The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla

Damn - only a month and a half left in 2015, and I haven't read a Dark Tower book all year. Until now, of course. To the bullets!

• First things first - this monster was 925 pages long. Stephen King sure knows how to churn out a word count, and, credit to him, his books rarely feel quite as long as they actually are. I'm sure that has to do with his simple sentence structures and penchant for dialogue-driven exposition, but it's nice to be able to describe a 925-page book without calling it a "trek" or a "slog" or something similar, you know?
• My issues with this author and with this series in particular have always been about world building, character development, and self-consistency. By now, most of these criticisms no longer apply; regardless of how poorly I think Jake was pulled into Mid-World, or how badly defined Roland was back in The Gunslinger, we're now several thousand pages into this story, and I've come to terms with the basic premises here. The characters have enough definition, by now, that it's notable when they begin to act differently, for instance.
• There's actually a lot going on at once in this book, which I enjoyed. The previous books in The Dark Tower played out more or less serially in nature. Roland follows the man in black; Roland opens three doors on a beach; the ka-tet must save Jake; the ka-tet must make it to the Dark Tower. And so on. Here, I thought there were three fairly major arcs all playing out at once, which made for a more interesting read.
• Those three arcs? One, referenced in the title, was really more of a side quest; Roland and his crew had to save the children in a town from being kidnapped by "Wolves" and returned "roont" - absent-minded and devoid of all personality and intelligence. This never felt like more than a side quest to me, and I was strangely okay with that. Roland is ostensibly a hero - why not give him a little village to save for a few hundred pages? I mean, maybe this all turned out to be an essential step in making it to the Dark Tower, but if it was, I missed that.
• Secondly, there's an arc in which the ka-tet must travel to 1970s New York - by ingesting some magical muffin-like mushroom things and tripping balls for a while - in order to purchase a vacant lot. In that vacant lot grows a rose in danger of being crushed or otherwise destroyed if someone else purchases the lot. And that rose, it turns out, is the Dark Tower itself. So, yeah - the ka-tet needs to trip balls several times in order to go back to New York City and acquire the means to purchase the lot, or at least prevent the rose from being destroyed.
• Lastly, Susannah's got... issues. She's preggers, but not from Eddie. Remember that demon she had sex with back in The Waste Lands during the Jake-extraction process? No? Well that happened, and now she's got a demon bun in her oven. She also gets her legs back when she's tripping balls in New York, because she's not herself in that scenario, but instead a demon-woman named Mia. Makes sense, right? I mean, she's already got three distinct split personalities - what's a fourth? The book ends on a huge cliffhanger when Susannah, possessed by Mia, sprints through a dark portal of sorts to New York City in order to birth her hellspawn child. It makes perfect sense, then, that the sixth book in the series is all about the quest to find and save her, what with it bearing her name and such.
• Oh yeah, and the ka-tet runs into Father Callahan, who's apparently the main charcater from Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot, a book that had been totally isolated from The Dark Tower to this point in time. Callahan recounts the plot of that book in some detail, then mentions how he became a vampire and how that led to his murder back in his own world; like Jake, upon dying there, he just kind of woke up at the Way Station in Mid-World. It didn't make any sense back in The Gunslinger and it doesn't make much sense now, but at least King is using an established device to get Callahan to Mid-World instead of concocting an entirely new asinine method for doing so.
• One of the coolest moments of the book came at the end, when Callahan finds a copy of 'Salem's Lot and suddenly doubts the reality of his own existence. I mean, wouldn't you? It pulls at this giant multiverse of metafiction that Stephen King is clearly having fun with; so do the existence of light sabers and Harry Potter snitches in Wolves of the Calla. I know that in the next book, Stephen King even makes an appearance as a character. That's going to be groanworthy as hell, I'm sure, but come on - are we not already groaning? I learned to make my peace with this series a while back; don't hope for it to make any sense - just enjoy the ride.

So, yeah. I'm enjoying the ride. At least a little. I doubt I'll jump back into The Dark Tower in 2015 - these are long books, no matter how quickly they read! - but my goal is to finish off the final two installments some time in 2016. Time will tell.