n   “It was the possibility of darkness that made the day seem so bright.”n

And here we have yet another Great American Novel from Stephen King. Yes, I do realize that *technically* Mid-World of the Dark Tower world is not America, *technically*, but it’s blatantly obvious that’s it the Wild West and the Great American Frontier, not to mention the side venture to 1970s New York (gangs and addiction as a side dish there) and a grim road trip through the 1970s-1980s America (or a few versions of it, anyway) that should be any college literature professors darling.

n “No one ever does live happily ever after, but we leave the children to find that out for themselves.”

In Wolves of the Calla, one of my favorite Dark Tower series books (behind The Waste Lands, on par with The Drawing of the Three) King does exactly what he excels at — the life of the regular small-town folk, not inherently good or bad but with admirable and abhorrent side by side, like in all of us. King is a master of the setting here - small places with ensemble cast that makes you care about people who seem real even if not universally likable (think ’Salem’s Lot or It or Needful Things or 11/22/63).

n   “Coincidence has been cancelled, honey,” Susannah said. “What we’re living in these days is more like the Charles Dickens version of reality.”n

This book goes deep into Stephen King multiverse, with the presence of not just Father Callahan but also the actual books of actual Stephen King in this interconnected web of worlds. Everything serves the wheel of destiny, that blasted “ka” that grinds everyone under its dreaded weight.

I’m not a fan of the idea of anything predestined, anything that turns others into little but marionettes, but I’ll give Sai King a pass here, as long as I can make the “ka=kaka” joke as often as I want.

n “At first everything went according to plan and they called it ka. When things began going wrong and the dying started, they called that ka, too. Ka, the gunslinger could have told them, was often the last thing you had to rise above.”


“For the Ka-Tet of Nineteen (or of the Ninety and Nine; Jake had an idea they were really the same), things were tightening up even as the world around them grew old, grew loose, shut down, shed pieces of itself.” n

It’s a very King-esque mishmash of fantasy and science fiction, pop culture references and small-town saga with a bonus of a spaghetti western (as far as I recall, it was Clint Eastwood who inspired the idea of Roland Deschain). Sandalwood guns and ranchers and robots and lightsabers and glimpses of ruined technological civilizations from millennia past, the “beg your pardon” and “thankee sai” and New York jokes — you’ve got it all, although the slow measured tension in a frontier town predominates. And this intricate, complex mishmash is addictive, I gotta say — and King knows it, too:

n  “In our world you got your mystery and suspense stories ... your science fiction stories ... your Westerns … your fairy tales. Get it?”
“Yes,” Roland said. “Do people in your world always want only one story-flavor at a time? Only one taste in their mouths?”
“I guess that’s close enough,” Susannah said.
“Does no one eat stew?” Roland asked.n

King is great at buildup and setting the scene, and here in Calla he is still working on it, still maddeningly far from the conclusion of Roland’s arduous journey to the Tower. And I love it. I’m not sure I’m a big fan of where it all leads in the end (although I dare you to come up with a better conclusion to this series than King ultimately does, and maybe the reread will make me love the resolution more) but I’m here for all of it.

4.5 stars (taking off a half-star for that endless Callahan flashback).

———
Buddy read with Fiona.

——————
Also posted on my blog.

Din momentul când am terminat cartea Salem's Lot am avut o dorința să citesc mai mult despre Părintele Callahan. În această carte am avut ocazia. I really love the book.

The final three books in the Dark Tower saga are among Stephen King's most divisive works. Written in the years immediately after getting run over on an afternoon walk, the three novels in question— Wolves of the Calla, Song of Susannah, and The Dark Tower — show King entering and settling into an existentialism period in his writing, which makes perfect sense. The guy was well into his 50s when he came face-to-face with death. That would make anyone think. His ruminations on life and death form a thread that runs through almost all of his 21st century output, making it a bit more nuanced and contemplative than his earlier work. This began with From A Buick 8 and a few stories in Everything's Eventual, but nowhere is it more apparent than in this story, the fifth entry in the Dark Tower cycle. While Wolves of the Calla is about the Ka-tet — Roland, Susannah, Eddie, Jake, and Oy — coming to the rescue of the folken of Calla Bryn Sturgis, on a subtextual level this story is all about saving Stephen King. The Tower is falling, and its creator is in grave danger.

