The Dark Tower VI: The Song of Susannah

This and the companion pieces are less reviews than they are a sort of reader's diary of my experiences encountering Stephen King's monumental fantasy/western/science fiction tale The Dark Tower. It's made up of seven books, each of which I read at different times in my life. These are some reflections on the separate volumes, and I will be assuming that the reader has already read them or does not care if what he or she reads spoils the books or their endings. That is, of course, assuming that these little exercises have readers to begin with ;-) 

Again, and I will stress this so that no one may find the experience of learning Roland's story and reading The Dark Tower lessened by knowing what comes next, THERE BE SPOILERS HERE.

You've been alerted.

When last we saw our group of traveling heroes, they had saved the children of the town of Calla Bryn Sturgis from abduction by raiders called Wolves. We had also seen a decided rebound of the Dark Tower series, as Wolves of the Calla was easily its strongest entry since The Drawing of the Three, way back at volume two.

We dared to hope that this monumental meta-work that spanned most of Stephen King's imagination was back on track after the lackluster The Waste Lands and the awful Wizard and Glass. But just as the heroic quartet find their joy short-lived when they learn Susannah Dean has given herself over to the former demon Mia so the supernatural being can bear a child, the reader finds his or her hopes equally brief. Song is King back giving in to every undisciplined authorial impulse and chaseable rabbit he can find.

Although Susannah has taken the world-traveling mystic talisman Black Thirteen through the doorway with her into a world like ours, Roland, Eddie and Jake, joined by Father Don Callahan (originally of 'Salem's Lot, Maine and 'Salem's Lot, King's second book) use the combined magic of the Manni to open it again and make an attempt to rescue her.

Eddie and Roland will track Susannah to New York City in 1999. Jake and Callahan will travel to Maine in 1977 to secure the purchase of a vacant NYC corner lot from a man named Calvin Tower. Tower's lot holds a single magical rose that links to the Dark Tower itself in some important way, and if the group can purchase it before agents of the Crimson King do, they still have some chance at stopping his plan to break the worlds. But the magic goes awry, and each pair goes to the other team's destination: Jake and Callahan will have to face the Crimson King's lieutenant, the Man in Black and rescue Susannah, while Roland and Eddie have to track Tower.

We also pick up Susannah's story, seeing her struggle with Mia and with her own multiple personalities as she waits word from the King's minions.

And as mentioned before, we see the author King revert to his more recent habits of slathering his story over meandering pages better measured in acreage than word count. After 40,000-plus words, for example, Susannah/Mia has...answered a phone call. Sure, she showed up in our world, but we already knew that's where she was headed so I'm not spotting King that one. The rest of the time Susannah fights Mia and takes control, then Mia fights Susannah and her old alter Detta Walker and takes control, and then Susannah/Detta fight Mia and then they journey to a faux-Mordor (the land of the Crimson King, to be precise) for their expository palaver that explains everything that's happening to her via retconning several earlier incidents and blah blah blah.

The upshot is that the coming baby is also Roland's child because the demon with which Susannah had to couple when Jake was brought back into the group in The Waste Lands was the same demon with which Roland coupled in The Gunslinger. Mia was an incorporeal being desperate to bear a child. Walter, the Man in Black, promised her she could if she gave up her bodiless state and became mortal. As the birth of her baby or "chap" approaches, she begins to exert more and more control over Susannah's body and comes closer to separating herself physically from Susannah.

Mia also tells us that the trouble in Roland's world, its "moving on" that's wrecked so much, is part of the loss of magic in the world. People turned away from magic and faith and belief, relying instead on pure reason and technology to give the world its meaning. The problem was that such things break down, and when they are gone there will be neither the ancient magic nor technology to order things leaving everything in the chaos sought by the Crimson King.

We'll deal with Eddie and Roland in a minute, but first we pick up Jake and Callahan. Along with Oy the billy-bumbler, they've appeared in 1999 New York City and they have to take on the role of rescuing Susannah even though Eddie and Roland would have been the better fighters to do so. They have a brief encounter with a street preacher -- one of those slightly or more-than-slightly off religious folks who populate King's novels on the fringes -- who also met Susannah/Mia and learn where she has been. They retrieve the Black Thirteen glass and store it in a locker at the World Trade Center, where it will presumably be destroyed in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Then they ready themselves to attack a restaurant called The Dixie Pig, a front for the forces the Crimson King is using for his work in the world and where they know Susannah is being held. That's it for them in this book.

