Animalistic novels face fates at hands of beloved authors

All Things Literary

Martin Amis' latest novel, "Yellow Dog," is a brand of novel structured on a great premise that becomes all but lost as the reader keeps the pages turning. In this case, the premise is that of male devolution from a respectable, civilized family man to that of a sex-crazed, explosively violent brute. It's a great idea, and one that sounds at home among the rapscallions, Epicureans and moral criminals who populate Amis' previous novels like "Money."

It is the character of Xan Meo who devolves over the course of the winding, character-swapping narrative. After some drinks at a local bar, he is accosted by goons and severely beaten. As a result of head trauma, the family man reverts into a creature whose impulses for sex and outbursts of anger cannot be quelled. Meo even attempts to rape his wife not once, but twice.

Charting Meo's plummet into the base nature of his gender makes for an interesting plot strand and, severed from the rest of the novel, would make a perfect short story or novella. But with the introduction of two other primary characters — the reprehensible tabloid journalist Clint Smoker and a fictive English king attempting to keep scandal away from the royal family — the novel seems to leave Meo behind at times when he should be the central focus of the story. Of all the accidental and self-made misogynists in this novel, he is the most interesting, sympathetic one — and the most forgivable.

There are no misogynists to speak of in Stephen King's "Wolves of the Calla" — only monsters. The fifth volume in the seven-part horror/fantasy/sci-fi Dark Tower series — King's magnum opus — finds said creatures preying on a local community in the farmlands of the mythical Mid-World. To go into a retrospective of the previous four books would require cutting into the sports section; suffice it to say, that King's work centers on the last member of a clan of gunslingers and his posse (called a "ka-tet" in King-speak) traveling across the highlands and wastelands of a dying realm, searching for the Dark Tower.

For those of you who haven't heard of or read the brochure, the Dark Tower is the nexus of all time. Saving the local community from the threat of the ravaging wolves — technically horse-riding raiders in wolf masks — is nothing but a pit stop for the gunslinger Roland and his fellowship.

Sadly, such an episode shouldn't take more than 700 pages to resolve. This book is enormous, long-winded and severely underedited. As a dedicated fan of King, it's a shame to see his talent devolving like a character out of Amis' "Yellow Dog." His writing here is the worst it has been in recent memory, with characters and conversations coming off as wooden and a narrative that's bloated like a month-old corpse.

With almost every chapter, it seems the ka-tet gets sidetracked from its mission of saving the community and carrying on to find the Dark Tower. Threat upon threat arises, much of it awash in back story, so that when the ka-tet's confrontation with the wolves occurs, it is anticlimactic because another threat is just around the corner.

This installment ends with both a cliffhanger and a heavy stench of self-referencing that would make "Lolita" author Vladimir Nabokov smile (or wince). Is this fictional world a nexus for all worlds, both real and fictive? And, if so, what part does King play in his own story?

The idea is only hinted at, and the answers remain to be seen. I wouldn't be surprised if the end result were as disappointing as this mega-sized portion is. The Dark Tower series concludes in 2004 with "Song of Susannah" and "The Dark Tower."