Needless to say, this story is very meta. The previous books in this series contain casual references to and appearances of characters from other King stories, but this book plunges the reader right into Stephen King's — and our — own universe, making King a very important player here and in the two novels to follow. He is the characters' creator, and seeing them coming to grips with that is uncomfortable and intriguing. It makes perfect sense — after all, this is a series about not just one universe but all the universes — and I love King's decision to insert himself into the story. It's bloody genius. Some fans don't like it . . . some even hate it, claiming the three final novels of this series fall apart because of this artistic choice. I get it; it's a valid complaint. I love it, though. This book was written by a very different man than the one who wrote Wizard and Glass, which must be kept in mind. The writer of Wizard and Glass would not have put himself in the fiction, methinks . . . But the writer of Wolves certainly did.

So . . . The question bears asking: would Wolves of the Calla have existed if King hadn't been involved in his accident? Maybe. Possibly. It's almost impossible to know for sure. I lean toward no; I think the Path of the Beam went eschew on June 19th, 1999, and the Dark Tower became something else altogether. King's accident is in almost every page of the text, and it will bear an even heavier weight on the two books to follow.

I am not really sure where I'm going with all of this, and perhaps it's coming off as the incoherent ramblings of a rabid fanboy. If so, I'm sending my sincerest apologies through my computer screen right now. There is so much I could and would like to say, but I will muzzle myself right now. I'll try to land this plane with a few more quick thoughts, and then I'll be out of your hair.

I know this book is challenging for many, but it might just be my favorite Dark Tower novel. It's certainly in close contention with The Waste Lands for that position, and I think Father Callahan's gorgeous tale of his post-'Salem's Lot travels might just give WOTC the edge. This is a long, long story — a story that isn't exactly inviting, either, but once the reader works his or her way into it the treasures to be mined are endless and breathtaking. King takes his time with the set-up here, and everyone has a story to tell, but I wouldn't cut a single page. I simply love everything about it — the sublime descriptions of the Calla and the folken who live there, the evolution (and, in some ways, devolution) of the relationship between those in the Ka-tet, friggin' Donald Callahan (!!!!), the todash scenes, the battle against the wolves themselves. . . . It's all wonderful, and I could not utter a single grievance if I tried. This book is an extraordinary tale all its own, while masterfully setting up the final act of King's magnum opus.

This book helped bring me out of one of my too-frequent reader's blocks. I'm giving it five Oritza plates.

I finally finished this!!

The 2011 re-read:
Roland and his ka-tet of gunslingers ride into Calla Bryn Sturgis, a town with a problem. Once every generation, a gang of marauders called The Wolves ride out of Thunderclap and steal half of the town's children. The ones that return come back roont, or brain-damaged. Can Roland and the others stop the Wolves before Susan gives birth to the demon in her womb?

It was a long wait between Wizard and Glass and Wolves of the Calla. Was it worth it? Well, does a horse piss where it pleases?

The main story of Wolves of the Calla is right out of The Magnificent Seven or Seven Samurai. The gunslingers ride into town, prepare the town, and settle the bad guys' hash. The secondary stories, of which there are several, are what make the book. You've got Father Callahan from Jake, Eddie, and Susannah's world and his fearsome burden, Black Thirteen. You've got someone in town helping the Wolves. You've got Roland and his arthritis. You've got Calvin Tower and the vacant lot containing the Rose. And most of all, you have Susannah's disturbing pregnancy.

The gang going todash was one of the more interesting parts of the book and something I'd forgotten about in the years since I read this book the first time. I devoured the book in a day and a half when it first came out so I must not have savored it. There were so many wrinkles to the story that I'd forgotten.

