The Waste Lands

How it opens

For almost two months Roland has been camped in a forest with Eddie and Susannah Dean, teaching them to shoot, hunt and cure hides while his own body heals. A giant bear gone mad comes crashing through the woods and trees Eddie, until Susannah shoots the spinning dish on its head and it dies. A metal tag names the bear Shardik, a Guardian, and the three follow its backtrail to a portal where one of the Beams begins, a straight path toward the Dark Tower. All the while Roland feels his mind tearing between two memories, one of a boy named Jake and one in which there was no boy, and before they set out along the Beam he hands his last gun and his knife to Eddie.

Who you meet early

• Roland DeschainRoland, the last gunslinger, travels with Eddie and Susannah Dean, the two he drew into his world through doors on the beach, and still searches for the Dark Tower. A lobster-thing took part of his right hand and the great toe of his right foot. His memory of the desert way station is now doubled, with a boy named Jake in one version and no boy in the other.
• Eddie DeanEddie Dean, a young New Yorker who has beaten heroin, is now Susannah's husband and one of the two pupils Roland is teaching to shoot. His older brother, Henry, is dead. He has started whittling again, something he gave up when he was twelve.
• Susannah DeanSusannah Dean, a woman from the New York of the early sixties who gets around in a wheelchair, is Eddie's wife and the better shot of Roland's two pupils. She was once both Odetta Holmes and Detta Walker, and Roland still sometimes sees Detta glinting in her eyes.