"NO ONE EVER DOES LIVE HAPPILY EVER AFTER, BUT WE LEAVE THE CHILDREN TO FIND THAT OUT FOR THEMSELVES": LIMITED FIRST EDITION SIGNED BY KING AND THE ILLUSTRATOR

KING, Stephen. The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla. Hampton Falls, New Hampshire: Donald M. Grant, 2003. Octavo, original white cloth, original dust jackets, publisher's slipcase. $2500.

Limited first edition, featuring full-page color and black-and-white illustrations by Bernie Wrightson, number 739 of 1350 copies printed, signed on the limitation page by both King and Wrightson.

"The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed." With those words—inspired by Robert Browning's Childe Roland and Sergio Leone's film, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and typed on an old Underwood in 1970—King struck the initial notes of a saga 34 years in the completion. "Many of my fictions," King reflected, "refer back to Roland's world and Roland's story… My idea was to use the Dark Tower stories as a kind of summation, a way of unifying as many of my previous stories as possible…" These novels, the work of a lifetime, are "different in tone from most of Stephen King's work—and perhaps more demandingly inventive than usual—these have an undeniable mythic charge" (Clute & Nichols, 666). "Each of the novels is a mélange of motifs and ideas borrowed from horror, fantasy, Western and science fiction… King's narrative strategy and plot mechanics for the individual installments of the series show a wide variety of influences, ranging from L. Frank Baum's Oz novels to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales… [King indulges] some of his most fanciful and extravagant horrors" (Fantasy and Horror 6-194). Wolves of the Calla, the fifth book in the epic Dark Tower series, features a dramatic reappearance by 'Salem's Lot character Father Callahan. Illustrated by legendary comic book artist Bernie Wrightson, co-creator of Swamp Thing and illustrator of the graphic novel adaptation of King's Creepshow. Brooks A88.

A fine copy.