(6/29/2004) Sometimes it's hard for me, being the only person in my group of friends to be a true DT junkie, not having anyone I can truly discuss the books with. However, "Song of Susannah" is one of those novels where a person doesn't exactly have to be a fan to talk about some of the ideas it conveys. Duty, personal responsibility, sacrifice, theories of existence, coming-of-age, the bold (and somewhat unnerving) idea of God as being just some sort of middle-man for an even greater force... all of these things are qualified fodder for any snooty literary chat circle.

Of course, as a novel on its own, "Song of Susannah" seems more like just an appetizer to that bad boy that some Tower fans have been waiting over two decades for, Volume 7 of the series, "The Dark Tower". It is incredibly fast-paced (a welcome return to the hectic action of "Drawing of the Three" and "The Waste Lands"), and it manages to get across a hell of a lot of necessary info, in a bit over 400 pages. All that, plus even more character development and some nasty surprises. For one, the business with the chap and its parentage? Threw me for a loop.

It is true that the style of these last two novels seems to differ a bit from the first four. It's hard to describe, more a feeling than anything else, but it feels like some kind of magic has been lost. Mr. King said in his Amazon interview (short but kinda interesting) that he felt the need to finish the series, but it seems to me he could have waited just a bit longer. With the other novels, there was like a little hibernation period in between each one. It always felt like a long wait between stories, but I can't say I was ever disappointed when the novels DID come. Now, it almost feels like Mr. King jumped the gun on his "muse", or whatever you want to call it... the latest novels are very well-written in a workmanlike sort of way, but that true EPIC feeling, prevalent in the first 4 books, only makes a half-hearted appearance.

One surefire thing about "Song of Susannah"? It will you make wish the summer was only a few days long so you can get right to September, the release month for DT7 (!!!).

P.S. If you're an impatient reader like me and you want to look for any possible clues as to how to the series might end (of course I'm not guaranteeing anything), you might try looking out for a copy of "Childe Roland To The Dark Tower Came", which I recently read the whole way through for the first time. As I've read through the series again in anticipation of the final book, I've noticed a load of parallels to the poem that I had never picked up on before reading Browning's work. If you can get past the poetic language and Victorian English (I had a tough time at first), it's really beautiful, with an aptly bittersweet ending.

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Created May 05, 2009 at 10:14pm • Submit your own review...