked up and saw a lined, narrow face framed by white hair. Lips no more than a scar. Eyes the same faded blue as Roland’s. Eldred Jonas.
And this is the beginning of the end for Susan. 😨
Jonas turned to Renfrew, who had taken a single step forward and then stopped himself. “Put her on her horse and tie her hands in front of her. Tight.” He looked down at Susan, then kicked her in the shoulder hard enough to send her rolling toward the hut. “Spit on me, would you? Spit on Eldred Jonas, would you, you bitch?”
This part of the story is going to be a very, very difficult watch when it hits the screen.
I’m going to stop reading at this point, thoroughly depressed and anxious for what’s to come.
I am now 81% of the way through Wizard and Glass.
Day 1189: Apr 3, 2025
The Cast of Ka talks about the beginning of the end for Roland and Susan as they dive into this later chapter of Wizard and Glass.
Day 1190: Apr 4, 2025
Finished off this episode from The Cast of Ka.
Day 1191: Apr 5, 2025
I continue reading Wizard and Glass, picking up in Part Three, Chapter IX, Subsection 12.
The heroes are in a world of hurt right now with Susan captured by Eldred Jonas and gang while Roland’s plans are completely falling apart.
When he was sure they weren’t going to return, Sheemie walked slowly back into the clearing, doing up the button on top of his pants as he came. He looked from the way Roland and his friends had gone to the one in which Susan had been taken.
…
Walking at first, then jogging as his fear that they might double back and catch him dissipated, Sheemie went in the direction Susan had been taken. He would follow her most of that day.
Sheemie to the rescue?
“Sai Renfrew, watch our pretty Sunbeam a minute. I have a piece of property to take back.”
His voice carried well—he had meant that it should—and Rhea’s cackles cut off suddenly, as if severed out of her throat with a hooking-knife.
A final, fatal confrontation between Rhea and Jonas, perhaps, as they fight over the Wizard’s Glass?
“I curse ye all!” she screamed. It cut through them, stilling their laughter even as the cart bounced toward the edge of the trampled clearing. “Every last one of ye! Ye . . . and ye . . . and ye!” Her crooked finger pointed last at Jonas. “Thief! Miserable thief!”
Don’t know why ChatGPT made Rhea three times the size of the pony, but it was close enough to match this paragraph! 🤣
“I curse ye all!” she screamed. It cut through them, stilling their laughter even as the cart bounced toward the edge of the trampled clearing. “Every last one of ye! Ye . . . and ye . . . and ye!” Her crooked finger pointed last at Jonas. “Thief! Miserable thief!”
Don’t know why ChatGPT made Rhea three times the size of the pony, but it was close enough to match this paragraph! 🤣
His eyes moved from Lengyll to Wertner to Croydon to Brian Hookey to Roy Depape. “We’re close to forty men, going to join another hundred and fifty. They’re three, and not one a day over sixteen. Are you afraid of three little boys?”
“No!” they cried.
Famous last words!
That’s all of the reading I planned to do today. I’ll finish up this chapter tomorrow.
I am now 82% of the way through Wizard and Glass.
Day 1192: Apr 6, 2025
Finishing up Part Three, Chapter IX of Wizard and Glass this morning. Roland is still unaware that Susan has been captured. Rhea was forced to give up the Wizard’s grapefruit to Jonas. And Sheemie is trotting through the Bad Grass hoping to help Susan.
Reap Day has arrived.
Her voice was stilled by what she saw: an incredibly old woman crawling through the frost-killed flowerbed next to the house—crawling toward her. The crone’s stringy white hair (what remained of it) hung in her face. Sores festered on her cheeks and brow; her lips had split and drizzled blood down her pointed, warty chin. The corneas of her eyes had gone a filthy gray-yellow, and she panted like a cracked bellows as she moved.
Rhea drops in on Cordelia for tea.
“Would ye pay her back?” Rhea asked. “For that’s why I’ve come to ye.”