I love how the Man in Black doubled back and met Callahan at the Way Station while Roland and Jake were on in trail in The Gunslinger. In the revised edition of The Gunslinger, Roland contemplates putting his quest on hold for a few years and training Jake so he'd have another Gunslinger with him. Would they have met Callahan if they'd let the Man in Black get away? Tantalizing...

People say that the long flashback in Wizard and Glass fleshed out Roland's personality. I'd say watching Roland interact with the people of Calla Bryn Sturgis in this book went a lot farther in showing what kind of man Roland was before the world moved on.

I can't really say much more for fear of giving too many things away to people who have never read it. If you like the Dark Tower, this one is probably in the top three books of the series.

The 2019 re-read:
I've been meaning to re-read books 5-7 of the Dark Tower for a few years now. When my wife and I found out we were having a chap, I put it on my 2019 reading goals and here we are. My original intention was to read all three before little Miles tears my wife's loins in two but I'm not sure how motivated I am to do that.

The story itself, the ka-tet defending a village from mysterious raiders who steal one of each pair of twins in the village every generation or so, is as compelling now as when I read it hot off the presses. As with the 2011 reread, I'd forgotten quite a bit about this book.

It's probably because this is my third go-round but the things that irk me are a lot more apparent than in previous reads. This book could easily be at least 100 pages shorter. Wolves of the Calla suffers from a case of King Bloat in the middle. There's so much talking when the ka-tet could be going to New York to save the Rose! "I know time flows one and a half times as fast on the New York side of things and Balazar's goons are putting the squeeze on Calvin Tower but let's stay up all night and listen to Pere Callahan's story some more." The Calla-speak gets really painful after a while.

Now that the gripes are out of the way, I still dug this book and The Dark Tower as a whole. The todash concept is great and Stephen King knows how to ratchet up the suspense when he needs to. Parts of it were still surprising, even though I've trod this path twice before. The final battle with the Wolves was some tense shit, even though I knew the ka-tet would survive, I couldn't remember which of the townsfolk died.

While a bit of the shine has worn off this penny, I still enjoyed Wolves of the Call quite a bit. 4 out of 5 stars.

n  

«Primero vienen las sonrisas. Luego las mentiras. Finalmente las balas».

nNo me gustó tanto como los restantes de la saga; aun así sigue siendo bueno, solo que los otros de la serie son una maravilla y este es más pausado y, en mi opinión, bastante insustancial (excepto sus últimas páginas). Para mí es más largo de lo que debería ser, lo que provocó que en varias partes se me haya hecho pesado e inapetente.

Escribí demasiado sobre lo malo que es este tomo pero tiene mis tres estrellas: esta parte de la historia tiene una atmósfera de misterio que me cautivó desde su primera carilla; también un ritmo, aunque lento, absorbente. Otro ingrediente que me gustó mucho es la estructura del relato: un pueblo entre los vericuetos de bosques y montañas, con gentes pasivas que se dejan hacer daño por un miedo a un daño mayor, y, para cambiar esa convención, llega el Ka-tet con ideas de resistencia y contraataque que desataran diversas opiniones y conflictos.

Creo que todos hemos nacido con un agujero en el corazón y que vamos por ahí buscando a la persona que pueda llenarlo.

Les recomiendo tener leído Salem's Lot antes de abordar esta novela, ya que, les puedo asegurar, lo van a disfrutar mucho más que yo en ese caso (yo no lo había leído).

A love slog relationship.

Look I have buy-in with this series. It's frankly totally nuts, unpredictable and with great characters and I'm totally enjoying the journey. But I'm not going to sit here and tell you Wolves of the Calla is a good book. Because it's really not. It's a huge slog and an enormous pit stop in the over arching story of the Dark Tower. Not only that, but it's mostly boring and goes into unnecessary character flash backs (yeah I'm looking at Callahan the Priest). I never read Salem's Lot but I'm pretty sure I still wouldn't care about Callahan's back story even if I did.

