[Mind redacted spoilers—highlight to reveal—and paragraphs ending with questions.]

Goodreads: Describe the book you’re currently reading in three words!
Jarrod: Author inserts himself.

Such is the wrong turn King made when resuming The Dark Tower after a six-year hiatus that nearly killed him. Equal time passed between the earlier third and fourth books—The Waste Lands and Wizard and Glass, respectively—but felt longer to this recent college graduate who lost interest given King’s mid-nineties output. “Try me with your questions, and let the contest begin!” Try me, indeed—has a book ever ended with the word “begin”?

Seeing Wizard and Glass in bookstores at the time, I recalled the afterword from The Waste Lands or The Drawing of the Three (the series’ second, and my favorite) projecting that volume four would be a flashback story. Yeah? This couldn’t be handled in a standalone novella à la 1998’s The Little Sisters of Eluria? You know, Kyle Katarn can’t save the universe by himself. And then Napster? And then Napster! Distractions abounded and the fates of our heroes went unread until… hey, book five’s coming out!

Catching up with an eBay-secured trade paperback from 1997 instead of the rebranded 2003 edition—“I was into these dudes before anyone”—Wizard and Glass neatly resolved Blaine and the overhyped Tick-Tock Man before settling into a (back)story within a story. It’s a good book and I’m glad to have read it—twice now—but I don’t know how necessary it is. We learn more of Roland’s history and are introduced to mechanisms (thinnies, crystal balls, pop culture) that echo later, but the six hundred-plus pages mainly succeed in getting the ka-tet off the train. Would you miss something if you skipped from chapter three to Wolves of the Calla? Of course. But how much?

If Wizard and Glass wasn’t an overt side quest then Wolves of the Calla certainly is. Almost conventional and self-contained—gone are the varied environments and encounters that come with the first three books’ adventures, even recognizing that debut The Gunslinger is a weaving of five individual stories—it exists to formalize “the enemy,” tie in five-star masterpiece ’Salem’s Lot, retcon an unutterable pregnancy… and insert the goddamn author. Might Father Callahan exist outside of metafiction? Could Star Wars, Harry Potter and Dr. Doom have been referenced without the goddamn author inserting himself? Does this plot twist torpedo the whole thing? Man, it tries.

On the plus side, Wolves of the Calla has a traditional beginning/ending structure after The Waste Lands (beginning only) and Wizard and Glass (ending, beginning, second ending). Emma Cline weeps. This doesn’t preclude a cliffhanger, for Song of Susannah picks right up in the Calla and spends a lot of time with the title character, who (no matter who’s in charge) hasn’t been interesting since The Drawing of the Three. The inserted-author bullshit continues and I would have enjoyed that cabin discussion much more were it repurposed as straight nonfiction for the contemporary On Writing—creative inspirations and methods are fascinating but only when heard directly and not through some dramatized… what, sketch?

That’s where the series falters. Momentum is an asset to three thousand pages but ninety percent of Wizard and Glass—dead center within the opus and therefore a strange spot to stall—looks backward, as does the bulk of Callahan’s content in Wolves of the Calla, as does all of King’s in Song of Susannah. Drag. I look forward to rereading the concluding The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower later this year, for that rights the ship if I remember correctly… aside from everyone dying. Talk about beginnings and endings! Until then, per the Pandora Code, I cannot recommend these. ⭐⭐⭐⭐/⭐⭐⭐