“Miss Oh So Young and Pretty,” Cordelia murmured in a barely audible voice. The hand not holding the knife floated up to her face and touched her ash-smeared cheek. “Yes. I’d be repaid of her, so I would.”
It’s so good to see two good, gentle women bonding over a shared interest!
Cordelia unbuttoned her dress down the front, pushing it open to reveal an ungenerous bosom and a middle which had begun to curve out in the last year or so, making a tidy little potbelly. Yet she still had the vestige of a waist, and it was here she used the knife, cutting through her shift and the top layers of flesh beneath. The white cotton began to bloom red at once along the slit.
“Aye,” Rhea whispered. “Like roses. I dream of them often enough, roses in bloom, and what stands black among em at the end of the world. Come closer!” She put her hand on the small of Cordelia’s back, urging her forward. She raised her eyes to Cordelia’s face, then grinned and licked her lips. “Good. Good enough.”
Cordelia looked blankly over the top of the old woman’s head as Rhea of the Cöos buried her face against the red cut in the shift and began to drink.
So Rhea is a vampire too?
The third rider now began to turn. Roland caught a glimpse of a bearded face—a dangling cigarette, unlit because of the wind, one astonished eye—and then Cuthbert’s sling thupped again. The astonished eye was replaced by a red socket. The rider slid from his saddle, groping for the horn and missing it.
Roland, Cuthbert and Alain have stealthily pulled up behind the army of horsemen and have begun picking them off quietly one by one.
Roland saw Jonas, Depape, and Lengyll reining around to face their attackers. Lengyll was clawing at his machine-gun, but the strap had gotten tangled in the wide collar of the duster he wore, and every time he grabbed for the stock, it bobbed out of his reach. Beneath his heavy gray-blond mustache, Lengyll’s mouth was twisted with fury.
I’ve been waiting for this confrontation to occur since the Traveller’s Rest incident!
Roland never hesitated in his headlong gallop, never paused to think; his hands did his thinking for him now, and when he remembered all this later, it was distant and silent and queerly warped, like something seen in a flawed mirror . . . or a wizard’s glass.
Jonas thought: Gods, it’s him! It’s Arthur Eld himself come to take me!
I don’t think I’ve breathed for this entire section. Roland mowing down the Coffin Hunters was epic!
Roland thumbed back the hammer of his revolver and fired. The bullet struck the center of the tattooed hand holding the drawstring cord and vaporized the palm, leaving only fingers that twitched their random way out of a spongy red mass. For just a moment Roland saw the blue coffin, and then it was covered by downspilling blood.
I know Mike Flanagan has this thing about “hands”. I bet he read this passage and said, “Yep – I want to do The Dark Tower!”
Only Alain had been wounded; a bullet had opened his left cheek, a wound that healed clean but left a scar he bore until his dying day.
For some reason, I had assumed that Cuthbert and Alain didn’t survive Reaping Day, but this would indicated clearly otherwise.
He slipped both hands into the bag and lifted the wizard’s glass out. He held it up to his eyes, unaware that he had smeared it with droplets of Jonas’s blood. The ball did not mind; this was not the first time it had been blood-touched. It flashed and swirled formlessly for a moment, and then its pink vapors opened like curtains. Roland saw what was there, and lost himself within it.
On that note, I finish reading. I am now 84% of the way through Wizard and Glass.
Day 1193: Apr 7, 2025
Listened to The Cast of Ka review this section of Wizard and Glass.
Day 1194: Apr 8, 2025
The Kingslingers covered Part 3, Chapters 8 and 9 of Wizard and Glass.
Day 1195: Apr 9, 2025
Finished off this episode from Kingslingers.
Day 1196: Apr 10, 2025
I enter into Chapter X, the final chapter of Part Three of Wizard and Glass. Chaos has broken out with Roland eliminating Eldred Jonas and the rest of the Coffin Hunters. He’s also retrieved the Wizard’s Glass and things are looking up for the young gunslingers.
But there’s this little matter of Susan having been captured and Rhea and Aunt Cordelia having made an unholy alliance.
