Wolves of the Calla
1997
- lightsabers
- snitches
- androids
- action and adventure fiction
- adventure fiction
- epic fiction
- fiction
- heroes
- good and evil
- fantasy fiction
The story
[The Dark Tower][1] V After escaping the perilous wreckage of Blaine the insane Mono and eluding the evil clutches of the vindictive sorcerer Randall Flagg, Roland and his ka-tet find themselves back on the southeasterly path of the Beam. Here, in the borderlands that lie between Mid-World and End-World, Roland and his friends are approached by a frightened band of representatives from the nearby town of Calla Bryn Sturgis. In less than a month, the Calla will be attacked by the Wolves--those masked riders that gallop out of Thunderclap once a generation to steal the town's children. The Calla folken need the kind of help that only gunslingers can give, and if the tet agrees to help, the town's priest--Father Callahan, once of 'Salem's Lot, Maine--promises to give them Black Thirteen, the most potent and treacherous of Maerlyn's magic balls. He used it to enter Mid-World, and now it sleeps fitfully beneath the floorboards of his church. Meanwhile, in the New York of 1977, the Sombra Corporation plots to destroy the lot at Second Avenue and Forty-Sixth Street. How can Roland and his friends both save the rose and fight the Wolves? Only by using the magic of Black Thirteen, but how can anyone trust this sinister and treacherous object which is, in actuality, the eye of the Crimson King himself? Time is running out on all levels of the Tower, but unless our ka-tet can defeat the minions of Thunderclap both in our world and in Mid-World, they will never reach that great lynchpin of the time/space continuum which, even now, begins to totter . . . ([source][2]) [1]: https://openlibrary.org/works/OL81600W/The_Dark_Tower_1-7 [2]: https://stephenking.com/library/novel/dark_tower_wolves_of_the_calla_the.html
What it’s like
Dusty, sun-bleached prose with a laconic western cadence, the sentences spare and declarative until a digression swells into folksy detail about a farming town's routines, its wells, its meals and its wary faces. The sensory world is hot wind over scrub and dirt roads, the air thick with dust and the smell of horses, with the Wolves rendered as a looming, almost mythic dread on the horizon. Parallel sections set in 1970s New York bring in grey concrete, traffic and fluorescent-lit offices, a flat modern texture that jolts against the frontier. The pace is long and digressive, with slow stretches of talk and planning that break into sharp, sudden action. Violence is frequent and sometimes graphic, including gunfights, deaths and a threat to children that lands with real menace, though it stops short of extended gore. The emotional register is earnest and melancholy, centred on loyalty among companions and the weight of a community that has learned to fear what comes every generation. It suits a slow weekend read, or a stretch of time spent with a sprawling epic, and it is best for readers who want serialized, genre-blending adventure with a brooding, weathered voice.
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