The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla

This and the companion pieces are less reviews than they are a sort of reader's diary of my experiences encountering Stephen King's monumental fantasy/western/science fiction tale The Dark Tower. It's made up of seven books, each of which I read at different times in my life. These are some reflections on the separate volumes, and I will be assuming that the reader has already read them or does not care if what he or she reads spoils the books or their endings. That is, of course, assuming that these little exercises have readers to begin with ;-) 

Again, and I will stress this so that no one may find the experience of learning Roland's story and reading The Dark Tower lessened by knowing what comes next, THERE BE SPOILERS HERE.

You've been alerted.

It would take Stephen King six years to return to Roland, Eddie, Susannah and Jake after they escaped plague-ridden Topeka and Randall Flagg's Emerald City trap. It took me an even dozen.

The sprawling mess of Wizard and Glass simply made me less and less concerned with what King was doing in The Dark Tower. The rest of his work had begun to disappoint as well. His publisher seemed to operate almost like a vanity press, doing a simultaneous release of a Desperation by Stephen King and The Regulators by Richard Bachman, King's long-exposed pen name.  The "unexpurgated" version of The Stand, a re-release of that early King novel including several thousand words cut from the first edition, demonstrated that editors do have value and that more is not always more. Bag of Bones was a wandering trip to -- and through -- nowhere.

Despite occasional bright spots like The Colorado Kid and The Green Mile, I'd lost enough interest to not even care how the whole saga of the Dark Tower ended. I greeted Wolves of the Calla with a shrug and a pass.

It's probably good that I did, because Wolves is good enough I might have given King another chance and inflicted Hearts In Atlantis, Dreamcatcher, From a Buick 8 or Black House on myself.

The quartet of gunslingers and Oy the billy-bumbler continue following the Beam towards the Dark Tower. They travel through some settled country and eventually they encounter people, in the form of a delegation from the town Calla Bryn Sturgis. The folk of this town face a horrible affliction. Once every generation, a group of raiders called Wolves attack the town and carry away one of every pair of twin children. The stolen children return sometime later, with diminished mental capacity and destined to grow into giants who will die very young. Andy, a wandering robot left over from a more technological era, has warned them that the Wolves are coming and will be at Calla Bryn Sturgis in about a month. Their terrible weapons make it impossible to fight them and they always find the children, no matter how well hidden they may be.

Although hundreds of years seem to have passed since Roland's day, the people of the Calla remember gunslingers and approach the group, alerted to their presence in a dream. Roland agrees to listen to their problem and see if he can help, even if it takes time away from his quest for the Tower. Providing such aid is part and parcel of being a gunslinger; he can do nothing else and remain true to himself.

In Calla, Eddie, Jake and Susannah find another traveler from their own world, Father Frank Callahan. Fr. Callahan was last seen in 'Salem's Lot, King's 1975 vampire novel. His shaky faith led him to fall victim to the vampire Barlow and he was forced to drink Barlow's blood, rendering him unclean. Callahan spent years in an alcoholic stupor before drying out and working at a homeless shelter in Manhattan, where he found himself able to see certain kinds of vampires. He began killing them, but this brought him to the attention of other vampires as well as a group of hunters called the Low Men. Callahan stays on the run from the Low Men for many years, sometimes switching between parallel worlds, before being trapped by them and the vampires. Rather than be infected by AIDS-carrying vampires, Callahan kills himself and finds that he has crossed over into Roland's world near Calla Bryn Sturgis. There he resumes his duties as a priest.

Callahan also crossed over with a seeing stone called the Black Thirteen, similar to the Maerlyn's Grapefruit stone Roland found in Wizard and Glass but even more evil. Its presence allows the gunslingers a chance to return to the other world and protect a mystic rose growing in a vacant New York City lot. That rose has some connection to the Tower and if it is destroyed, the consequences could be dire.

Over the course of the month, the quartet grows close to the townspeople. Jake especially, given the chance to be with children like himself, enjoys the time. But as the Wolves' attack grows closer, opposition to Roland's plan intensifies, and Jake learns his friend's father is a traitor working with whomever controls the Wolves themselves. Andy the robot is found to be their ally as well, so the gunslingers must plan ways to defeat him and the treachery they have uncovered.

In a final battle, the gunslingers and some women of Calla Bryn Sturgis, adept at throwing sharp metal discs that look like plates, defeat and utterly destroy the wolves. But Jake's friend dies, killed by the wolves' advanced weapons.

And following the battle, Susannah becomes completely possessed by an alternate personality named Mia. When she coupled with the demon in The Waste Lands, she became pregnant with its child and the supernatural being growing within her causes her to revert to her multiple personality disorder. Mia has been taking Susannah part of the time at night, as first Roland, then Jake and then Eddie and Susannah herself learn. After the battle, Mia slips away and uses the Black Thirteen to open a door to her world. She takes it with her, trapping the others in Roland's world so they cannot follow. Wolves closes with Eddie insisting the remaining gunslingers find a way to get to her and rescue her. Father Callahan will join them.

Wolves puts Roland in the most classic Western setting of the series. King said he drew from The Seven Samurai and Magnificent Seven movies, as well as Sergio Leone's "Man With No Name" westerns. King's gift for storytelling really details the people of the Calla and shows them clinging to the hope Roland represents.

There are some false touches. The Wolves are robots, dressed like Marvel Comics' Doctor Doom. They wield Star Wars-style lightsabers and explosive versions of Harry Potter's sneetches. On the surface these inclusions seem like King being silly, but they may have to do with a possible "narrative behind the narrative" that we'll get to in another post. Quality-wise, Wolves almost reaches the level of The Drawing of the Three. The use of Fr. Callahan reflects the self-indulgence that weighs down most of King's work since the late 1980s, but even though most of his backstory is an extra, it's not a story-killer.

King-o-philes and Tower-heads love it, of course, but since their main complaint is that this immensely long series (somewhere north of 1.3 million words) isn't longer, their judgment can be questioned.

We learn more about Roland than we did in the whole Meijis episode from Wizard, and we begin to see the work done by whoever is behind some of the initial villains Roland and the others encounter, like Flagg. Some of the shadowy plans concerned with the Tower's destruction begin to take shape. Eddie's leadership abilities come to the fore, as Roland realizes he would continue the quest if Roland himself was killed. Jake also begins to develop over the course of the story, rather than being the simple Sidekick the Boy Wonder/Hostage he was in Gunslinger and The Waste Lands.

Wolves of the Calla can give a reader, especially a former Tower-head like myself, a reason to hold out hope for the rest of the series. The pessimistic reader (raises hand) might be pretty sure none of the subsequent volumes will match the heights of Drawing of the Three, but considering the buzzkill of Wizard and Glass, any hope at all is kind of a miracle.