The Dark Tower Reread pt. 8: Wolves of the Calla

"There's really nothing here that bothers me." 

- Dog Star Omnibus, 11/15/2012

So I said six and a half years ago. This time around? I found plenty to bother me. Let me tell you all about it.

First, though: it's kind of a drag to write negative reviews. Some things trigger a passionate negative response. Those things are easier, because it's fun to be mad at those kind of things. Then there are things like Wolves of the Calla, or Stephen King in general. These things give me no joy whatsoever to be negative about (and we're just going to have to live with dangling preposition). And not necessarily because I feel so attached to King or the Dark Tower to not be critical; I have and never had no trouble sharing my opinion on things I like or dislike out there in the pop culture candyland. Mainly the joylessness comes from the extra work involved, because I feel like I really have to footnote myself. It's not enough to say "it's crap" for things you actually care about, and I do care about King's work. And what's the point of just saying "I don't like it"? Well, who cares? Why write the blog? Why did I get myself into this? 

Let me start with what worked for me and move out from there. 

THINGS I LIKED

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

As an episode of the larger series, it's mostly a pretty enjoyable one. The central idea I mean (defending a town from rapacious robots) and all the usual mix of sci-fi with fantasy and traditional gunslinger fare. Not much happens compared to something like The Waste Lands. It has more or less the same structure as Wizard and Glass, except the slow burn western adventure takes place in the present and not in flashback. Both end with meta-mash-up-gone-amok. 

Is it a little strange to basically just repeat the structure of bk 4? Maybe. I can't really get worked up about it.

Pere Callahan enjoys the distinction of being something I simultaneously like and dislike about Wolves. I like the way he's written and for the most part enjoy his backstory. I'll save the dislikes for the appropriate section. He's a fun addition to the ka-tet, and even though the whole Lamerk Foundry spiders-web of interdimensional tunnels and bridges never really makes sense, it's a cool idea to have this guy wandering about, killing vampires, slowly drawing their power against him, then ending up with the free range folken of the Calla. 

He's a drunk in recovery (the best kind: exile in another dimension. He and Eddie Dean have that in common) and that allows for some AA "Wisdom of the Book" stuff like "It's hard to hear a small voice clearly when you're shit-ass drunk all the time." Or "You could miss the elephant in the room if it was a magic elephant with the power to cloud men's minds." That last one reminded me of two other Kingthings: (1) The Regulators, with the magic elephant in the room being the television, and (2) the bk7 fate of the Man in Black to come. 

I liked Andy. I liked Jake's journey to the Dogan. 

Finally this is probably the only Jericho Hill stuff we're ever going to see, but I kind of wonder what the heck happened with Alain. Maybe the answer is in the Browning poem, I haven't checked. (If you wanted to do a book-length last stand of Gilead/ The Alamo sort of deal, Sai King, I say go for it. Put Holly Gibney in it if that's what it takes.)

KING META FICTIVE

"Someone or some force had carried them over or through the thinny and back to the Path of the Beam." 

There's plenty I could put in this section, but I figure with the way bks 6 and 7 go, I have plenty of time to get to it all then. So just a couple of things:

- It really does seem like King is very aware of some of his reoccurring tics doesn't it? Giant-folks, telepathy, self-referencing, the "magically simple", conversational solipsism, storm/ thunderclap, etc. Did he have a copy of my Bingo Scorecard when he wrote the last 3 books? 

- Calvin Tower. So much hostility with this guy! I guess we'll get into this more next time, too, but sheesh. King really lets loose on this poor bookseller and - in his own equally important way - caretaker of ka. It's an interesting development considering the self-reflective qualities of the series. (Flashforward to King himself telling Roland in a hypnotized panic in bk 6 "I DON'T WANT TO BE GAN!") As The Dark Half and Misery explore some of King's complicated feelings with fandom, this character perhaps suggests an antipathy with the industry of fandom. 

THINGS I DON'T MUCH LIKE 

BUT DON'T WANT TO HARP ON

These things will be happening with increasing frequency and urgency for the rest of the series, and I don't want to spend any time on them in the remaining posts. So let me just get it all out of the way now.

- Mia. Probably at the top of the list. The pregnancy never makes sense and just gets more and more complicated and crazy the more he tries to nail it down. The plot development also nullifies all of that Detta being the reigning blue balls champ of wherever the hell it is, too, which like everything involving Detta was all just very painful to read. But read it I did, so hey! Thanks for that. Who cares but sheesh. If you circle Mia on my list of problems worksheet, there's a lot of subsequent material that is default bullet-pointed beneath it. So, that's a drag for me, especially in bk 6. Here, though: I mean... doesn't Susannah's hair get wet when Mia's diving into the mud? I know it's magical and all, but that's the whole thing: the whole Mia/ pregnancy / Mordred thing relies on way too many Rube Goldberg angles.

- Nineteen/ the doubling/ coincidences. It just isn't interesting enough to keep coming back to. 

- Commala. Holy crap! I had enough of this by halfway through Wolves, and, as if he was waiting to hear if it annoyed me, he added it another million times, amping it up in bk6 to come. All of the "If the dinh-da be kai-mai, than aye, delah" stuff just got to be too much. Granted it's a genre trope but holy moley does it go skidding off the rails and then it's just an errant boxcar in the countryside, destroying crops, downing power lines, smashing baby carriages and pedestrians, totally out of control. 