But did I like this book? Yes. And it's because I have buy-in with the prior books and I love the main characters. The mystery and multiverse stuff and the lore of Mid-World and the Tower are really compelling and is what keeps me going in the series. This book, unfortunately, was just too long without enough plot and it was a pain to get through. But I will still be reading on and intend on finishing the series.

Con la saga de La Torre Oscura he aprendido que es más importante el camino que el destino. El anterior libro fue un enorme flashback de los orígenes de Roland y en esta quinta entrega supone otro alto en el camino hacia la Torre para que los protagonistas se conviertan en una especie de Clint Eastwood en una película de Sergio Leone y tengan que proteger a los habitantes de un pueblo del ataque de los Lobos del Calla. Es una historia al más puro estilo western.

¿Por qué le pongo 3 estrellas? Si se hubiera centrado solamente en esta especie de historia a Los siete samuráis le hubiera dado las 5 estrellas, pero esta trama supone una pequeña parte de todo el libro y los protagonistas se embarcan en viajes a universos paralelos donde vemos aparecer elementos meta literarios: referencias a otras novelas y personajes de Stephen King aparecen aquí. Quien haya leído su novela Salem's Lot verá aparecer aquí un personaje importante que cuenta su historia y cómo acabó en el mundo de Roland. Como me leí no hace mucho Salem's Lot y todo el tema de los vampiros no me gusta se me ha hecho muy cuesta arriba que gran parte de la trama esté centrado en ese tema.

Entiendo que es problema mío y no quiero que quien lea esto se desanime a continuar la saga. Sigue igualmente genial escrita por King y los nuevos personajes son tan creíbles como los anteriores. Es una historia escrita por un maestro, solo que no me esperaba este nuevo alto en el camino y me ha costado. Pero aún así, con ese final solo consigue que busque la siguiente parte para saber qué les ocurre a Rolan y su Ka-Tet.

Oh wow! I looked down before starting this review and saw that I started this book way back in November. That's what happens when you read a book that is over 700 pages during the holidays...it takes a while. Giving this next installment of the Dark Tower series a 4. I'll break it down of course below.

Let's quickly re-cap. Roland Dechain of Gilead is a Gunslinger. A Gunslinger is a kind of knight that helps when needed. He fights the powerful to help the weak. He is also obsessed with the Dark Tower. Everyone knows what this dark tower is but only through stories. The Dark Tower is the center of creation in Roland's world. Our world, EARTH is connected to Roland's by beams. You can follow these beams by crossing through magical free standing doors, going To-Dash, or using a crystal ball from ... Walter's Rainbow? I can never remember the way it goes. These doors/beams take you to other worlds. These worlds are from different where's and when's of EARTH.

In book 1: The Gunslinger, Roland is following the man in black for revenge and to seek the Dark Tower. While he is traveling west he comes across a way-station with a boy inside. This boy Jake Chambers has no idea how he got there only that he thinks he is dead. Roland takes the kid with him to find the Man in Black.

book 2: Drawing of the Three, Roland finds himself on a beach with Lobstrocities all around him. Man eating Giant Lobsters. They take his first 3 fingers on his right hand. Roland barely escapes and heads for the first free standing door. Through there he "meets" Eddie his first companion in his Ka-tet. Eddie Dean from New York, is a heroine junkie from Brooklyn and is also working for the mob as a drug mule. The next door hails Odetta Holmes/Detta Walker a black woman in her mid- twenties, she is also missing her legs and uses a wheel chair. The third door holds a mystery. Is the person Roland finds, Jack Mort, really supposed to be apart of his Ka-tet? No... that door holds the answer to the two women living in the same body. The real third door comes later.

