Song of Susannah, Stephen King

Song of Susannah is the sixth book of Stephen King's series, The Dark Tower. Its length is listed at 432 pages. So, it is significantly shorter than the volumes before, but longer than the first two.

At this point I have read more than 3/4 of this volume. Although it doesn't quite have the beauty of some of the earlier volumes, I nonetheless have enjoyed it quite a bit better than Wolves of the Calla. There are some quite interesting aspects to it which I will get into shortly.

This book is centered around Susannah having Roland's demonic baby. She has been hijacked, yet again, by a new personality. However, it is different in that this is not one of her own personalities, but rather a new individual altogether. She has fled from the Calla in an effort to bring to term the pregnancy in another dimension of earth.

The ka-tet (Stephen King's expression to describe a kind of tightly knit posse, brought together by fate) is split into two: one to rescue or recover Susannah, and the other to obtain the property rights to the land in New York on which the sacred wild rose lives. Jake, Oy, and Callahan go in pursuit of Susannah while Roland and Eddie go after Calvin Tower, the owner of the New York property.

One scene disappointed me: when Susannah first appears in New York for the deliverance of the baby, she robs a lady of her shoes. I find the stereotype disturbing.

Probably one of the most interesting aspects to this book is the involvement of Stephen King as a character and plot twist. King writes himself in as a kind of God or conduit. The question of either being a kind of God or a conduit is never answered. Does Stephen King invent the characters, worlds, and events that take place in the books, or is he merely a conduit for them? When Roland and Eddie meet Stephen King, King knows less about what is going on than they do. King is at the point in his life where The Dark Tower series lies nearly forgotten in a box. He has, he says, essentially run away from the book, and speaks of his fear of it: is it the fear that he cannot complete the series? that he isn't good enough to complete the series? is it the fact of living within the story, as writers do as they are written, frightening to him? These are some of the other questions that I think he, the character and maybe the writer, come up with.

In any case, at this point of the story, I have enjoyed it quite a bit. There is none of the slow paced, pointless rambling that pained me through Wolves of the Calla. In King's phraseology, "Thank ye sai!"

I finished it! Good book. I really enjoyed it from beginning to end.

Sparingly, King indulges the reader in some terrific horrific imagery:

...the smell in the air hadn't been pork. The thing turning on the spit, brown as a squab, was a human baby. The creatures around it dipped delicate china cups into the drippings beneath, toasted each other... and drank.

 Susannah gives birth in the 19th chapter of the novel: quite fitting considering the repeating theme of the number 19. The story, for the most part, ends here. But then there's an interesting twist.

King writes himself into the story once again. How much of it is fiction, how much of it is biography? I don't know. I really love how he describes going over an old manuscript (The Gunslinger):

Usually working on an old story is about as appetizing as eating a sandwich made with moldy bread.

I think I would liken it to putting on dirty clothes after taking a long hot bath.

This last chapter seems to be a series of journal entries that somehow involve the creation and selling of the The Dark Tower series. Again, is this fact or fiction? I'm very, very curious. Curiouser and curiouser! One interesting thing he writes is, "...books were treasures you protected with your life." I can't help but wonder if that sentiment had anything to do with the creation of the book dealer. I can't imagine, having read what King wrote on working on an old manuscript that he could contemplate rereading his own journal and throwing in relevant bits and pieces. Surely they are fictional entries loosely autobiographical.

There's something particularly beautiful about this last chapter. It's the kind of last chapter that I wish all of my favorite authors of my favorite books had written: imagine Tolkien having a chapter like that after his Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit! Imagine Paradise Lost, and regained, by our great poet Milton, having a chapter like this? How about Asimov, or Heinlein, or any of the others? I think if all the books had sucked as bad as Wolves of the Calla and they had ended with this journey into the creation of this series, it would have all been worth reading. King has a fantastic narrative ability which transcends fiction.

This excerpt also gave me a good chuckle:

The worst thing to happen this week, I hope, will be my wife's bed coillapsing under the weight of our son and daughter-in-law--the idiots were wrestling on it.

I'm still laughing!

One of these days I'm going to do my '50 best novels' or 'writers' or something. You know, one of those lists that only means something to me. Kind of like this reading journal that I keep, the stories that I write, the poems that I wrote... I wonder where I'd put King. He definitely belongs on that list.

Wolves of the Calla, Stephen King

Image from Corey Morgan

This is the fifth book of The Dark Tower series, by Stephen King. It's of equal length to book four, and thus the exponential growth of page numbers seems to have comAmazon, the book ranges in price from $.69 for a second hand copy to $20.85 for the library binding. The ebook is a reasonable $7.29.

