Wolves of the Calla: The Dark Tower V

By Stephen King. Scribner, 714 pp, $52, hardcover.

You gotta love writers. More than any other sort of commercially viable artist, authors can beggar expectations. And this doesn't just go for James Joyce following up A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with Ulysses and Ulysses with Finnegans Wake. The very same thing, I'm overjoyed to have now noticed, can be said for Stephen King.

Try for a moment to go back to 1973 when the young King gave us Carrie. No matter what you thought of genre writing, Carrie was just plain good. As was The Shining. And Salem's Lot. And The Stand. And The Dead Zone. This was a pretty much unprecedented run of good bestsellers. Things started getting a little samey around Pet Semetary, and by then, people who considered themselves serious readers had mostly given up this particular ghost and moved along to other excitements. But this whole time, King was working on something really big. He'd started it before Carrie, and over the years he's published The Dark Tower series under the literary radar.

It started with The Gunslinger, which he published between Cujo and Christine. It was the era's best horror writer's fantasy series, and as such, often got shooed under the table by critics and King fans alike. But slowly, he built up his homage to J. R. R. Tolkien and Robert Browning's "Childe Roland", fascinatingly working his own books into the background fabric, or rather, this ur-mythology into the backgrounds of his more popular books. The weirdness in the horror was given origins in the world created in the Dark Tower series (King lists 15 of his non ­Dark Tower works as Dark Tower ­related), and both benefited from the added depth and playfulness, which reaches a fevered pitch in the final lines of Book 5, Wolves of the Calla. (The last two books in what can only be described as our age's most enduringly popular writer's life's work will be published over the next two years.)

Wolves of the Calla, like its predecessors, is not a perfect or great book. It lacks the awe-inspiring sense of sheer achievement you get from Tolkien, or Browning's care with language. The fabricated speech King has come up with for some of the characters is not terribly impressive, and the cover art and occasional plates throughout are not only bad but several times narratively inaccurate. But King has stuck to his strengths and expanded upon them. There is, as there always is, a 12-year-old boy upon whom much of the story's weight rests and on whom most of the best characterization and writing centre. The introduction of Callahan from Salem's Lot is buckets of fun and adds immensely to these books' chief attraction, which is their tying together and filling in of King's entire work and world.

There's not much point in going into the plot. It's extensive and connected at every point with the previous four books. Fans and acolytes can discover it for themselves; novices should buy the newly revised edition of The Gunslinger, pick up a copy of the just-published Dark Tower concordance, and settle in for a long and thoroughly involving ride.

It's time to face the fact that Stephen King is an important writer and to make an effort to get a handle on him. Don't worry--it'll be fun. Steve wouldn't have it any other way.

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