It was the Cöos, the old witch-woman, and although her face was pocked with sores and her eyes sunk so deep in their sockets they could barely be seen, she gave off a peculiar sense of vitality. Her lips were red, as if she had been eating winterberries.
The woman behind her walked slowly and stiffly, with one hand pressed against her midsection. Her face was as white as the witch-woman’s mouth was red.
Almost forgot Rhea’s vampiric meal at Aunt Cord’s expense.
Take her. Ye must take her. I say it in love and sorrow, so I do.”
Silent. Their eyes.
“Paint her hands.”
The glass gaze of the thing on the wall, looking its stuffed judgment over the waiting room.
“Charyou tree,” Cordelia whispered.
They did not cry their agreement but sighed it, like autumn wind through stripped trees.
What a poetic sentence of death!
A hand gripped Sheemie’s arm just above the elbow. He almost shrieked.
“Don’t!” a woman whispered. “For your father’s sake!”
Sheemie somehow managed to keep the scream in. He turned. And there, wearing jeans and a plain checked ranch-shirt, her hair tied back, her pale face set, her dark eyes blazing, stood the Mayor’s widow.
He was sneaking around the deceased Mayor’s house looking for Susan. But I had forgotten all about Mayor Thorin’s wife!
“Roland.”
He will hear this voice in uneasy dreams for the rest of his life, never quite remembering what he has dreamed, only knowing that the dreams leave him feeling ill somehow—walking restlessly, straightening pictures in loveless rooms, listening to the call to muzzein in alien town squares.
When we last left Roland, he had gazed into the Wizard’s Glass and became lost in it.
Following him, wearing a sombrera and riding a broom festooned with fluttering reap-charms, comes Rhea of the Cöos. “I’ll get you, my pretty!” she screams at the fleeing mule, and then, cackling, she is gone, zooming and brooming.
I somewhat remember The Wizard of Oz bleeding into this series. Is this the first hint of that?
Dead fields and deserted villages roll up out of the gloom; he sees blasted trees that will give no shade—oh, but all is shade here, all is death here, this is the edge of End-World, where some dark day he will come, and all is death here.
“Gunslinger, this is Thunderclap.”
“Thunderclap,” he says.
“Here are the unbreathing; the white faces.”
“The unbreathing. The white faces.”
Yes. He knows that, somehow. This is the place of slaughtered soldiers, the cloven helm, the rusty halberd; from here come the pale warriors. This is Thunderclap, where clocks run backward and the graveyards vomit out their dead.
What imagery the Wizard’s Glass is giving Roland! Can you imagine seeing this adapted by Mike Flanagan?
“Gunslinger, look—look there.”
Yes, there it is, a dusty gray-black pillar rearing on the horizon: the Dark Tower, the place where all Beams, all lines of force, converge. In its spiraling windows he sees fitful electric blue fire and hears the cries of all those pent within; he senses both the strength of the place and the wrongness of it; he can feel how it is spooling error across everything, softening the divisions between the worlds, how its potential for mischief is growing stronger even as disease weakens its truth and coherence, like a body afflicted with cancer; this jutting arm of dark gray stone is the world’s great mystery and last awful riddle.
This is INCREDIBLE!
In the dooryard of the Bar K, it had been Cuthbert who clipped Roland; this time Alain did the honors, administering a hard right to the center of the gunslinger’s forehead. Roland tumbled backward, the ball spilling out of his loosening hands and the terrible pink light leaving his face. Cuthbert caught the boy and Alain caught the ball.
This is where I stop reading for today. Intense! I am now 86% of the way through Wizard and Glass.
Day 1197: Apr 11, 2025
Rhea has riled up the townsfolk of Hambry to send Susan to the charyou tree 🔥. Roland was trapped inside the Wizard’s Glass experiencing a wild LSD trip until Alain clocked him in the head. And I’m continuing with this inevitable tragedy as I continue with Chapter 10 of Part Three of Wizard and Glass.
