
After purchasing a children's book called Charlie the Choo-Choo at a used book shop, Jake finds a key in a littered vacant lot where grows a single red rose.

Jake, in a schizophrenic panic, abruptly leaves school. Eddie must carve a key that will open the door to New York in 1977. Roland burns Walter's jawbone and the key to his and Jake's dilemma is revealed-but to Eddie Dean, not Roland. Meanwhile, in 1977 New York, Jake Chambers is experiencing exactly the same crippling mental divide, which is causing alarm at his private school, and angering Jake's cocaine abusing father. Roland now reveals to his ka-tet that his mind has become divided by the paradox of having let Jake Chambers die under the mountain after finding him at the Way Station in the desert, and yet also, after having subsequently prevented Jake's earlier death in New York City, having an alternate memory of traveling through the desert and mountains alone. The three gunslingers follow the Path of the Beam inland to Mid-World. After an encounter with a gigantic cyborg bear named Shardik, they discover one of the six mystical Beams that hold the world together. Roland, Susannah, and Eddie have moved east from the shore of the Western Sea, and into the woods of Out-World. The story begins five weeks after the end of The Drawing of the Three. The book was released by Grant in August of 1991, and is the third volume of the Dark Tower series. The Waste Lands is the 29th book published by Stephen King it was his 24th novel, and the 19th novel under his own name.
