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In 1954, Shichinin no samurai (Seven Samurai) was released, a masterpiece of martial arts cinema, hailed still as one of the greatest action epics ever filmed. Its director, Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, could not have realized then the considerable intercultural influence his film would have, or the legacy it would generate over the course of fifty years. To Kurosawa's list of imitators, add Sam Peckinpah (The Wild Bunch), Sergio Leone (the Man With No Name trilogy), John Sturges (The Magnificent Seven), George Lucas (Star Wars), and countless dozens of "team mission" films such as The Guns of Navarone and The Dirty Dozen, right up to Disney's A Bug's Life. In film critic Roger Ebert's estimation, "it could be argued that this greatest of filmmakers gave employment to action heroes for the next 50 years, just as a fallout from his primary purpose." Novelists too, it seems.

Stephen King's fifth book in The Dark Tower cycle -- the first of the final three he wrote back-to-back -- is as strange, powerfully written and utterly weird as it predecessors, but foremost, it is King's tribute to the great action films and cultural archetypes that descended from Kurosawa's magnum opus (in turn inspired by John Ford's film epics and other great westerns of vintage Hollywood cinema). Like Kurosawa's tale, King's is principally a story about talented killers summoned to aid a beleaguered village, to protect its villagers from banditry. In Kurosawa's tale, the bandits came for rice; in King's, they come for children.

At the end of Wizard and Glass, a band of gunslingers led by Roland Deschain of Gilead passed through a phenomenon known as a "thinny," a wearing away of the fabric of space and time. During an elongated and possibly enchanted evening of palaver (comprising most of the fourth book), Roland revealed the events that set him on the path to the Dark Tower. The Dark Tower is the bolt that holds all realities in place, supported by great beams of magnetic force. These beams are breaking, one-by-one, orchestrated (it is believed) by a creature called the Crimson King (first named in King's novel Insomnia), who has somehow gained access to the Tower. If the tower falls, so will Roland's world, and in fact all worlds.

In Wolves of the Calla, Roland and his companions (Eddie and Susannah Dean and Jake Chambers from New York, and a billy bumbler named Oy from Mid-World) journey to the edge of End-World, the final geographic stage of their road to the Dark Tower; on its borders lies a deceptively tranquil village named Calla Bryn Sturgis (note homage to Yul Brynner in The Magnificent Seven and that film's director, John Sturges). Every twenty years or so, great packs of "wolves" come riding on horses from Thunderclap -- a belt of blackness and lightning along End-World, visible on the distant horizon from Calla Bryn Sturgis -- to raid the village and take its children. The practice, we are told, has been occurring for centuries. The children are eventually returned to the village, but "roont" (village patois for "ruined"), stricken with horrific mental and physical handicaps. At the beginning of the story, the villagers are warned that the wolves are coming to the Calla in one month, and as in Kurosawa's film, this time some of the villagers are ready to fight back. Their fragile bravura is seized upon and galvanized by an enigmatic priest.

It seems a famous character from one of King's earliest novels has been resurrected to dwell in this quiet town at the edge of Thunderclap; the novel in question: 'Salem's Lot, the character: Father Donald Callahan (note similarity to "Calla"), an alcoholic priest whose faith proved transient when confronted by that novel's supernatural antagonist. At the end of 'Salem's Lot, Callahan boards a bus to nowhere, his fate indeterminate. The story of how he ended up in Calla Bryn Sturgis comprises great swathes of the narrative -- some of the most entertaining in fact, as King draws in material from Hearts in Atlantis and "Low Men in Yellow Coats," taking us on another whirlwind tour of New York, pulling us into its soup kitchens and rehab centers, and back to that same empty lot where a certain invaluable rose awaits protection or destruction. There is also a notable extension of King's vampire mythos, a continuation of themes established as early as 1975; nothing on the order of Anne Rice's extravagant erotica, and not much that is particularly inventive either (King essentially divides vampires into three categories, or "types," and links them to the service of the Crimson King). Still, the fun is in the simple, masterful way King tells his tale, its punchy, realistic voice and controlled prose. The escalating revelations that draw increasingly upon King's life, both fictional and subtly autobiographical, reward longtime fans who've been with the series for decades, and give his older works new and richer meaning.

Like the previous four, this one also contains an "r" word in its prefatory pages: resistance, and on the opposing page, the number nineteen now graces the interior of the first six books (the seventh alters this slightly). This is the first one in the series to capitalize on that number (not counting revisions made to the first), adding to the quest a maddening game of numerology. Names, towns, events, and just about anything that fits fall under the spell of nineteen, which at first seems a game of coincidences, until the coincidences accumulate to the point of overwhelming Roland and his ka-tet ("one from many"). It is worth noting here that June 19th, 1999 was the day King himself was nearly killed by a runaway van, though nineteen also factored into Bag of Bones (published September 1998). There is also a growing sense on the part of the characters that something unreal is occurring, as if to suggest the characters have "become aware" of their fictive quality (as characters in a Stephen King book). This tinkering with the "fourth wall" is tantalizing and reveals an author willing, after over forty books, to push his writing in boldly different directions.

There's even a bit of fun poked at critics (add publishers and resellers to this list) who like to divvy up the literary world into easy castes: science fiction, fantasy, horror, western, romance, etc. At one point early on, in a nod to Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, Roland asks Eddie Dean

Do people in your world always want only one story-flavor at a time? Only one taste in their mouths? ...Does no one eat stew?

Matt Peckham lives in Nebraska and Iowa. His first book, a guide to Mike's Carey's Lucifer, will be published by Wildside Press. For more about Matt, check out mattpeckham.com