Wolves of the Calla by Stephen King [Review]

Picking up immediately after Wizard and Glass where the last of the Gilead gunslingers – Roland Deschain – shares with his ka-tet how his quest for the Dark Tower originally began as the five wanderers continue ever westward in its pursuit, they pass down into the idyllic hills of the Calla Bryn Sturgis as the community prepares to undergo the annual twenty year reaping by a group of raiders they call the “Wolves.” While it has obviously been hinted at in previous volumes, Wolves of the Calla is the first time you see just how Stephen King has pulled his other stories into the Gunslinger series. And while that has been amusing at times, the very overtness of it in this installation felt a little ham-fisted at times. Of course that said I still enjoyed the book, as the adventures of Roland are a pretty compelling read. In fact all of the characters come into their own, with the gunslinger having to acknowledge that all had grown in ways that make them very different from the people they had originally been when he’d first dragged them into his world in The Drawing of Three.

Even though this is a pretty thick book, it reads quickly, and like the majority of the Gunslinger series over much sooner than you ever want them to be.