The children are eventually returned to the community “roont,” ruined, useless, and fated to die horrifically, and the town begs the band of travelers for help.

Every two decades, rampaging hooded creatures attack the town and steal a child from each home. This fellowship, or “ka-tet,” as King calls it, lands in a rural farming town where all the women give birth to twins. The novel hits the ground running, with little background for newcomers, and little introduction to Roland or his companions in the search for the Dark Tower: streetwise Eddie Dean, eccentric Susannah Holmes, and lonely Jake Chambers, a boy transported from 1970s New York City. While Calla bears little resemblance to his modern horror novels, such as From a Buick 8 or the story collection Everything’s Eventual, careful readers will find many connections to King’s fantasy-oriented works, such as Black House, The Talisman, The Stand, Hearts in Atlantis, and others.īut as a stand-alone novel, Wolves of the Calla is not particularly user-friendly. Why invest time in an intricate, fantastical story about a vague quest with no vampires, no rabid dogs, and no captive romance novelists anywhere in sight? There was so much other enjoyable horror penned by King since 1982, when Volume 1, The Gunslinger, was published. Roland is on an Arthurian-style quest to reach the mythical Dark Tower, the place where time and space (and remaindered books) all come together in one collapsing maelstrom.įor many King enthusiasts, it was relatively easy to let volumes 1 through 4 slide by without much notice.

Since the early 1970s - when he was a college student scratching out a living freelancing for tiny science-fiction magazines - King has been writing the story of Roland Deschain, a gunslinger from the ancient imaginary land of Gilead. Donald Grant/Scribner, 714 pp., illustrated, $35Įven bona fide Stephen King fans don’t know quite what to make of Wolves of the Calla, the hefty fifth installment of his epic, and seemingly endless, Dark Tower series.

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