1Resistance Against Impossible Odds
For generations the Calla has handed over its children and called it fate. Tian Jaffords breaks the pattern with a speech—'We are men, not sheep!'—and old Jamie Jaffords supplies the weapon: memory. His story of killing a Wolf decades ago, of the mask coming off to reveal 'nothing under it but metal and lights,' turns terror into tactics. Roland builds the whole ambush on that one remembered detail, and the town's plate-throwing women finish what the gunslingers start. The book's point is that fear survives on the belief that the enemy is supernatural; the moment a town learns its monsters are machines that can be broken, the raid that has ruled its history for generations ends in a single afternoon.
Characters:Roland DeschainJamie JaffordsTian Jaffords
2The Price of Protection
Every rescue in this book has a bill attached. Ben Slightman betrays the entire Calla for one exemption—his son spared from Thunderclap—and the bargain fails anyway: Benny dies in the battle, killed by a Wolf's snitch, and Jake loses his friend. Calvin Tower saves his rose and his skin only by giving up his rare books to a cave in another world. Eddie spares Slightman's life not for justice but for the boy's sake, and Roland's mercy leaves a traitor alive in a town that will have to live beside him. King keeps asking what a protector owes, and answers that protection is never clean—someone always pays, and often it is the person you were trying to shield.
Characters:Roland DeschainEddie DeanJake ChambersCalvin TowerBen Slightman the Elder
3Doors Between Worlds
Black Thirteen, the malevolent black glass orb Walter gives Callahan, is the book's hinge: it caused the todash dreams that pulled Eddie and Jake to 1977 New York, and it opens physical doors from the Doorway Cave to Manhattan. Through one door, Eddie saves Calvin Tower and the rose that is the Dark Tower's manifestation; through another, Mia steals Susannah's body and escapes with the orb itself. The same power that lets the ka-tet protect one world lets an enemy flee through another. King's point is that every passage between worlds cuts both ways—the tool that saves you is the tool that will eventually be taken from you and used against everything you love.
Characters:Father Donald CallahanSusannah Dean / MiaEddie DeanJake ChambersCalvin Tower
4Story as Reality
The book's most unsettling move is a paperback. Callahan, searching Calvin Tower's stored books in the Doorway Cave, finds 'Salem's Lot—a novel by Stephen King that recounts his own life, his battle with Kurt Barlow and the vampires, word for word. He whispers, 'I am a character in a story. I am not real,' and Roland steadies him: 'You're real enough, Callahan. Real enough to stand and fight.' The scene turns the whole series inside out: if Callahan's suffering was authored, then every choice in Mid-World is written somewhere. Roland's answer is the book's answer—reality is not what created you but what you do when the door closes and the next path is unknown.
Characters:Roland DeschainFather Donald CallahanCalvin Tower
5Bodies as Battlegrounds
The Wolves steal children and return them 'roont'—mind destroyed, bodies doomed to grow enormous and die young—so the raid is a war on persons through their bodies. Susannah's storyline mirrors it from within: the demon's coupling leaves her pregnant, and a second personality, Mia 'daughter of none,' rises inside her, fiercely guarding the child. By the end, Mia takes Susannah's body entirely and runs. King stages the same violation twice—once by masked machines in a rice patch, once inside a trusted friend's skull—and insists that the fight for a self, whether a town's children or one woman's mind, is the same fight.
Characters:Susannah Dean / Mia