by Jay Wilburn
The plan is to reread all of Stephen King’s works in the order that they were published. Richard Chizmar of Cemetery Dance had the vision. I’m doing it because I am a writer and I want to improve my fiction. And I love Stephen King’s stories. I think there is something to be learned through this process.
You can also go back to the beginning and read Before Carrie or any of my other posts up through this one and beyond by checking out this link to the Master List of all my #StephenKingRevisited posts.
Song of Susannah is dedicated to King’s wife. For Tabby who knew when it was done. The subtitle of this book is Reproduction.
“Fair is whatever God wants to do.” Good line.
A Beamquake shakes the fabric of reality. Not the Bear to Turtle beam or all our characters would be dead. Maybe it was Fish to Rat that collapsed. There are only maybe two beams left. If one more collapses, all the universes will be plunged into unending darkness, taking all existence down. No pressure.
Our heroes must make two trips through the door for two pieces of business. They are split up and ka scrambles their plans up for them.
Dying of a busted bladder from holding to too long is one of those pieces of bullshit you know is false, but absolutely believe at the same time. That’s a great bit of business in the story to describe superstition.
Susannah invents a mental control room. King used this technique in Dreamcatcher as well.
King’s theme from The Stand of magic giving way to machines causing worlds to fall into Great Exhaustions is played out large in this volume as part of the history of Mid World.
Susannah, and her strange passenger taking over her body, slouches to give birth to a monster of some sort, something born of demons, but also the child of someone else. This birth is to create a man/monster to slay the last gunslinger, to deliver this superweapon, super-killer, super-beam-breaker into the hands of the agents of the Crimson King. Richard P Sayer of Callahan’s backstory appears to be orchestrating all this.
Our gunslingers can’t have an easy day. Don’t you just hate it when in gangsters you already killed in one universe are waiting to ambush you in another?
Our characters believe they have found the “True World” or the one closest to the center of the Tower. Here losses are permanent. There are no do-overs. There is no going back to a time you’ve already visited. Those are the rules … at least for now. *looks back over the previous books* *decides not to pull at any threads*
“Before the question had occurred again, death had slipped between them.” Good line.
“The column of truth has a hole in it.” Another great line. Some people will not believe a thing no matter how much proof you offer.
King, the author, hints over and over that Stephen King, the character in the story, was supposed to die in this universe, the one with no do-overs. His writing of Roland’s story is significant to the protection of the Tower. As King, the character, writes, it opens the eye of the Crimson King upon him and places a target on him. A death bag, like the ones described in Insomnia, hangs around him, related to his addictions.
King actually wrote himself into the story with great skill. It read very, very well and was some of my favorite stuff in this volume of the series.
The gun is the way of damnation and salvation, we are told. All the same in the end.
There is a rather over-the-top stereotypical portrayal of Japanese tourists at one point that distracts from the story, in my opinion. King made it all the way to page 307 before he threw in his first “honey chile.” We get one more before the book is over.
There are monsters in the todash darkness between worlds. These lightless creatures will hunt the ruined void following the collapse of all worlds into screaming nothingness.
In flights of fancy, as our combating women within one body find a place to palaver, we see a castle, a dead village, the Wolves’ Dogan of dogans, and the Devil’s Ass Crack waiting at the end of the tracks in End World.
The doctor bugs from the tent of vampires in the Dark Tower short story “The Little Sisters of Eluria” are back, too. We have a regular reunion of the worst of the worst underlings from the Dark Tower universe.
The novel crashes toward the birth of the cursed child with characters poised to enter a deadly place for another battle.
O, Discordia!
The novel ends with 30 pages of a writer’s journal that seems to blend the experiences of Stephen King the author and the story character. It’s largely a history of the writing of the Dark Tower series. King comments as he prepares to write Susannah’s pregnancy in the story, that a pregnancy where no one knows who the father is sends the story down the tubes. It sucks as a plot device, he declared in a meta moment. The van accident in June of 1999 appears poised to turn out differently than in our world.
One more turn of the path and then we reach the clearing.
My next post in this series will be Before The Dark Tower which will be linked on the Master List of all my Stephen King Revisited posts.
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