book 3: The Wastelands, Roland and his two companions have come to a rocky standstill. They have decided that they will work together. Eddie is no longer fixated on his next high and Odetta/Detta is now called Susanna. Roland is teaching these two how to survive in his world and making them into Gunslingers. Jake from book 1 makes a reappearance in this book. He is the real third person that was supposed to be pulled from the door. The ka-tet continue on their journey toward the Dark Tower and come to find themselves in a great rundown city. A lot happens during this part of the book and we almost lose some. The villain is a train. This was my favorite book so far.

book 4: Wizard and Glass. The ka-tet are much more together now. They are all considered by Roland, Gunslingers and they have learned everything he can teach. Wizard and Glass is 10% Roland and his gang traveling and 90% of Roland's back story...how he became a Gunslinger and how and when the world started to move on. It also talks about Susan Delgado, Roland's one and only love.

book 5: Wolves of the Calla is what this review is really about. Roland and his ka-tet have past the Glass Castle in the middle of a different where and when of EARTH (Mid-World) and are continuing on the beam toward the Dark Tower. They feel like things are actually going better and they are looking ahead to the next obstacle. It doesn't take long. There is a band of followers close at their heels. It's Father Callahan from the Calla and he has come with a few other people from the town to ask the Gunslingers for help. In Calla Bryn Sturgis, every 25 years or just abouts, Wolves come from Thunderclap and steal their babies. Those that are born a twin. One twin is taken and the other is left alone. When the stolen kids come back they are not what or who they used to be. Their minds are stolen. These poor kids come back altered. They continue to age after they return, but its for the worse. They grow giant and they never really learn or speak again. They all die a horrible and painful death. Roland is his band decide to see if they can help these people fight off the Wolves. In doing so they learn more about the beam, the Dark Tower and the how everything is connected. Father Callahan is also from Eddie, Jake and Susanna's world and we learn all about that too. If you have read Salem's Lot you will already know who Father Callahan is and it was a wonderful surprise to find him here in this book. The ending is left on a cliffhanger. I love the continued growth among the characters with themselves and between each other. I don't know how I feel about Callahan. He seems a little shady and untrustworthy. Hopefully that is not the case, if he is still around in book 6. Definitely can not praise the book series enough. It is so detailed and interwoven, I'm always impressed how King does it. Song of Susannah here I come.

And one day I just woke up
And the wolves were all there
Wolves in the piano
Wolves underneath the stairs
Wolves inside the hinges
Circling round my door
At night inside the bedsprings
Clicking cross the floor
I still don’t know how they found me
I’ll never know quite how
I still can’t believe they heard me
I was howling out that loud
- Josh Ritter, great American singer/songwriter

This book works fine as. John Wayne western featuring twin-separating wolves. It was nice to catch up with ol’ Father Callahan, too, although too much of the book was dedicated to his story. The beginning and the end of the book were my favorite parts, but it felt really jumbled and too wordy in the middle. Sometimes it felt like Salem’s Lot 2 was sandwiched between Wolves of the Calla. There’s some goofy robot named sandy, too. It was nice to be back on the path to the Tower, and the story progresses just fine. I’m enjoying the weird turn this series is taking. Each book gets progressively weirder so I’m, you know, excited to finish this thing. I’m not jumping yo and down and chomping at the bit in excitement, but I’m looking forward to pressing on to the next book. I’m also not chomping at the bit because I’m not at horse. Maybe I’m jumping up and down though. Maybe I am right now as I’m typing this out on my phone. You’ll never know, will you?

These days I’m reading too many books at once and writing less reviews. I need to flip that and read less books at once and write more reviews. I’m gotta did myself out of this fantasy series pit I’ve found myself stuck in lately. I’m mixing in some other stuff, too. I’ll keep doing that. Maybe I will. You’ll never know, will you?

"First comes smiles, then the lies. Last comes gunfire."

It's sort of hard to be objective when a book sucks you in as hard as this one sucked me in. It's not often anymore that I actually lose myself in a book—just straight up forget about my own existence, and become completely absorbed in a fictional one—but this one totally did that. It gave me the same feeling as The Drawing of Three, which is probably still my favorite in the series so far, though this one comes close.

