Song of Susannah

Stephen King

It's quite ironic that, less than a year after announcing his impending retirement, Mr. King has graced us with one of the best pieces of writing he's put out in years (excepting "Blind Willie," one of the strongest stories of his career). After a string of books ranging from the mediocre (From a Buick 8, Wolves of the Calla) to the out-and-out bad (Dreamcatcher), during which, one can assume, King decided to hang up his hat, we get Song of Susannah.

The sixth book in the Dark Tower series starts just after the end of Wolves of the Calla (so much so that the last sentence in Wolves of the Calla and the first sentence in Song of Susannah could have been part of the same chapter in the same book), and takes place over the next... couple of days? Time's getting weirder in the spaces between Mid-World and Earth. Roland's decline into age-related illness is speeding up, making the quest for the Tower more urgent. Callahan is now part of the crew. So's Mia, albeit in a different capacity. (One wonders, idly, why Roland didn't take Rosa with him, if he took Callahan.) And, in his own odd way, Stephen King himself, which became obvious about fifty pages from the end of Wolves of the Calla.

That last bit sounds cheesy, doesn't it? And it's hard to tell whether it is or not, really, until the final few pages of Song of Susannah. But to his credit, King paints himself as quite the dysfunctional deity, which was by turns amusing and horrifying (given the autobiographical quality of the scenes, which are mostly in-more-detail pieces of the self-abusive parts of hie life he detailed in On Writing). My final thought on it was that it probably could have been done better, but certainly could have been done worse (it blew Jonathan Safran Foer's overhyped and barely readable Everything Is Illuminated out of the water).

So the question is, why's Song of Susannah so much better than the rest of his recent books? It's not necessarily because he's writing in a different style (he had the outline in place when he wrote Wolves of the Calla, too), or because he's changed anything about the way he portrays characters and events. In fact, the only real change I can discern in Song of Susannah is that it's... shorter. Yep. King, who has been working without an editor who does more than token work since the complete and uncut version of The Stand sold eighty-seven trillion copies (and rightly; the editor who worked on the original version of the novel hopefully is picking cigarette butts out of a gutter now), takes a special moment to go out of his way to thank the person who's edited the last few Dark Tower books. Whoever she is, she's gotten it into gear and really started whipping King's writing into shape. Song of Susannah is better-paced, more tense, a lot more visual without losing that special King ability to draw characters and scenes in the space of a few lines, and, well, just overall better. He also adds in a new (to him, anyway) dimension here, with both Roland and Eddie sticking around Earth long enough for them to really smack into the wall of culture shock (usually, they've been making quick trips up till now for one specific thing, while this time they keep getting derailed in almost Luis Bunuel fashion), and King handles it with a gentle wit that's been missing from his novels for years.

The abbreviated scope of this novel, combined with the brilliance of "Blind Willie" from a couple of years ago, gives me some small hope that instead of retiring, King will focus on what got him noticed in the first place, the punch-to-the-gut short stories that showed King both being effective and working with an economy of words he's completely neglected for twenty years or thereabouts. But one way or the other, this left me salivating for the seventh Dark Tower book, and what might or might not come after.