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Recent Updates:
My debut Southern Dark Fantasy novel BEYOND THE RUINED NIGHTS is officially OUT!
It’s available literally everywhere books are sold. Want my recs?
Get the Ebook here: Campfire
Get Paperback and Hardback here: Bookshop.org
Can’t afford to buy a copy? I’m happy to announce that my book is also available on HOOPLA through your local public library!
I’ve also updated my website to highlight my short fiction! Head on over!
Project Progress:
I’ve made a little more progress on book 2! I’m at around 70%. Slow and steady and all that.
Recent Fascinations | The Fiction Books that Made Me #10: WOLVES OF THE CALLA
Want to understand what this series is? Go Here
“I wanted to say goodbye to someone, and have someone say goodbye to me. The goodbyes we speak and the goodbyes we hear are the goodbyes that tell us we´re still alive.”
How fitting that we start this series with not only a Stephen King novel, but a DARK TOWER novel. THE DARK TOWER V: WOLVES OF THE CALLA. While this isn’t the only King book that I’ll be talking about in this series (there’s four and I’m not sorry), it is the only DARK TOWER novel that made my list of 10. For some of you that know me (and know me very well, ya ken?), this might be a surprise, so let me explain.
THE DARK TOWER is, without any exaggeration, my favorite series of all time. There is seldom a day that the series doesn’t cross my mind in one way or another. I measure myself against it, I measure any new series I read against it. If taken as a whole, the series would be number one, far beyond anything else that is on this list, but I did not consider the series as a single work, and instead was tasked with picking my single favorite book. WOLVES won out, after very little deliberation. In consideration of this list, and how much impact they have had against me, I decided to place it at 10, because that’s where it feels most right when taken on its own merits and the rest of the context of the series is removed.
So then, what makes WOLVES my favorite of the series? And beyond that, what makes it so important to me? Let’s tackle those one at a time.
I am, to put it lightly, a huge fan of Westerns. Exactly why, and to the extreme degree with which, I love this genre will be discussed in great detail in a later entry of this series, but this fact influenced my love for WOLVES a great deal the first time I read it. While the western motif is carried through the entirety of THE DARK TOWER series, no book does so more openly, more directly, than WOLVES OF THE CALLA. The book is King’s interpretation of the famous, and often imitated, Akira Kurosawa film SEVEN SAMURAI, which was remade as the landmark Western THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN in 1960. While I respect the original, the American Western version of the story has been one of my favorite movies for as long as I can remember, a love that was passed down to me by my father. WOLVES is an adaptation of this motif, the gathering of the “seven”, the outsider bandits that have tormented the little town for generations, this time in the form of…well.
Doombot werewolves throwing Green Goblin-esque bombs inspired by the snitch from Harry Potter.
Look, I didn’t say the book wasn’t also very, very silly. Beyond this thematic connection to one of my favorite movies, and in my opinions one of the best motifs in all of fiction, WOLVES is also a stealth sequel to one of my favorite King novels (one that did not make this list but all the same lives in my heart), SALEM’S LOT. I won’t go into exactly how it works as a sequel, but it does so in an exciting and unique way that really works for me as a reader, but more importantly it gave me a lot of ideas as a writer.
That leads me to the second piece of this particular story that ended up making it so important to me: the inspiration it gave me to work on my own series, THE SONG OF CALARINE. My books, short stories, and other fictional works all take place in a single shared cosmos. I hesitate to use the word “multiverse”, in no small part because of how Marvel oversaturated the world to that idea, but in essence that is exactly what it is. BEYOND THE RUINED NIGHTS, my recent debut Southern Dark Fantasy novel, is set in the same world as my short stories, though divided by the veil of the universes and eons of time. While from the earliest moments it is clear that the DARK TOWER takes place in a universe of many worlds, “There are other worlds than these,” after all, it was WOLVES that showed me just how far that idea could be taken. While the following two books, SONGS OF SUSANNAH and THE DARK TOWER took the idea even further, it was the little weird western featuring a malfunctioning robot, a catholic priest, and a frisbee slinging, wheelchair bound badass that told me one absolute truth: write what you want, just make sure it kicks ass.
At the end of the day, that’s why WOLVES OF THE CALLA took the number 10 spot when so many other books could have ended up here. Some books remind us of our fathers, of the little joys in life. Of Steve McQueen with a sly grin and a fast gun. Most of all, of the worlds possible, both those around us and those within us.
What more can you ask from a book than to show you what lies ahead at the same time that it shows you what you’ve left behind?
Ya ken?
Thanks for reading, Sai. Long days and pleasant nights.
