A Novel Critique

It’s been a long wait between Wizard and Glass and Wolves of the Calla, and the question on most fans’ minds is this: has the wait been worth it? The fan reaction to King’s last two efforts (the mediocre Dreamcatcher and the simply terrific From a Buick 8) had been lackluster, and his last jaunt into Dark Tower territory (the King and Straub collaboration Black House) was a difficult – if ultimately rewarding – read for many fans. Readers, both Constant and otherwise, had begun to wonder if King really had the stuff to pull off the final three volumes of his magnum opus. Well? Does he?

Good God, yes.

After a final “Argument” (the word King uses to head the foreword, recapping all that has gone before), King transports us to a small town on the very edge of Mid-World known as Calla Bryn Sturgis. There, we learn the horrible plight of its folken: every twenty-three years or so, harriers known as Wolves ride in from the foreboding land of Thunderclap ... to steal the townsfolk’s children. Not just any children, though. See, for generations untold, the women of the Calla have given birth to twins, far more than to singletons, and it is one of each pair that the Wolves come to collect. Eventually, the children are sent back on a train from Thunderclap ... but they are changed; roont. They return to the Calla as idiot hulks, painful reminders of the bright children they once were.

A simple farmer known as Tian Jaffords, whose own sister was taken and returned by the Wolves years ago, decides that the town must take a stand. He’s not alone in this stance, either: many of the townsfolk, including a priest known as The Old Fella, are on his side. If only they had help.

Into the story now comes our old friends, the ka-tet of Roland Deschain, Eddie and Susannah Dean, Jake Chambers, and little Oy, the billy-bumbler. Roughly two months have passed since the ordeal at the Emerald Castle in Wizard & Glass, and those months have brought change. Jake, fast approaching adulthood, is becoming as natural a gunslinger as Eddie and Susannah had been. Susannah is changing, too, and not for the better: it seems the nasty business of Odetta Holmes/Detta Walker is not so much history, after all. A fourth personality, a woman named Mia, has begun asserting herself ... and Mia is hungry. Not for her, necessarily, but for the chap growing inside her belly. And there’s this strange business with the number nineteen: a simple catchphrase that seemed to pop out of nowhere has begun popping up everywhere. Coincidence? Maybe. But as Susannah suggests early on, “Coincidence has been cancelled, honey.” As we delve further into the layered mysteries of Wolves of the Calla, we begin to find out how eerily prescient that is.

When our ka-tet meets up with the people of Calla Bryn Sturgis, the story kicks into high gear. One member of the welcome wagon, the man the Calla folken know as The Old Fella, is none other than Father Donald Callahan, last seen years ago escaping the vampire-ridden town of ’Salem’s Lot. The alcohol-soaked tale of his travels from Maine to Calla Bryn Sturgis is captivating, demanding a large portion of the book but never losing the reader. Callahan’s importance in the novel – nay, in the epic – is perhaps not clear at first ... not until the final pages, when we begin to realize just how huge King’s undertaking is.

The plot of Wolves is dual: the steadily marching threat of the Wolves out of Thunderclap ... and the larger, more insistent threat to that lone rose in New York City. This flower (Tower?) Jake first glimpsed in The Waste Lands is seen again, felt again, here, and by more of the ka-tet. The journeys to other, perhaps parallel worlds are as frequent as they were in The Drawing of the Three, but not necessarily the same. A new form of traveling known as todash is discussed for the first time, a way of existing in a parallel world without physically appearing. Roland, Eddie, Susannah, Jake, and Oy travel todash in their dreams; it is while in this state that they learn that the terrible danger to the rose more imminent than any had guessed, and that certain stories explored in the previous parts of the Dark Tower series are far from over.

King wrote in his Afterword to Wizard & Glass that “...Roland’s world (or worlds) actually contains all the other of my making.” It is not until Wolves of the Calla that we begin to glean how true that statement is. Constant Readers who have followed King’s work for any length of time will start to see that everything has served the Beam. Those lost-pet posters from Hearts in Atlantis crop up here. The notion of flipping, explored first in The Talisman, is discussed here at length. The real-life phenomenon of the Richard Bachman pseudonym gets a mention, one which will almost certainly seem more important down the line. I wonder if it’s coincidence that the intervals between the Wolves’ arrival coincide with the coming of It, from It. And why does one of Eddie’s throwaway comments so exactly reflect a certain scene in King’s Misery?

At one point in the novel, Eddie comments to Roland that the quest for the Dark Tower has had eerie similarities to stories from our world. The Wizard of Oz connections in Wizard and Glass seemed a bit too obvious when that book first arrived. Now we wonder. Does the fact that Wolves of the Calla is a near-perfect replica of the events of Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai (later adapted as a Western known as The Magnificent Seven, directed by none other than John Sturges) mean that these fiction-allusions are increasingly important? What about the fonts used in the part-headers being the same as those used in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels? And, for the money, why does a certain Stephen King novel pop up in physical form on the last page of Wolves, and what the hell does it mean?

These questions remain unanswered, and I’m glad. Wolves of the Calla is, to my mind, the perfect Dark Tower experience, perhaps the best in the series. The very “Western” feel of The Gunslinger; the cross-world travel of The Drawing of the Three; the action of The Waste Lands; tales of the past and the literary allusions of Wizard & Glass: all these are on display in Wolves of the Calla. And that’s in addition to Mia and her pregnancy, the mystery of nineteen, the dark secret buried in Father Callahan’s church, a treachery, a deception, the deal with the plates, and, of course, the apocalyptic battle with the Wolves of the Calla. As this series grows longer, King’s understanding of its truth grows deeper, as does my appreciation for it. Wolves of the Calla is a perfect novel. Say thankya, Stephen King. Big-big.