Despite all of that, it wasn't an awful book. It's not even my least favorite Dark Tower book, an honor will forever go to #4, Wizard and Glass, entirely due to the tedious, repetitive, and sappy 400 "young love" flashback.  I might have to rethink that though, since bored as I was with 400+ pages of "Roland's so in love he can't see how everything else is going to shit," at least Wizard and Glass gave us useful background information about Roland, Alain, and Cuthbert, had a good action scene or two, and advanced the overall plot both before and after the overlong middle section about Roland's puppy love. This one, #6, is basically 400 pages of set up for the big conclusion in DT7, which seems sure to feel rushed, given the pace that the saga has progressed at, thus far.

Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah, Stephen King
Plot: 6
Concept: 8
Writing Quality/Flow: 5/5
Characters: 6
Horror: 3
Fun Factor: 4
Page Turner: 5
Re-readability: 5
Overall: 5

These rating categories are explained here.

Since the only really interesting thing in all of Song of Susannah is a big twist, I've gotta be spoilery to discuss it.

There are spoilers ahead, all the way through the end of this review.

The big plot twist is that Stephen King himself shows up as a character in the book. I thought it was an impossibly-cheesy idea at first, but the way he worked it in actually made sense. Roland and Eddie end up in Maine in the 1980s, and while tracking down some odd disturbances in reality, they find out that most of the weird happenings have come about since famous author Stephen King moved into the area. They go talk to him, and in this part King writes about King, describing himself as he was back then, in rather unflattering terms. It's not a retroactive autohagiography; the King in the book is out of shape, confused, on drugs, unhealthy, etc. It's hard to read it without thinking that King the author is describing King the character in such negative terms to defuse potential criticism, but maybe he's just done a lot of hard thinking about what a fuck up he was back in those days, since that section of the book almost smacked of self-loathing. A subject I'm quite knowledgeable about.

The book plot spiral twists tighter when the book version of King sees Roland and freaks out, eventually fainting, since after all, Roland is a character from a book he wrote, come to scowling, gunslinging life. He doesn't react to Eddie, since after all, he hasn't conceived of or written book 2 in the Dark Tower yet, which is where Eddie comes in. And even if he had, Eddie has changed so much in appearance between book 2 and book 6 that King might not have recognized him at all.

Anyway, Eddie and Roland talk to King, and it gets mind-bending. Since they're just characters in a book series King is going to write, do they really exist? How can they have done things he has not yet written them doing? If he doesn't write more, will they cease to exist entirely? Is he creating them with his writing, or are they doing what they do and he's somehow getting their story psychically and writing about them as a sort of unwitting biographer?

They end up hypnotizing King and leaving him with ideas to get going on the DT series again, while worrying that he's smoking and drinking too much and might drop dead before he finishes writing it all down.  This is significant, since in the epilogue of the novel there's a faux news article about King, but in his world he died in 1999, when the minivan rammed him on the country road. In our world he survived it, barely, and he's obviously gone on to finish the DT series, but since he's dead in the book world, long before finishing the series, what does that mean? He dies before book 6 was even written though, and since his death is detailed in book 6, try to wrap your head around that one. It's quite a twist, but is it a good twist? I'm not sure.

Overall, I'm pretty displeased with how books 5 and 6 went in the DT series. I was happier with books 3 and 4; Roland and party wandering and facing occasional challenges and growing as a unit. I didn't like the long story about Roland's childhood in book 4, but at least it was on topic, so to speak. Book 5 wasn't bad, but it was a tremendously-long build up to a short battle with some robots on horses; robots that were, at best, of tertiary importance to the overall saga.  Book 6 was much shorter and far less interesting of itself, didn't have even a short scene of any of the powerful arch villains, other than hints of some evil dudes with Susannah.

Basically, King seems to have gotten bored with Roland and his guns against bad guys. There was a Roland's guns vs. many bad guys scene in book 6, but it felt perfunctory, unrealistic, and entirely preordained. (Of course they'd be ambushed, and of course they'd survive it. The days when Roland's party suffered casualties seem to be far in the past, though we can at least hope for some loss and failure in book 7, when it all wraps up and the stakes will be highest.) The major conflicts in book 6 were Susannah vs. the weird ghost spirit woman who is living in her body and is magically pregnant with Roland's own semen from several centuries ago, and Roland/Eddie vs. time paradoxes and the young Stephen King. There was almost a conflict between Jake/Callahan and a room full of weirdly mutated high society evil creatures, but that plot line was basically ignored through the entire book until it was just about to come to a head, when the book ended.

One way to look at it is to think that everything is all set up for an amazing book 7. The other way is to feel cheated that book 6 is just a long prologue to book 7, and that nothing of any real note actually happened in the surprisingly-short book 6.

Besides my disappointment at book 6, I'm not happy with the way the plot is progressing. I figured that in book 5, the whole time in Calla and battle with the wolves would take up no more than 1/4 or 1/3 of the book. I didn't need book 4 revisited, with Roland and party hitting some hick town, discovering there was great evil beneath the surface, and eventually getting around to battling it, hundreds of pages later. I suppose that it could have been worse; most of the novel could have been devoted to Jake's first love and how amazing it was to be in love and how nothing else seemed to matter anymore. That wasn't far off; he fell in very strong like with his first real friend, who ended up being sacrificed to the dark gods of tragic endings, much as Roland's GF was in book 4. The problem with those plot turns, for me at least, was that I never gave a damn about either Roland's love or Jake's friend, and therefore didn't care when they died. In fact I was basically happy that they were dead and no longer contributing their dead weight to the tale.

I don't see how they're anywhere near reaching the actual tower in book 7, how all of the ongoing plot threads will be resolved neatly, and how I can possibly be satisfied with the ultimate ending to the series and Roland's epic quest. But at least King wrote the books quickly, so we don't have to wait another 10 years to find out. 

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