Well, I read the first few pages of Wolves of the Calla online, and now I have to go out and get the book. Dangit, I have been trying to avoid buying it in hardcover! Oh, well. Intense books, man, intense. Roland's world has always had a certain eerie familiarity to it. It reminds me of those days as a child when I would go to the school and play on the playground when it was closed, in the summers or on the weekends. Sometimes you would get really close to the ground and look at the dusty ground with its struggling grass. It was always quiet, a palpable kind of quiet that was never quite dulled by any noises a kid could make, and the schools always had a sort of menacing presence when they were empty. Schools are places of dark secrets and powerful emotion, I think. That's why they're always so creepy after everyone's gone. Roland's world feels like that - quiet, with occasional hints of a dark menace just below the threshold of perceptibility. Except sometimes it bubbles over; and there's something going on that you have to do; and people keep trying to stop you; and all the daylight in world doesn't dim that feeling of something watching you, waiting to draw you into its world of dark secrets until the outside fades away and you roam the halls of empty facts forever. Man, I need to get some sleep. :)