Cuthbert patted Roland’s face with no result. Alain pushed him aside, knelt, and took the gunslinger’s hands. He had never used the touch this way, but had been told it was possible—that one could reach another’s mind, in at least some cases.
Roland! Roland, wake up! Please! We need you!
Roland has been knocked out by his friends so often, he’s probably got CTE from multiple concussions!
“What did you see?”
“Much,” Roland said. “I saw much, but most of it is already fading out of my mind, the way dreams do when you wake up. What I do remember I’ll tell you as we ride. You must know, because it changes everything. We’re going back to Gilead, but not for long.”
“Where after that?” Alain asked, mounting.
“West. In search of the Dark Tower. If we survive today, that is. Come on. Let’s take those tankers.”
Is this the genesis of Roland’s quest?
As soon as the women heard their footsteps on the stairs at the end of the hall, Olive nodded to Maria and they crossed the room. Maria threw the bolts; Olive pulled the door open. Susan came out at once, looking from one to the other, then smiling tentatively.
An unlikely ally in Olive has helped free Susan. For now.
“Susan’s been taken prisoner,” Roland told the others as they rode west toward Hanging Rock. “That’s the first thing I saw in the glass.”
…
“What?” Alain asked. “Susan taken? How? By whom? Is she all right?”
“Taken by Jonas. He hurt her some, but not too badly. She’ll heal . . . and she’ll live. I’d turn around in a second if I thought her life was in any real danger.”
I groaned mournfully when I read this.
“We are fools of ka,” the gunslinger said. “Ka like a wind, Susan calls it.” He looked first at Cuthbert on his left, then at Alain on his right. “The Tower is our ka; mine especially. But it isn’t hers, nor she mine. No more is John Farson our ka. We’re not going toward his men to defeat him, but only because they’re in our way.” He raised his hands, then dropped them again, as if to say, What more do you need me to tell you?
“There is no Tower, Roland,” Cuthbert said patiently. “I don’t know what you saw in that glass ball, but there is no Tower. Well, as a symbol, I suppose—like Arthur’s Cup, or the Cross of the man-Jesus—but not as a real thing, a real building—”
“Yes,” Roland said. “It’s real.”
This feels like the single most important passage of this book!
Sheemie nodded. When he spoke, he could manage nothing above a whisper. “ ’Twas only ka,” he said. “I know that . . . but I love you, Susan-sai. Go well. I’ll see you soon.”
“I look forward to it.”
But there was no soon, and no later for them, either. Sheemie took one look back as he rode his mule south, and waved. Susan lifted her own hand in return. It was the last Sheemie ever saw of her, and in many ways, that was a blessing.
Nearly every chapter now ends with King’s signature “It was the last time…” trope.
Reynolds started at that and went for his gun. He was fast, but he had given Olive too much of a headstart and was beaten, beaten cold. Even as he cleared leather with the barrel of his revolver, the Mayor’s widow held the old gun out in both hands, and, squinching her eyes shut like a little girl who is forced to eat something nasty, pulled the trigger.
I certainly didn’t expect to see Olive Thorin involved in a gunfight today.
The galloped-out pony that had brought the witch back to Hambry had been replaced by a fresh one, but it was the same black cart, the same golden cabalistic symbols, the same driver. Rhea sat with the reins in her claws, her head ticking from side to side like the head of a rusty old robot, grinning at Susan without humor. Grinning as a corpse grins.
Olive’s gun misfired and she was shot to death. And now Susan’s fate appears sealed.
And on that gloomy note, I finish reading for the day. I am now 88% of the way through Wizard and Glass.
Day 1198: Apr 12, 2025
I take a break from reading Wizard and Glass to tune in to The Cast of Ka who covered the first half of Part Three, Chapter X.
Day 1199: Apr 13, 2025
Finished off this episode from The Cast of Ka.
Day 1200: Apr 14, 2025
I’m finishing off this final chapter of Part Three of Wizard and Glass over the next two days.
