Read: Wolves of the Calla–“Secrets”; “The Dogan, Part 1”; “The Dogan, Part 2”; “The Pied Piper”

As we head toward the big showdown, we’re on an upward trend. The ka-tet finally shares its many secrets, putting an end to one of the most frustrating aspects of the book so far. Jake has one of those cloak-and-dagger lions’-den espionage expeditions that King excels at. In the process he discovers the moles among the Calla–Andy the Robot and Slightman the Elder, as suspected–and uncovers Andy as yet another piece of ancient technology gone sociopathic, like Blaine and Shardik. Computers, robots, and other machinery outliving their creators by milennia and going bad in the process is one of the eeriest and most interesting aspects of the Dark Tower mythos and it’s always fun to see another example pop up.

Meanwhile, as irritated as I am by King’s mafia-by-numbers hoodlums back in New York, and as silly as I find the idea he advances via Eddie that such men marry and breed creatures just as evil as they are (seems to me they’re more likely to be self-involved morons like A.J. Soprano or Victoria Gotti’s brood), watching Eddie get medieval on the asses of Balazar’s enforcers was the most fun I’ve had with this character ever. Of course King has to go and ruin it by forcing Eddie to explain whether or not he was bluffing about killing the goons’ families if they messed with Calvin Tower again, but at least the answer is never “yep.”

King’s refusal to divulge what’s behind the Wolves’ masks gets more obnoxious each time he makes a point of telling us the heroes know something we don’t, but it seems pretty clear by now (especially when Jake muses that their footprints will be heavy like Andy’s) that they’re mass-produced robots or cyborgs. (Now that I think of it, one of Berni Wrightson’s dopey, no-attention-to-detail illustrations kind of blew that surprise earlier, but only if you trusted his visual imagination as truth, which I didn’t considering he couldn’t even get the much-ballyhooed haircolor of the redheaded woman killing the Wolf in that scene right.) I guess we’ll find out soon enough.

Passing thought: The Tick-Tock Man didn’t really amount to much, did he? His prominent role during the big Flagg reveal at the end of The Waste Lands made him seem like he’d play a major part in the subsequent volume or volumes, but he gets iced almost instantly by the ka-tet as he works he controls during Flagg’s Oz routine. Maybe Ben Slightman the Younger will become Jake’s new archnemesis?

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