Roland and his ka-tet are once again back on the Path of the Beam, but along the way, their gunslinger duties come calling. Calla Bryn Sturgis is a small town on the Crescent, the last inhabitable land before the Thunderclap, and the end of End-World. For generations, folk in the Calla have been preyed upon by Wolves, wolves who come once in a generation and steal children for their own nefarious ends. But it's creepier than that, because most pregnancies in the Calla result in the birth of twins (singles are as rare as twins in our world). And when the Wolves come, they only take one twin, leaving the second behind (presumably to carry on breeding and providing them with more babies to steal).

I was a bit wary of this book going in because Westerns aren't normally my thing, and didn't we just do the whole riding into a small town and rescuing them thing in Wizard and Glass? Except most of this book is not actually the ka-tet vs. the Wolves. This book is prep and character work, and characters telling each other stories and divulging/discovering secrets, not to mention worldhopping and world-deepening, which is definitely my thing. This book more than any of the others so far shows you who a gunslinger is and what a gunslinger does. Roland is still THE gunslinger, but Eddie, Susannah and Jake are fully gunslingers now as well, no longer apprentices. It was so fun to see them doing their work and doing it well. (Oy the billybumbler continues to be an adorable, furry angel.)

I also found myself really liking the Calla. One of the reasons I don't very much like westerns is that there is often a tendency to rely on stereotypes to do the atmosphere work for you. But King actually does the work here, makes specific characters, specific culture, for these people to live in, and it made it feel real. (The lingo also did not annoy me at all, which was incredibly surprising. instead, I found myself wanting to start using it IRL. I did say "yer-bugger" the other day in the presence of a non-Stephen King reading friend, and she had absolutely zero reaction, so my experiment so far has been useless.) I think part of why I'm digging this series so much is that it isn't just one thing, but many. I often find myself wondering, like Roland does in this book, why we box our stories into categories and limit ourselves to "just one flavor" at a time.

The only thing keeping this from being five full stars instead of 4.5 is the Susannah pregnancy storyline, which I will wait to see the outcome of before I decide how I feel about how it was handled here.

All in all, I am way into what is happening with this series right now. Can't wait to dig into the last two books.

[4.5 stars, rounded up]

13/2 - I loved how meta this whole book was - references to Harry Potter, King himself, 'Salem's Lot (don't read this till you've read that or you'll be totally spoiled), and Star Wars abound. One of my favourite literary devices is when a character breaks the fourth wall or there are references to our 'world' in the story (one of the only lines I know off the top of my head from the TV show Charmed is from a scene where the sisters are in a mausoleum and Piper quips "Where's Buffy when you need her?") and King does that a lot in this book.

I liked how Jake is starting to grow up and has more responsibility within the group - getting his own mission that only he could have completed and the information he gathered was vital to the overall mission of saving the town. I was a bit annoyed by what happened with Susannah because it feels like she just can't catch a break and I thought we were done with that kind of plot with the merging of Detta and Odetta at the end of The Drawing of the Three. I'm interested to see where the plot goes in Song of Susannah. I was surprised by the ending, I thought it was going to be a lot more bloody than it was. I thought there might be a main character death, or at least a serious maiming, plus a whole pile of the townspeople - it was much more triumphant than I ever expected (I figured they would win, but I thought it would be a very bittersweet victory for everyone involved). I was saddened by the fact that the ka-tet were hiding things from each other and thought Roland would (should) make more of an effort to bring everyone back together once he realised what was happening and the possible consequences of there being distance between the group (the whole 'leave it up to ka' always irritates me the same as 'it's in God's hands' does in real life). Once again Oy was a star who didn't get enough screen time. I don't know what the plot of The Song of Susannah is, except guessing that it's got a lot to do with Susannah, but I really want Oy to have a more central role, to really do something like he did in The Wastelands (except, of course, he's not allowed to die). Can't wait to get started on The Song of Susannah as soon as I finish my current series, Foundation by Isaac Asimov.