I have a feeling I’ll be in a deep depression after this. Susan has been recaptured by Rhea and instead of running to her rescue, Roland thinks she’s fine. Besides, his priorities (thanks to the pink Wizard’s Glass) have completed shifted over to the Dark Tower.
Alain raised the machine-gun, seated its rusty wire stock in the hollow of his shoulder, and remembered what little he knew about rapid-fire weapons: aim low, swing fast and smooth.
A helluva a way to open the reading today! Alain mowing down the horsemen like a scene out of Rambo.
The ease with which the gunslingers had gotten inside the enemy’s perimeter and the confusion which greeted their original charge could have been chalked up to inexperience and exhaustion, but the placing of the tankers had been Latigo’s mistake, and his alone. He had drawn them tight without even thinking about it, and now they blew tight, one after another. Once the conflagration began, there was no chance of stopping it
TV series? I need this on the big screen!
Roland glanced back and was astonished by the size of the black, smoky column rising into the air. Ahead he could clearly see the brush blocking most of the canyon’s mouth. And although the wind was blowing the wrong way, he could now hear the maddening mosquito-whine of the thinny.
Eyebolt Canyon – the final piece of Roland’s plan!
It was time. Roland stuck one of the lucifers between his front teeth and raked it forward. It lit, spilling one hot and sour spark onto the wet bed of his tongue. Before the lucifer’s head could burn away, Roland touched it to the powder in the trench. It lit at once, running left beneath the north end of the brush in a bright yellow thread.
Guiding Latigo and his army right into the thinny!
How infinite was love, twining in and out of hope and memory like a braid with three strong strands, so much the Bright Tower of every human’s life and soul.
What a beautiful line! And I wonder if the “Bright Tower” was part of the lore of the land as much as the “Dark Tower” was.
It was the thinny, and as Roland watched, Cuthbert and Alain began to walk toward it.
“Stop!” he screamed. “For your fathers’ sakes, stop!”
They did not stop. They walked hand-in-hand toward the white-edged hem of the smoky green shimmer. The thinny whined its pleasure, murmured endearments, promised rewards. It baked the nerves numb and picked at the brain.
There was no time to reach them, so Roland did the only thing he could think of: raised one of his guns and fired it over their heads. The report was a hammer-blow in the canyon’s enclosure, and for a moment the ricochet whine was louder than that of the thinny. The two boys stopped only inches from its sick shimmer. Roland kept expecting it to reach out and grab them, as it had grabbed the low-flying bird when they had been here on the night of the Peddler’s Moon.
He triggered two more shots into the air, the reports hitting the walls and rolling back. “Gunslingers!” he cried. “To me! To me!”
Thinking of Cuthbert and Alain almost entering the thinny…
And everywhere, filling the world like lunacy, that whining, whingeing, cringing buzz.
Hendricks’s horse went down, eyes rolling, bit-parted teeth snapping at the smoky air and splattering curds of foam from its lips. Hendricks fell into the steaming stagnant water, and it wasn’t water at all. It came alive, somehow, as he struck it; grew green hands and a green, shifty mouth; pawed his cheek and melted away the flesh, pawed his nose and tore it off, pawed at his eyes and stripped them from their sockets. It pulled Hendricks under, but before it did, Latigo saw his denuded jawbone, a bloody piston to drive his screaming teeth.
The thinny claimed its first victim of Latigo’s army.
Come in, the green shimmer invited, and Latigo found its buzz strangely attractive . . . intimate, almost. Come in and visit, squat and hunker, be at rest, be at peace, be at one.
With that call of the thinny, I end my reading for today.
I am now 90% of the way through Wizard and Glass.
Day 1201: Apr 15, 2025
Today, I finish off Part Three of Wizard and Glass and while everything seems to be going Roland’s way (Jonas & the Coffin Hunters dead, Latigo’s army driven through the thinny) I fear the greatest tragedy in nearly all of King’s works is about to unfold, and unfold quickly.