The introduction is new for this novel, which is good. The rampant growth in the books' girth from book one to book four was quite impressive. However, the growth at this point seems to have subsided. It is roughly the same length as book four.

The story begins away from the main characters. A village gets raided for 1/2 of each twin set of sons and daughters every 24 or so years. This time, they want to fight back, and look to hire the young gunslingers, Roland and his two partners, to protect the village. It has a more than passing semblance to the western movie, The Magnificent Seven (itself an appropriated from the movie, Seven Samurai). King acknowledges that this, among many other novels, contributed to the creation of this book.

For the most part, this book has been the most difficult to get through. The side story about Callahan is entertaining. But for the most part, the book feels tired and uninspired. I'm more than half way through it. Books like this are like a tar pit: you struggle to get through it and you can't really do anything about it. You've already stepped in it (this is book five, right?). Gotta slog through it...

OK, finished slogging now... the book is done. This one was not fun. It had some enjoyable moments, but for the most part I didn't like it. Had it been book one and not book five, I likely would have walked away from it. However, one must sometimes read through or miss important parts that need be known in book six. And, even if books six to eight are as sluggish as book five, I will probably still read every word just to see how the Dark Tower series ends.

There were no really brilliant parts to this book. It was uninspired and dull. I will have to write later if it was worth it after I have finished the series.

Suspension of disbelief is an important component of a book. You have to accept things like robots with antennae which, when shot or cleavered off with a titanium plate, disconnects them from the controller and they 'die.' I can accept that. What is harder to accept is the role of the android (not really a robot, Stephen), Andy (short for android perhaps?) warns the town that these wolves are coming. They decide to seek out the help of Roland and his posse. Then, later on, it's revealed that Andy is in fact a spy and agent for those who seek to harvest some kind of telepathic essence that twins are born with. Why would Andy betray both those who control him and those whom he has fooled into believing he was a kind of simpletonish friend?

But, this wasn't a huge drag on the book. Again, one must suspend disbelief or else miss out on a reading science fiction, horror, and fantasy.

I kind of like the cameo Stephen King does at the end. He becomes a part of the narrative as do some of his books. I find that interesting and wonder where he will go with that.

Wizard and Glass, Stephen King

The fourth book, like the others, continues the pattern of growth that the second and third set. The Gunslinger, according to Google, has 224 pages. The Drawing of the Three has 400 pages. The Wastelands 512, and I'm now into Wizard and Glass at 787. Regardless, a second hand paperback copy is available for as little as one penny on Amazon, while the Kindle version is $10.75. So, it is only a modest increase in price despite there being a full novel's worth of extra material.

The book has an introduction and an afterword that are original. So, unlike the first three novels, there is some little interest here. In the afterword, it's quite interesting to note how many years passed between King's writing of the third and fourth installation of The Dark Tower series.

Due to the sluggishness of The Wastelands, I had a good deal of fear that Wizard and Glass would feel equally dull through an even greater number of pages. However, I couldn't have been further from the truth. The Drawing of the Three was OK, with some sections that were good. But it just didn't have the literary flare or beauty that The Gunslinger had. And, for quite a number of pages, Wastelands was sheer drudgery that almost caused me to drop the book and move onto something else. Wizard and Glass, however, is another animal. Stephen King really mastered his craft when he forged this volume. I might even be so bold as to say that this volume is superior to the first. Where in the first volume was a mixed bag of genius and tired-and-forced expressions, there is none of that forced or tired feel to this volume. It reads brilliantly. I don't know what King was doing as he was writing this, but he was a bloody poet through parts of this. Since I have only read about 20% of the novel at this time, I can only hope he maintains his style and craft at this level.

The group of unlikely knights or gunslingers do very little in this novel. It is mainly a novel about Roland's background story. It's quite a good read. I'm glad I went through the boggy spots.

In the opening scene of Roland's story as a youth, we meet a witch that is to become involved with Roland as a young boy. Almost certainly not to Roland's benefit. In any case, it's just a marvelous scene:

... curled atop the box was a slim green snake. When she touched its back, its head came up. Its mouth yawned ina  silent hiss, displaying four pairs of fangs--two on top, two on the bottom.

 She took the snake up, crooning to it. As she brought its flat face close to her own, its mouth yawned wider and its hissing became audible. She opened her own mouth; from between her wrinkled gray lips she poked the yellowish, bad-smelling mat of her tongue. Two drops of poison--enough to kill an entire dinner-party, if mixed in the punch--fell on it. She swallowed, feeling her mouth and throat and chest burn, as if with strong liquor. For a moment the room swam out of focus, and she could hear voices murmuring in the stenchy air of the hut--the voices of those she called  "the unseen friends."

