Read: Wolves of the Calla–“The Meeting of the Folken“; “Before the Storm”; “The Wolves”; “Epilogue: The Doorway Cave”; Author’s Note; Author’s Afterword

It’s Duck Amuck???

Oh brother.

You know, I had a feeling. I’d put it aside because King’s gotten cute about this sort of thing before; in Misery, for example, the events of The Shining and the career of horror author Stephen King are both referenced as real things. Eddie said what he said about feeling like they were in a storybook or fairy tale, and King made sure we noticed “Stephen King” listed as one of the items on The Manhattan Restaurant of the Mind’s strangely changed “menu,” but I didn’t think that was really where we were going. Now that apparently it is, I really don’t know what to say except that this idea is not interesting to me. Like, at all. Sheesh, what would Sergio Leone say?

Ultimately it strikes me as another idea King couldn’t stop himself from spackling atop all the other ideas he has for this series, like weapons based on lightsabers and Doombots and the golden sneetch from Harry Potter. (Which also explains that hideous chapter-heading font he’s using here.) Those were kinda fun, and also kinda plausible based on what we know about the robots developed by North Central Positronics and LaMerk Industries, all of which seem designed to be superficially appealing to children in some way. Making the whole thing meta, though, is just–I dunno what it is. An apology for using genre tropes so head-on? Doubtful. Apologetics for genre aren’t King’s style. I’m going to go with “a misguided attempt to explore ‘the dark magic of storytelling'” or something like that.

Ah well. The fight was pretty cool, though over just as quickly as Roland thought it would be and without the major complicating problem you thought was coming (and maybe should have come, predictable though it may have been), a la the death of Susan in Wizard and Glass. I was impressed by the Slightman headfake, how we were lead to believe the major problem for Jake would be how his friend Ben Jr. would look at him once his dad was outed as a traitor, never once suspecting that Ben Jr. wouldn’t be alive to look at him at all. And now we’ve got a new name to add to the big-bad list: Finli o’ Tego, maybe a bird-headed taheen, maybe another Flagg alias.

I think the most instructive part of this concluding chunk was the bit just prior to the battle, where Roland muses that there’s probably only 15-30 second before the blood-madness of battle descends upon his mind but until then he can see all things in his mind’s eye real clearly–and then King spends a full page detailing every thing he could see. It reminded me of the part in Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure where Jan Hooks’ Alamo tour guide says “there are thousands and thousands of uses for corn, all of which I’m going to tell you about right now!” That’s The Dark Tower in a nutshell.

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