Eddie and Roland show up in Maine in 1977, only to find themselves under attack as soon as they arrive. Mia, it seems, revealed their plans to Walter who moved against them using mobsters he had also been working with to push Calvin Tower to sell his vacant lot containing the mystic rose we've mentioned before. In a furious gun-battle, Roland and Eddie wipe out most of the mobsters, some of whom Eddie knows because during his time in the world, in the 1980s, he will run drugs for this same outfit. Eddie's wounded and some bystanders are killed, but a man named John Cullum helps them escape. He also tells them of strange happenings in the area, of people who seem to appear from nowhere, dressed strangely and speaking unknown languages, before disappearing just as quickly. These "walk-ins" seem to be concentrated around a town nearby and have increased in frequency since an author named Stephen King moved into a house there. The pair have seen a book King wrote called 'Salem's Lot which features the exact story Father Callahan told them about his own past, so they resolve to visit King after they've seen Calvin Tower.

Tower is eventually convinced to sell them the vacant lot containing the mystic rose, although he is a weak man and demurs even when Eddie reminds him of the dangers posed to him by the mobsters who were pushing him to sell the lot to their employers, where it would fall under the control of Walter and the Crimson King. We spend a couple thousand words dancing through Eddie getting angry at Tower and Tower being petulant. Then the gunslingers visit Stephen King and learn that not only did he write about Father Callahan, whom they know as a real person, but he also wrote a story about Roland's quest for the Dark Tower itself. He's only finished the volume we know as The Gunslinger by this time in his life, so he doesn't know Eddie. But he does know Roland, and that knowledge allows him to believe their story and to tell them how he feels that some force is pushing against his completing it. Eddie and Roland believe that force to be the Crimson King, using a bad childhood memory of the author's to scare him out of writing the full Dark Tower story. Roland hypnotizes King so that he will finish the story as he is able.

That's pretty much it for the action -- Song vies with Wizard and Glass for the least amount of forward movement in the overall story. We start with Susannah/Mia about to bear a child that somehow combines Roland's essence with demonic forces and we end the same way. We start with the gunslingers needing to purchase Calvin Tower's empty lot containing the mystic, tower-connected rose and they do. Wizard bears the burden of thousands of words of clunky rambling backstory that is in itself longer than the whole Song of Susannah, but Song counters with one of the most egregious authorial pretensions available to the modern best-selling writer: The placement of himself or herself in the story in a pivotal role. Obviously, no story happens without the writer, but King chooses to make certain we get that by incorporating that reality into the Dark Tower saga. That takes an ego almost as big as one of these books, which is saying something.

It's also a clue as to one of the things that drags so much on the later Dark Tower novels and much of King's own output since he published It back in 1986. He quite simply can't get out of the way. In the bloated best-sellers that he's been churning out since then, his lack of storytelling discipline and his publisher's unwillingness to edit him into smaller and less profitable chunks clots the narrative arteries and prevents clear streaming of the story's arc. In Song, he goes a step further and shows up as a crucial factor in the quest for the Tower.

He's also part of the cliffhanger -- a coda excerpts the journals of the Song version of King that shows him publishing the first four volumes of the Tower saga before being killed when hit by a van in 1999 -- the same day in which the real-life King was seriously injured in exactly that kind of accident. But we know from Roland and Eddie that King must finish the story in order to help the quest succeed, so what will happen now that he's dead? Moreover, we understand that the alternate world where the gunslingers meet King is a sort of hub to the multiverse accessible through the Dark Tower -- one in which time flows only one way and can't be reversed. They can't undo King's death as they have changed other incidents during the story.

Even though Song of Susannah is the shortest Dark Tower book since the second one, it desperately needs compression. Book V, Wolves of the Calla, is mostly a self-contained story that wouldn't be well-served with Song's events tacked onto it. And the series' final book, The Dark Tower, was published at almost 290,000 words, which means it surely didn't need any more and which leaves us thinking that maybe Song did indeed have to be a stand-alone.

But that assumes that The Dark Tower -- both the saga as a whole and the upcoming book 7 -- don't need a stout pruning, and I'm betting that's an assumption that won't stand.