I would have preferred King to use a young woman, or younger, or of some average age. I've never been a big fan of coupling ugliness and wickedness together. Charlize Theron, for example, made a great wicked witch in Snow White and the Huntsman. For her alone was that movie worth watching. The wicked witches as haughty, powerful women, are a favorite of mine.

Another example of how King makes these brilliant flourishes that add a wonderful spice or flavor to his narrative:

(she) looked into the glass once more. The horse and its interesting young rider were gone. The rose light was gone as well. It was now just a dead glass ball she held, its only light a reflection borrowed from the moon.

Now that I'm further along, almost half way through the novel, it has become ponderous again. Some tired cliches about purity and virginity and golden yellow hair. The sick (perverted) old man is hot for the 16 year old girl, Susan, and has a hall pass from his wife on her since he's wanting a child and his wife can't (or he can't, but the narration suggests the problem is with her). Since the sick perverted man is also a powerful mayor, this is going to cause a major problem between Roland and the people.

I guess it's still in vogue today: writers who paint in moral black-and-white and rarely shades of gray.

Also, despite King being the sort of writer who doesn't mind saying fuck, when it comes to romance scenes, he's about as graphic as a cheap Harlequin novel. I guess the difference might be that in the Harlequin novel the scenes are not rape. Or are they? I have actually never read more than a few pages of a romance novel.

 His eyes were bulging, there were big drops of sweat on his forehead in spite of the room's coolness, and his tongue was actually hanging out, like a dog's on a  hot day. Revulsion rose in her throat like the taste of rotten food. She tried to pull away and his hands tightened their hold, pulling her against him. His knuckles cracked obscenely, and now she could feel the hard lump at the center of him.

He paints a singularly lecherous man who can barely contain himself for his desire of this young flesh. King can't even say cock this time. It's the hard lump at the center of him. What happened to you when you wrote this part, King?

Fortunately, the drudgery of this bland, two dimensional romance, is short enough to endure, and the narrative gets much better and easier to stomach.

Another few negative criticisms I have of King's narrative: First, his treatment of the veritable descendants of Mexicans. He refers to their language as 'crunk.' I guess it's the old cliché, right? Lots of movies were nasty towards Mexicans and (sic) Indians. Fortunately, I suppose, King left the Native Americans alone.

The next criticism I have comes from my feminist side: he refers to the virginity of Susan, Roland's love interest as something that makes her honest:

... calling her as she had all those months ago, on the night Susan had come to her hut to be proved honest.

I wonder if King would say that this is the language of the setting, or the perspective. Or if he just thinks a woman who is not a virgin is not honest? Or is King just trying to reflect the general sexist racist stereotypes for this one book? Or is King himself not racist and sexist, only his writing? Fortunately I'm white, so it's easier for me to swallow. If I was a minority maybe I'd walk away from King and his novel. Or maybe I'm too PC. Most of the time it's OK, and only mildly detracts from the story.

The Drawing of the Three, Stephen King

It's not possible to get a second hand Kindle edition version of this book as it is the paperback version. Therefore, either read the paperback version, or pay the $8.99/$10.60 (I think one price is US and the other Canadian), available on Amazon.com.

First off, I was disappointed in the introduction. It's the same introduction as the first novel in this eight volume octology. Having started the third volume, I can say that the third is the same as the first as well. Why couldn't you write a different introduction for the other books, Stephen?

Having completed volume two, I can honestly say that King has failed to match Tolkien as he had hoped. However, this is nothing to be ashamed of. King pumped these out at breakneck speed while Tolkien made it his life's work. That said, I burned through this book's four hundred some odd pages (according to Google) in less than two days. I don't know if that's a record for me, but it might be. In other words, it was a gripping novel that is hard to put down.

Our protagonist, Roland, is hunting down three people who are to help him in his quest for the Dark Tower. There is some kind of door that appears magically out of nowhere. When he opens it, he is able to control the consciousness of whomever the door is set to.

 Roland goes to the beach and suffers an encounter with massively large lobsters King calls lobstrosities. The fight results in the loss of two fingers from his right hand and results in a deadly bacterial infection.

The first he picks up is a drug addict, Eddie. He saves him from prison, is instrumental in delivering him from the drug lord who had conscripted him for trafficking cocaine, via airplane, into the US. He is a heroin addict and a bad junkie. His brother is worse. However, in the end the drug kills him. He crosses into Roland's world and helps him in his quest. He brings with him some drugs, but it's not enough to completely destroy the bacteria in his system.

