The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah

Sween, Marissa, Trev, and the Internet at large all agreed - Song of Susannah wasn't very good. It's the sixth book of seven in The Dark Tower series and yet rather than a penultimate table-setter it reads like an afterthought wedged in between the fifth and seventh installments. It's "short," too, for a King book - just over 500 pages in length, only about half as long as the previous or following stories. And the ka-tet spends the bulk of the novel split up into three different groups each working toward its own goal.

But what I really want to spend this post focusing on is Roland and Eddie's arc, in which Stephen King himself becomes an important character. It's the most perfectly Stephen King development I've encountered in any Stephen King book I've read yet. Fans hated it for the most part, and I understand why, but honestly? I absolutely loved it. By writing himself into his own magnum opus, Stephen King destroyed any pretense that his story took place in an isolated world with consistent rules and conventions. Almost every issue I've had with the Dark Tower so far - and there have been plenty - has at its core been based on mistrust. Specifically, I've never been able to trust that King knows what he's doing, and throughout the series I've been unable to lose myself in this world and relate to its characters because, really, so much of it has just seemed made up on the fly with little regard for setting or following precedents.

(Here's my favorite example. Way back in the first book, a major character died and went to Roland's world, and then died in Roland's world and seemed lost forever. But then in the third book he was "brought back" into Roland's world from his own, implying that death just sends characters back and forth between realities - a convention that doesn't stick around at all. When the stakes are unclear regarding our shared ultimate fate - death - and when the means by which Roland and his friends can travel between worlds are never made clear or consistent, the whole illusion of a created "reality" suffers.)

Anyway, here's what happens in Song of Susannah, in a nutshell.

• Somewhere in "our" world, Eddie and Roland find a novel by "Stephen King" - Salem's Lot.
• They realize that the story inside describes the previous adventures of their friend Father Callahan, and discern that Stephen King made them happen by writing them.
• Eddie and Roland decide that they need to convince Stephen King to "write" a story in which they make it to the Dark Tower.
• They look for Stephen King in Maine in the 1970s, and once they find him, they convince him to write such a saga.
• Stephen King warns them that he doesn't really know how the story will unfold or where it may get sidetracked.
• Roland and Eddie return to Roland's world and their push for the Dark Tower; Stephen King spends the next twenty years writing The Dark Tower and dies in 1999 after getting hit by a car.

There's so much to unpack here, and so much to love.

First, this is pure and unadulterated metafiction. Author King had long warned readers that he really didn't know where the story would go - only that he knew he wanted to start it back in the '70s with The Gunslinger. But now he's forcing that very fact right into the story itself, making it canonical. King is literally making his own reservations about writing The Dark Tower part of The Dark Tower itself. King realizes his story has had its share of issues and he realizes it's been inconsistent. So what does he do? He retcons it into that story that it's been nothing more than, you know, a story. Any inconsistencies in the world of The Dark Tower are there because the world of The Dark Tower was fabricated by a flawed author - young Stephen King himself.

This is awesome. It's almost a shameless cop-out, but somehow it's brilliant. I can see why those who were heavily invested in The Dark Tower hated this development; if George R.R. Martin showed up in The Winds of Winter as some sort of god-force, I'd roll my eyes until they fell out of my head. But here? I've always been skeptical of this world and this story, and to see an author come right out and say, in the penultimate book of a thirty-year-old series, "fuck it, I'm going to acknowledge that I wrote this story by writing myself writing the story into the story" - I absolutely loved that. All my previous complaints about characters dying and moving between realities don't really matter once those same characters are revealed to be, in-universe, mere characters in a story written by a young horror author.

Furthermore, consider the implications going the other way. By letting Roland and Eddie into "his" (our) actual reality, King is suggesting that something literally from "out of this world" compelled him to begin writing The Dark Tower in the 1970s. And then you can go one step further (and ten layers deeper) and ask if King's inclusion of his own plane of existence in a fictional story somehow implies that our very reality is fictional in nature - or at least no more real than the one that includes Mid-World.

