August 3, 2015
This is the sixth (and second-to-last) of The Dark Tower series. It's the lowest rated book in the series on Goodreads, but I personally liked it. The bulk of the controversy seems to stem from the fact that King includes himself as a character in this book.
I don't know yet how effective King's inclusion in the story was. What's intriguing, though, is that this King is in another world very similar to this one, except that he dies in 1999, as he's in the middle of writing the series. One of the most significant and well-known events in King's life is that he was hit by a van that year. In real life, he recovered; he wrote about his experience a bit in On Writing, since he wrote it during this time. In Song of Susannah, he doesn't survive that accident. This will certainly affect the events in the final volume, since the ka-tet realizes that they are products of his imagination...or, at the very least, he's the vessel or messenger used to tell this story.
Well, it's not any more bizarre than anything else we've experienced in this series. It's meta, in a way. What is reality, anyway? "We could be in a turtle's dream, floating around in outer space." Or living in a universe that is balanced on a great turtle's shell. Eddie and the others have a bit of existential pondering when they realize they're characters...but what they experience is real and important to them. I sort of hope they get into this more in next (final!) book, though there's a lot of action going in.
Just a quick run-down of the events. The ka-tet gets help from the Manni to get through the door. Eddie is distraught when he and Roland end up in Maine in 1977 and Jake, Oy, and Callahan end up in New York in 1999 to find Susannah, but he soon realizes that ka played out that way for a reason. The story follows Susannah and Mia (Detta's around as well) as Susannah learns more about Mia; not a new personality, but a spirit send to inhabit her by the low men to bear the child that they intend to use to kill Roland. There's a lot going on there, and the main story ends as Susannah and Mia are going into labor.
I appreciate this book for what it is: the set-up to the final volume. I intend to pick it up at the library today and get to it. I hope that the crew will all be reunited soon, because shit is getting more and more (un)real.
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