Orange, gunslinger, a cracked old voice laughed inside his head. The voice of the Cöos. The color of bonfires. Charyou tree, fin de año, these are the old ways of which only the stuffy-guys with their red hands remain . . . until tonight. Tonight the old ways are refreshed, as the old ways must be, from time to time. Charyou tree, you damned babby, charyou tree: tonight you pay for my sweet Ermot. Tonight you pay for all. Come, Reap.
“Climb!” he screamed, reaching up and slapping Alain’s behind. “Climb, climb! For your father’s sake, climb!”
Roland finally realizes that Susan is in mortal danger. King captures his sudden panic perfectly.
Nothing was clear to Susan until she saw the man with the long red hair and the straw hat which did not quite obscure his lamb-slaughterer’s eyes; the man with the cornshucks in his hands. He was the first, just a farmer… standing by himself not far from the place where Silk Ranch Road and the Great Road intersected, standing in the light of the rising moon.
Oh man, I was not prepared for first person POV of someone about to be executed.
With no gods to pray to, Susan prayed to her father.
Da? If thee’s there, help me to be strong as I can be, and help me hold to him, to the memory of him. Help me to hold to myself as well. Not for rescue, not for salvation, but just so as not to give them the satisfaction of seeing my pain and my fear. And him, help him as well…
Goddamn it – this got me teary-eyed!
Roland bent his face over the pulsing ball, its light running over his cheeks and brow like liquid, drowning his eyes in its dazzle.
In Maerlyn’s Rainbow he saw her—Susan, horse-drover’s daughter, lovely girl at the window. He saw her standing in the back of a black cart decorated with gold symbols, the old witch’s cart.
My heart is sinking!
Roland began to shriek. It was a single word, over and over again: No, no, no, no, no, no! The ball’s pink light flashed brighter with each repetition, as if his horror refreshed and strengthened it. And now, with each of those pulses, Cuthbert and Alain could see the shape of the gunslinger’s skull beneath his skin.
Wow!
“Bird and bear and hare and fish,” she murmured as she was first lowered and then slammed against the pyramid of dry wood, put in the place which had been left for her—the whole crowd chanting in unison now, “Charyou TREE! Charyou TREE! Charyou TREE!”
That phrase, “Bird and bear and hare and fish”, was the sweetest thing ever and now it just fills me with sorrow.
The dry wood caught; her pants caught; her shirt caught; her long blonde hair blazed on her head like a crown.
“ROLAND, I LOVE THEE!”
At the end of her life she was aware of heat but not pain.
I’m openly weeping now. It took forever to get here and now it’s gone by far too fast. Somehow, I still wasn’t ready for it.
There was no word, not even no, in his screams at the end: he howled like a gutted animal, his hands welded to the ball, which beat like a runaway heart. He watched in it as she burned.
<No words>
When Roland remained unconscious the following day (Mejis falling behind them now, and both boys feeling a deep tug of homesickness, inexplicable but as real as tides), they sat on either side of him, looking at each other over the slow rise and fall of his chest.
The ka-tet have left town. Will Roland get revenge on Rhea? I have no idea as I remember nothing beyond this point.
Alain couldn’t get Roland’s hands off the ball, and so he laid his own on Roland’s cheeks, touching him that way. Except there was nothing to touch, nothing there. The thing which rode west with them toward Gilead was not Roland, or even a ghost of Roland. Like the moon at the close of its cycle, Roland had gone.
On that somber note, I stop reading for today. I am now 92% of the way through Wizard and Glass.
Day 1202: Apr 16, 2025
The Cast of Ka dwells upon Susan’s final moments.
Day 1203: Apr 17, 2025
Finished off this episode from The Cast of Ka.
Day 1204: Apr 18, 2025
Two Guys to the Dark Tower Came discuss the Reaping that occurred in the final two chapters of Part Three of Wizard and Glass.
Day 1205: Apr 19, 2025
I’m plugging the Kingslingers into my ear holes to hear a discussion of the end of Roland and Susan’s story in Wizard and Glass.
Day 1206: Apr 20, 2025
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Day 1207: Apr 21, 2025
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Day 1208: Apr 22, 2025
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