And then author King goes one step too far and reveals his "own" reality to be a fictional one by claiming that character King was killed by a car in 1999. Wait, what? Then who the hell wrote the last three books, finished and published in the early 2000s? Probably best not to go down this particular rabbit hole.

As usual, I'll close this one out with some stray observations - mostly nitpicks.

• It's implied that antagonistic "forces" are out to stop character King from writing and finishing his Dark Tower novels, and that the car accident that did really severely injure author King in 1999 was, in Dark Tower kayfabe, an assassination attempt on character King. But again, character King dies - so what's going to happen in The Dark Tower VII that allows our ka-tet to prevail?
• The ka-tet will obviously prevail because the stakes here are the very nature and structure of the universe. By leaning on "big battle between good and evil" like so many epic fantasy authors before him, Stephen King has all but telegraphed the final outcome of his last chapter.  After all, how can evil prevail here when King has outright connected the end of Roland's world with the end of our own? The fact that our own world is still here is kind of a "spoiler" in that sense, no? Anyway, with no suspense hanging on whether or not our heroes can stop the Crimson King from destroying the Dark Tower, my enjoyment of the upcoming thousand-page conclusion will hinge largely on character beats. I expect at least one of these characters to die - but will his or her send-off be sad and memorable?
• The Crimson King - the antagonist of this decades-in-the-making story - is referred to in our world as "Satan." Another beautiful "hey, fuck it" from Stephen King. He's had ample opportunity for defining, characterizing, and motivating this villain, and instead in the second-to-last book we just lear that the Crimson King is Satan. This is some Lost-Season-6-third-to-last-episode-Jacob-water-wheel-time-good-and-evil level panicking, folks.
• Prior to seeking out Stephen King, Roland and Eddie were in New York in order to process some paperwork and check in on the deeds for a certain lot in the city. Not compelling!
• The book's named after her, but Susannah doesn't really carry what I would call the A-story in this one; she's pregnant with (and possessed by) a demon baby and once again she's struggling with split personalities. The father might be Eddie, Roland, the Crimson King, or some odd combination of the three. Susannah's alter-ego this time around is Mia, and honestly I couldn't tell the difference between Mia and Detta. Mostly, Susannah's perspective just seems laden with ebonics and n-words. It's tough to take seriously in 2016, but at least when that stuff came from the early '80s I could dismiss it as "from another time." But Song of Susannah was published in 2004, so here it's a lot tougher to excuse.
• Speaking of racial insensitivity, here's a verbatim throwaway line from when Susannah meets two Asian tourists in New York who'd like her to take their picture. "You take pickcha, preese? Take pickcha me and my fliend?" Come on! Accents can be tough to handle on the page, and they're even harder to treat respectfully, but Stephen King just made an Asian guy say "preese" and "fliend." That Japanese speakers struggle with differentiating the English L and R is a known (and often mocked) phenomenon. But either their L's sound like R's or their R's sound like L's - they don't substitute the two sounds for each other! Bad, Stephen King. This is learry razy wliting! (See?)
• Jake, Oy, and Father Callahan also endured their own little arc, but it felt like the least essential one to me. They mostly just looked for Susannah in New York and ended up locking an important bauble in a locker in the basement in the World Trade Center in 1999. (Again, this book was published in 2004. Connect your own dots.)
• It's obvious and clear at this point that I won't be regarding The Dark Tower with nearly as much acclaim as Sweeney and Marissa when all is said and done, but I'm still glad I've worked my way through most of it. It's Stephen King's "biggest" accomplishment, and Stephen King is the most famous and imitated author in the English-speaking world by a country mile. At this point, I'm not too worried about whether or not he sticks the landing; this has been a sprawling, messy, and ugly performance from the get-go - interesting and unique as it's been. No, at this point what I'm worried about is just tackling the 1050-page conclusion. Stephen King rambles really well and ends things really poorly. It's just what he does! I'm guessing I'll hold off on this one at least until the summer... but man, I don't want it hanging over my head for much longer.