William S. Burroughs once wrote, "It's the little touches that make a future solid enough to be destroyed." Over three decades of writing, Stephen King seems to have taken that epigram to heart. The quality of his output varies, but his best work has always been built around painstaking detail, and around characters rendered so realistically that it hurts when they meet their frequently ugly ends. In recent years, however, King's books have often centered more on that detail than on actual plot. Looking at the periodic installments in King's epic Dark Tower series, it's easy to believe that he's putting all his time, focus, and care into those, while churning out plotless quirkfests like From A Buick 8 and The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon during his lunch breaks. Wolves Of The Calla, the fifth of seven planned Dark Tower novels, continues the riveting story of Roland Deschain, the last gunslinger in a dark and disintegrating world inspired by Robert Browning's poem "Childe Roland To The Dark Tower Came." The book's core story is unabashedly drawn from Akira Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai. Roland and the odd group of heroes he's gathered over the course of four previous books are called upon to defend a farming community against a group of seemingly unstoppable raveners who periodically steal half the area's children, returning them weeks later as helpless imbeciles, permanently ruined–or "roont," as the local parlance would have it. Around the margins of that plotline, King continues to develop his key characters and the story of the actual Dark Tower, a mysterious place at the center of overlapping realities. Like Robert Heinlein, King is winding down his career by drawing more and more of his work into a single mythos: Dark Tower references and plotlines have become commonplace in his other works, while Wolves itself continues the tale of a key character from King's 1975 novel Salem's Lot. In similar fashion, the Dark Tower books cross into a variety of realities, allowing King to play with the form and themes of classic Westerns in a book full of vampires, robots, dimension-hopping priests, streetwise New York addicts, and even Harry Potter references. The result is self-indulgent, but it transcends genre in clear and compelling fashion, with all the charismatic charm of King's classic work, and a deeper sense of emotional maturity. It also provides the perfect framework for his laziest and most prevalent stylistic quirk: the inner voices that inform his characters' actions and clarify their motivations. In books like Rose Madder, those voices become weak deus ex machinas; in the fate-and-destiny-heavy, resonant world of the Dark Tower novels, the same voices seem a perfectly natural part of the stricken landscape. Like King's best work, Wolves Of The Calla is a perfectly entertaining yarn with indelible characters and an eye for the little details that help make a fantasy world solid enough to seem real. But even beyond that, it's part of a vast continuum that seems like the perfect capper for King's career. If, as he claims he will, King retires once this series runs its course, he'll at least have the satisfaction of ending a notable run with a powerful bang.