The second person is a black lady named Odetta. She is very tough but has a split personality that is a kind of Jekyll and Hyde. One is a deadly killer and the other a highly educated lovely lady. Eddie falls in love with her, but she is difficult to manage because of her second personality and the fact that her legs were cut off and consequently she needs to be pushed around in a wheelchair. However, that does not mean she is helpless. She is very dangerous.

The last is Jack Mort. But rather than bring Jack back, he uses Jack to rob a store of antibiotics and get some ammunition. He never thinks to get other firearms for his new colleagues. At this time, however, Odetta (good)/Detta (bad) is in bad mode and takes hostage of Eddie. Jack Mort is the man who is responsible for her condition. He is a psychopath who pushes people into traffic, subway trains, and drops bricks on random people. Odette/Detta was one of the victims twice--once as a girl he dropped a brick on, and once as a woman whom he pushed in front of a train which took her legs from her; as was the boy, Jake, from volume one of the series. Therefore, the gunslinger has no pity for him and hates him and subjects him to considerable pain before forcing him to kill himself by jumping in front of a subway train.

While the gunslinger is in that other world, Odetta/Detta has mercilessly tied Eddie up for the lobstrosities to eat up.

Once he does that, Odetta/Detta become a single character, thereafter referred mostly to as Susannah, becomes their friend and ally. She saves Eddie and they become buddies. Roland brings back a lot of drugs to take care of his infection and ammunition. Roughly at this point The Drawing of the Three comes to an end.

It's a very enjoyable story and King has kept me glued to the pages. Some other notes: the style between volume one and two has shifted. Both metaphors and similes, forced and brilliant, ar eno longer present. So, I missed the moments of brilliant description and was grateful for the absence of the forced ones which pained me on occasion. I also didn't catch any run-on sentences. I think he hired a good proofreader for this volume!

The Gunslinger, Stephen King

I think I remember reading this book a long time ago. The title is familiar. But that's it. Maybe I read Amazon.com. This is just the first of eight in a series. So, that means to go from point a to point z courtesy of Amazon, you're looking at about $80. Mass market paperback, on the other hand, will set you back by about $0.51. It might cost the environment a few more kg in CO2, but that's not his or his publisher's nightmare, is it? I guess it was something else. Unfortunately, the only way to get this book for free or at a reasonable price is to either a) get lucky and borrow it, b) someone throws it away and you take it, c) steal it from friend, stranger, or foe, or d) buy it second hand from a second hand bookstore. Why there is a premium on an old book going through Amazon is beyond me. For $10.46 you can get your Kindle version.

I am reading not the original version, but the version that has been revised since the completion of the octology. The changes, he mentions in the introduction that he wanted to do an epic series. This is his opus magnum.

Stephen King is a master of narrative. No sane mind, and probably no insane mind, would dispute this opinion having read his books. He really owns his genre.

His similes and metaphors are frequent, and occasionally real gems. "A gunslinger knows pride, that invisible bone that keeps the neck stiff." There are several other gems that I really liked. Other times a few of the metaphors seem forced. I didn't record those instances and I'm not going to dig for them. So, my impression could be wrong and maybe I was just in 'a mood'.

The story is that the gunslinger, named Roland Deschain, is out for revenge against "The Man in Black," I think because of something the man did to his mother a decade or two earlier. His own father had been a gunslinger. He is said to be not as fast or as smart as the other gunslinger students, but his teacher, Cort, tells him that he's the best student he's had in a long time. He is described as slow and deliberate. 

From izquotes.com

Eventually he does track down the man in black. Or, perhaps it can be more accurate to say that the man in black leads him to this final destination. Along the way he runs into a small village where he is set upon by a witch and all those who are under her spell. In all there are some 70 men, women, and children, who all try to kill the gunslinger. But he kills them all. In the pages of killing, I like this line: 

She was large and fat and known to the patrons of Sheb's as Aunt Mill. The gunslinger blew her backwards and she landed in a whorish sprawl, her skirt rucked up between her thighs.

I am surprised, however, to see runon sentences in his book. The one above is not the only one I spotted. Great descriptions, but always surprised to see stuff like that considering he was an English university grad, school teacher, and has an editor to ferret out such things.

After he's done killing the congregation of the witch,

They trailed in a twisting, zigzagging path from the back door of the barber shop to where he stood.

There is even a lovely illustration of the bodies lying in zigzag formation.

Eventually he does get to the man in black. He wakes up ten years older in the mountains after his conversation with the man, or palaver as King likes to put it, and the man in black is a skeleton. How this comes to pass or why is unknown. It is here that King leaves off volume one of eight in The Dark Tower series.