Returning to the Tower III.B: The Drums

The thing about The Wastelands is that it really does have a driving beat.

From Jake's reentry process through the exit from Lud, the book just keeps pounding away.

I had always thought of this book as the best total book in the series until I read Wind Through the Keyhole, and honestly a second read does affirm this perspective. The final doorway through which Jake is drawn almost offers us the full cinematic description we came achingly close to throughout Drawing of the Three, and the moment is sufficient to warrant our complete and rapt attention.

Jake's birth into Midworld is one of those phenomenal passages of storytelling where we can allow for the writing to be anything more than sufficient, and King's is far more than sufficient. Even if it weren't, none of us can judge, because he did an impossible job.

Gan knows, King's writing there led to inevitable consequences in his later writing, and none of us were happy about those events.

Needless to say, we weren't meant to be happy, because we didn't come for excuses. We keep interrogating the Tower because we aren't content with feeling comfortable if something is truly wrong in the world.

Committing to finishing this journey does mean committing to a horrible series of wretched events. It also means committing to that path because you know it is the only chance to win through.

It means saying, "I would do it again because life matters, because living matters..."

Anyway, about those drums.

I love the drums of Lud.

I love how Eddie is right, but I also love how in the beginning as a musically minded person I think about how Eddie is probably totally wrong, and how common that beat could be. It's particular to be sure, but it certainly isn't entirely unique.

The drums are this great device in the second half of the book. I genuinely dig how King uses auditory elements in this book, and it's an anticipation of how he describes thinnies. He really gets us used to being both aware of and unsettled by big ambient sounds with these drums, and he uses them as a way to give us a view into both different characters and different scenes.

Those drums are some damn fine writing.