Stephen King - Wolves of the Calla (The Dark Tower, Book 5)

Wolves of the Calla is the fifth volume of a longer tale inspired by Robert Brownings narrative poem Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came. The sixth, Song of Susannah, will be published in 2004. The seventh and last, The Dark Tower, will be published later that same year.

The first volume, The Gunslinger, tells how Roland Deschain of Gilead pursues and at last catches Walter, the man in blackhe who pretended friendship with Rolands father but actually served the Crimson King in far-off End-World. Catching the half-human Walter is for Roland a step on the way to the Dark Tower, where he hopes the quickening destruction of Mid-World and the slow death of the Beams may be halted or even reversed. The subtitle of this novel is RESUMPTION.

The Dark Tower is Rolands obsession, his grail, his only reason for living when we meet him. We learn of how Marten tried, when Roland was yet a boy, to see him sent west in disgrace, swept from the board of the great game. Roland, however, lays Martens plans at nines, mostly due to his choice of weapon in his manhood test.

Steven Deschain, Rolands father, sends his son and two friends (Cuthbert Allgood and Alain Johns) to the seacoast barony of Mejis, mostly to place the boy beyond Walters reach. There Roland meets and falls in love with Susan Delgado, who has fallen afoul of a witch. Rhea of the Cos is jealous of the girls beauty, and particularly dangerous because she has obtained one of the great glass balls known as the Bends o the Rainbowor the Wizards Glasses. There are thirteen of these in all, the most powerful and dangerous being Black Thirteen. Roland and his friends have many adventures in Mejis, and although they escape with their lives (and the pink Bend o the Rainbow), Susan Delgado, the lovely girl at the window, is burned at the stake. This tale is told in the fourth volume, Wizard and Glass . The subtitle of this novel is REGARD.

In the course of the tales of the Tower we discover that the gunslingers world is related to our own in fundamental and terrible ways. The first of these links is revealed when Jake, a boy from the New York of 1977, meets Roland at a desert way station long years after the death of Susan Delgado. There are doors between Rolands world and our own, and one of them is death. Jake finds himself in this desert way station after being pushed into Forty-third Street and run over by a car. The cars driver was a man named Enrico Balazar. The pusher was a criminal sociopath named Jack Mort, Walters representative on the New York level of the Dark Tower.

Before Jake and Roland reach Walter, Jake dies againthis time because the gunslinger, faced with an agonizing choice between this symbolic son and the Dark Tower, chooses the Tower. Jakes last words before plunging into the abyss are Go, thenthere are other worlds than these.

The final confrontation between Roland and Walter occurs near the Western Sea. In a long night of palaver, the man in black tells Rolands future with a Tarot deck of strange device. Three cardsthe Prisoner, the Lady of Shadows, and Death (but not for you, gunslinger)are especially called to Rolands attention.

The Drawing of the Three, subtitled RENEWAL, begins on the shore of the Western Sea not long after Roland awakens from his confrontation with Walter. The exhausted gunslinger is attacked by a horde of carnivorous lobstrosities, and before he can escape, he has lost two fingers of his right hand and has been seriously infected. Roland resumes his trek along the shore of the Western Sea, although he is sick and possibly dying.

On his walk he encounters three doors standing freely on the beach. These open into New York at three different whens . From 1987, Roland draws Eddie Dean, a prisoner of heroin. From 1964, he draws Odetta Susannah Holmes, a woman who lost her legs when a sociopath named Jack Mort pushed her in front of a subway train. She is the Lady of Shadows, with a violent other hidden in her brain. This hidden woman, the violent and crafty Detta Walker, is determined to kill both Roland and Eddie when the gunslinger draws her into Mid-World.

Roland thinks that perhaps he has drawn three in just Eddie and Odetta, since Odetta is really two personalities, yet when Odetta and Detta merge as one into Susannah (largely thanks to Eddie Deans love and courage), the gunslinger knows its not so. He knows something else, as well: he is being tormented by thoughts of Jake, the boy who spoke of other worlds at the time of his death.