A few hours spent at Barnes & Noble (because the library isn’t open on summer weekends) and a bit of late-night reading, and I have finished Song of Susannah, the sixth and next-to-last book in Stephen King’s Dark Tower series.

First, something general with no spoilers: in introductions to his Dark Tower books, Stephen King makes it very clear that The Dark Tower is his opus, his One Big Thing, the story that he feels most passionate about. I haven’t come close to reading everything he’s written, but I’ve gone through a good bit of it, including (obviously) all published Dark Tower books. I can definitely say that they’re my favorites. As a whole, The Dark Tower is completely different from everything else he’s done. There are six parts out now, and nearly every store and library has a few of them. So I don’t understand is why no one seems to have read them.

Sure, I’ve talked to other Dark Tower fans, but the vast majority of people who tell me they love Stephen King shake their heads when I ask about The Dark Tower. The first book is a bit boring, yes, but the others are beautiful. I think they’re of a higher quality than the rest of his work, overall. The Dark Tower isn’t just about a single set of characters and settings. It’s about everything. It travels through countless variations of the past, present, and future, of our world and all the others. It is the metastory, the story that all his other tales exist in. I could go on and make this an entry all its own, but I’ll stop. Read the books, though. They’re amazing.

Further discussion of the book will go behind the cut, as I’m going to be dealing with some pretty major plot points. Don’t be an idiot and read it if you don’t want to know what happens.

The thing that really put me off in the book: Stephen King himself makes an appearence. He’s a character in his own book. A much younger version of himself, sure, but there he is. And he’s not just a regular guy, either. He’s one of the Beams holding up the Dark Tower (if I remember correctly)! When I first read it, I thought, “Either this guy is on the ultimate ego trip, or this book just got pretty weird- not that it wasn’t weird enough already.”

After his part in the book was done (disregarding the Coda), I felt a little better about it. King is the creator of the Roland, Eddie, Oy … everyone. I’ll call them the Tet Corp. In a way, he is the god of their world - in our reality. But in the books, the Tet Corp. actually exists and he is just the man who was chosen, somehow, to set their story down on paper. He didn’t create it - at least that’s how it seemed to me. I’m having a hard time putting it into words. By the end of the book you get this idea of the interconnectedness of everything ever mentioned in the book and the fragility of it all and somehow, that makes the whole thing make sense. Moving on, because I can’t explain myself.

The ending was frustrating. I remember the exact same thing happeneing in another book, but I can’t think of which one it was. “The exact same thing” being, of course, spending an entire book waiting for one thing to happen … and then finding that you have to wait for the next book to come out. Quite a lot happened in the book, but I still feel like it was an interlude. I was expecting Susannah to have the baby at the beginning, and then the rest to continue the plot. After all, there’s only one book left. They still have to have the baby, get out of the Dixie Pig, reunite the Tet Corp., get to Thunderclap, hang out there, and actually do the whole Dark Tower thing. And cute li’l Baby Mordred (badly, named, I think - wasn’t impressed with that) has to kill his daddy, or be killed, or something.

I wonder how autobiographical the Coda was. I’ve always wondered about King being an alcoholic, since so many of his characters are. I thought it was very interesting how he died at the end. Why did he do that? Was he making a statement about how the future of the world is icompletely in the hands of the gunslingers?

Two last, frivilous things: 1) “Wordslinger.” I love that. 2) Some part of me wants to be in a situation where it’s appropriate to look someone in the eye and solemnly say, “Y’know, it would be better if we weren’t taken alive. If it comes to that.” All my pacifism goes out the window when characters go bravely into fights they don’t expect to come out of. I’m going down, but I’m taking them with me.