The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla by Stephen King

It's not too late to join the quest

While Stephen King has always treated his readers with greater generosity than most authors, providing at least one novel (and frequently more) every year, fans of his magnum opus have had to wait for years between instalments. The first volume of the series, The Gunslinger, appeared in 1982, and subsequent volumes have followed every five years or so. Now, in an astonishing (even by his standards) burst of creativity, he has finished the final three volumes, which will be published over the next 18 months.

The publication of the first of these books, Wolves of the Calla, comes in a year when King has been awarded the 2003 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, joining the illustrious company of previous winners including Saul Bellow, John Updike, Philip Roth and Arthur Miller. This recognition finally confirms what readers worldwide have known for years: King is one of the great American authors. And when The Dark Tower is finally complete, it will stand alongside his very finest novels (from Carrie to Hearts in Atlantis) as an epic that readers and academics will be exploring for years to come.

As befits a sequence of extraordinary length, The Dark Tower is a mixture of genres, and it is this cross-fertilisation that gives his narrative its incredible power. It is, in part, a fantasy novel based on Robert Browning's narrative poem, "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came". The fantasy element of the novel has obvious connections with The Lord of the Rings (and there is also a mischievous reference to the newcomer in the genre, Harry Potter). Indeed, King is keen to state that: "The Dark Tower books, like most long fantasy tales written by men and women of my generation, were born out of Tolkien's." But while acknowledging this debt, he stresses that while he wanted to write a novel that contained Tolkien's "sense of quest and magic", he wanted to set this against a Sergio Leone-influenced Western backdrop. Leone isn't the only influence on the Western elements of the story, as the set-up of the fifth volume, Wolves of the Calla, also owes something to Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, and in the previous book there was a monorail with an automated voice that sounded like John Wayne. This set-up involves a group of farmers who suffer a "reaping" every 23 years when wolves come to their community and take away their children, only for them to return "roont", husks of their former selves who have suffered terrible psychological and physical damage. Roland of Gilead, the hero of the sequence, arrives with four gunslingers to protect them from the latest invasion as a temporary stop on his longer quest.

This mixture of Western and Fantasy is only one half of the story. In his Afterword to Wizard and Glass, the fourth volume of The Dark Tower, Stephen King stated that: "Roland's world (or worlds) contains all the others of my making." Although King's work has been the basis for more than 70 films, television movies and mini-series (even the short story "Children of the Corn" has inspired, at the last count, seven films), he has only once indicated a desire to write a sequel to one of his novels. That novel was Salem's Lot, and, although King never got round to writing this book, it is significant that one of the book's characters, Father Callahan, shows up here, as instead of writing sequels King has instead allowed some of his characters to stray from one novel to the next. This has created an extraordinarily elaborate fictional universe, so sophisticated that there is a 350-page Concordance (the first of two volumes) published along with volume five of The Dark Tower. And while King is a best-selling popular author, he is not afraid to play with intertextuality, establishing relationships not just between his own books, but with those of authors including Arthur Conan Doyle, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Thomas Wolfe and TS Eliot. These interlinked references encourage further study of the books, not in a dry academic way, but rather to gain deeper pleasure from the novels. Here these connections go further into new territory than ever before, as Father Callahan is given a copy of King's novel Salem's Lot, and cannot understand how this author has managed to turn his story into fiction. There is a hint that in the next volume King's characters may gain an even closer relationship with their author, which will delight anyone who enjoys the more playful side of King's imagination. It should also be noted that while much of the novel takes place in King's fantasy Mid-World, a land ruled by the Crimson King where the Dark Tower stands, the characters frequently cross over to the recognisably realist (up to a point) America where many of King's other fictions take place. Certainly the New York depicted here feels immediately identifiable, although just as brutal as the Western landscape the characters leave behind when they pass through portals.

This may sound like an extremely heady brew, and King warns that this novel is probably not the place for new readers to begin. It can be enjoyed as a stand-alone book, but is best read as part of the series, and as King has also recently revised the first volume, The Gunslinger, even die-hard fans will want to refresh their memories.

Although The Dark Tower already has millions of readers, the fact that the sequence will soon be complete will no doubt encourage those who have been reluctant to start reading before to join the quest. As a final enticement, I should add that this really is one of those unusual books that truly does have "something for everyone". Anyone allergic to fantasy fiction will be won over by the sections that deal (especially in the previous volumes) with the dirty side of New York life, including heart-rending descriptions of lives damaged by drugs and alcoholism. And with vampires, robots and gangsters all taking part in one enormous narrative, it's a perfect Christmas present for anyone who enjoys epic storytelling, offering the excitement of The Sopranos, Buffy and Star Wars all rolled into one.