- Jake as gunslinger. I mean, I was already wary of Eddie and Susannah, and now Jake's always got a steady gunslingin' eye and one finger on the docker's clutch, which was King's trigger-word-association this time around. Anytime Jake is "on the case," his hand drops to the good ol' docker's clutch. Also, Jake as "carrier of the touch." It just never gelled for me so everytime either is referenced I'm less and less vested. I've kind of already written Jake out of this story in my head.

- It's difficult to understand why Sombra or any of the bad guys would take this cautious step by step approach to the rose. Like possession of Black Thirteen, why give our heroes such time, opportunity, and assistance? I know they're kept in check by the Tet Corporation, who collect kick-ass paintings and stage cool corporate retreats and have a bunch of interns poring over King books for Dark Tower references, so you know, they're formidable opponents for a bloodthirsty, magical, gazillionaire outfit. Staffed with low men and vampires and magical interdimensional devices. Seems like they had a lot more firepower than they even bring to bear on the situation. 


- Combining aspects of both of the above: this habit of just giving characters super powers to cross dimensions and project telepathically when the need demands - but simultaneously keeping up the conceit that it's exceptional, etc. or a plot device complication - is kind of irritating. Black Thirteen is one of many such conveniences. Shouldn't it exact worse toll for its usage? Although (in bk6) I guess the implication is that its toll is ultimately 9/11, right? That's that, I guess. 

- The ammo problem still bugs me. 

- Roland's finger-twirling gesture and the subsequent text-explanation every time it appears... plus, it almost never really makes sense. There's not the sort of conversational meandering and time waste etc. going on to provoke it in most spots. Also, it seems a vanity for Roland to do this, and Roland's not a vain man.  

Okay. There we are, then. I'll try not to bring up any of the above in subsequent reviews.

THINGS I DAMN WELL AM GOING TO HARP ON

All right, back to Pere Callahan. Converting Salem's Lot (and vampires) into an adjunct of the Dark Tower verse doesn't really work for me. I'm fine with it here in bks 5 through 7 because what choice do I have? But I simply forget all of this back/future-story when I read or think about Salem's Lot. Thankfully he's never put a new edition of Salem's with Dark Tower stuff digitally inserted. 

Callahan's whole rambling drunk Todash highway vampire killer story is interesting, but it's all so weirdly overcomplicated. I liked the slow encircling of the Low Men but most of the rest (the Hitler Brothers, Lupe Delgado, maybe a few too many stops and starts) didn't really add anything. And then Walter nabs him and gives him Black Thirteen? It just seems weird to me that Walter can anticipate so many different things and play chessmaster like this but somehow never suss out how things actually go. Or, if not weird, uninteresting. 

The Sisters of Oriza. Fine. Contrived - Men can't throw them? Does this seem at all realistic? A factory on the outskirts of Amish Central makes titanium-alloy-grade memorial plates that also just so happens to be the one thing that can decapitate the bad guys? A multi-generational sisterhood (plus Jake) of Oriza-throwing markswomen? An old codger who knows the secret but says nothing except to Eddie Dean? - but fine. 

"TATERS AND GRAVY!"? Nope. Somewhere in the annals of literary history an entry will exist on this book, and I hope whomever writes the entry just quotes that and nothing else.

The portent is a little out of control in this book. On pg. 367 Eddie hears the secret of all gray horses from Gran-Pere (another in a long line of homages to King's Uncle Oren, who even makes a brief appearance while The Author's under hypnosis in bk 6. that is held back from the reader (but not to Roland) util pg. 666. To me that's just kind of useless portent. He does that more than a few times, actually - it seems like a form of cheating to me. There's no real interest or tension built up from holding it back, just the kind that comes from having it deliberately withheld. Ditto for with the object in the lining of the bag. (More on that next time.)

Then, as Wizard and Glass did, the meta-madness goes into hyperdrive in the last 30 pages, with the Harry Potter sneech models and the Doctor Dooms wielding lightsabers on motorized horses. I've been talking about the 2 narrative frames for Dark Tower stuff: one is storytelling that is supposed to hang together somehow, and the other is this meta-fictive self-analysis King is doing of himself as a storyteller, as a son, as a father, as a man of his time. I'd say this is where the first frame is obliterated for good. This is for me the proverbial jump-the-shark moment. It's even the first of several jump-the-shark moments to come, which is unfathomable to me.

Clearly, then, some other narrative frame is needed. The second is still very much intact; in fact, these sorts of universe-folding-in-to-the-man-behind-the-curtain moments even make it better. So, for the next few posts I'll try my best not to pick at anything from a "does this make sense?" angle except "does this serve the only Beam left shining, i.e. the meta-fictive one. This creates a whole new set of problems for me. Man! I thought a re-read would be less work.

THE WORST THING KING MAY EVER HAVE WRITTEN

Roland gets a Rosalita in bk 5, which is fine enough, but in one section, as they go off to hook up, King writes:

"He came with her willingly and went where she took him. She kept a secret spring surrounded by sweet moss, and there he was refreshed." 

Ewww. I mean, what the christ, This flowery stuff is so tonally off with passages elsewhere, in addition to being wtf-y. 

~