Mia – Farrow – Farrowing

Excerpt from my Real-Time Review of ‘The Wolves of the Calla’ (The Dark Tower V – by Stephen King)

VII. Nocturne, Hunger

“For a moment the tip of its twitching tale stuck up, and then that was gone, too.”

Mia subsumes Susannah’s ‘dream/time/place’ me again in the Castle of Todash – not Detta-ridden, not Odetta-enhanced – with a bellyful of the “chap” (cf: cowboy’s ‘chaps’?).  This is a conjuration of a nightmare, genuinely one of the most rat-roasted and nightmarish nightmares in literature, I guess, even in the broad sunshine of this morning during which I read it: filling me with a foreboding farrowed by disgust. Strong writing.  And I do forgive Stevie King’s assumed omniscience for openly keeping deliberate secrets from the reader in the previous chapter – because we are here  imbued with a different foreboding, i.e. that the members themselves of the ka-tet are now actually keeping secrets from each other.  Each with a tale that twitches then is gone, as if never told. But Oy, meantime, seems to read minds as well as these words and helps Boy Jake with secrets of the book’s plot that Oy knows better than its characters – i.e. regarding his new friend Benny’s father’s connection with Andy and with….  But that would be telling. Spoilers, not secrets. [Re Mia’s farrowing in my terminology – ‘farrowing’: giving birth to a litter of pigs. Cf: the pig roast in the nightmare. Wow!] (4 Apr 11)