Hello everyone, welcome to the Stephen King cast, one man's musings on the works of Stephen King.

Each week, I'll review one entry in the bibliography of Stephen King in the chronological order of publication.

And this week, guys, this week, this episode kicks off a three-episode examination on the final journey of our quartet as King wraps up the story that he began when he was 19 years old, and the end begins here with 2003s, The Wolves of the Kala, which is then followed by the Song of Susanna and ultimately the Dark Tower.

When looking at them, you should treat these final three novels as a whole.

Basically, they function as a trilogy capper to a decades-long adventure novel.

With Stephen King's 1999 car crash, the path that we had been on swirved into a patch

of woods that we hadn't known existed, and our route to the dark tower became a lot stranger

than we had anticipated. Now, I'm going to be honest, guys, I'm having a little difficulty

with this one.

I knew this was a big moment for me.

In the spring of 2014, when I sat down and I thought about the possibility of making a podcast about Stephen King, I thought about the challenges and the excitement that would come from such an

endeavor.

And note that the challenges and that from which I would derive excitement

are not by nature mutually exclusive.

Knowing I would have an opportunity to say every thought I've ever had about it

was one of those driving factors.

But I'd say that the biggest factor

was re-examining the Dark Tower series,

placing each of the installments into the context of a complete vision,

a vision that King begins to wrap up with the wolves of the Kala.

A large part of me was excited to reread wolves because, as I've insinuated in other reviews,

my feelings on the final three books in a series that had taken up so much of my life was mixed.

...