I’m a Stephen King fan. I’ve currently trying to collect and read every novel he’s published (current score: 25 out of 52), and recently finished up the latest in his Dark Tower series, Wolves of the Calla.
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I didn’t like it at all.
I had originally wrote “hated it” in that last sentence, but my venom really isn’t that potent. Many people (like this columnist on Blookslut.com) have accused King of “jumping the shark”. This is a euphemism for passing one’s prime, made popular by the infamous Happy Days episode where Fonzie jumps over a bunch of sharks …on water skis. I mean Fonzie was wearing water skis, not the sharks, though that might have been an improvement.
King’s latest, 700-page shark jump is Wolves of the Calla, which is supposed to be the next installment in King’s thrilling Dark Tower series. The main gripes I have with the book are that it’s trite, and it’s boring.
Coincidence veiled as fate (or vice versa) is a major theme in The Dark Tower books, and WotC swims in it. People are at the right places at the right times, they know passcodes and others’ thoughts because they were fated to. The action, what little of it there is, is entirely plot-driven instead of character-driven. The end result is that the whole plot feels like it was shoe horned into place by a tired author that just doesn’t care about making sense any more.
Another example of this is the flashback about Father Callahan’s activities since we last saw him in 1978’s ‘Salem’s Lot. Callahan had been infected by a powerful vampire, made unclean to the point where God rejected the priest and sent him into a booze-slicked exile. In WotC, not only is Callahan “all better” in the span of a few pages, but we get inexplicable new rules about the vampires that were never present or hinted at in ‘Salem’s Lot and seem to serve only the purpose of setting up the plot for this book and its sequels. Again, I felt that King was cramming a square peg through a round hole.
Perhaps WotC’s most egregious shortcoming, though, is that it’s boring. The titular wolves don’t make an appearance until the last 50 pages or so, and when they do show up their action is almost meaningless and short-lived. The rest of the book is almost only sparsely populated with all the things that typically make us want to turn the page: suspense, action, character development, and revelations about Roland’s world. It’s just not there.
There are a few good things going on in WotC, like Jake’s character development and the introduction of Mia (though I kind of felt like “been there, done that” in reference to the latter). But they’re very few and far to far between.
Oh, I’ll still buy and read the next two books, but I may kick back to some older King circa the 1970s and 1980s while I wait.
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