“I will show you something different from either/ Your shadow at morning striding behind you/ Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;/ I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”Book III of the Dark Tower was called The Waste Lands, in an obvious homage to T.S. Eliot’s famous poem. A slightly less-obvious in-joke comes in the name of the city through which the ka-tet must quest: Lud, first mentioned, as far as I know, in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain (c. 1130). Geoffrey’s History is the chronicle that brings King Arthur to the masses, and we can’t forget that Roland is descended on the sinister side from Arthur of Eld.