Written by Stephen King
Published by Donald M. Grant/Scribner

With the Calla saved from marauding Wolves, the ka-tet must face a new set of crises. Susannah has gone missing, likely under the control of a new and dangerous personality, "Mia," who is preparing to give birth to some sort of demonspawn via Susannah's body. The rest of the crew splits up, with Jake and Callahan following Susannah and try to save her from the agents of the Crimson King, while Eddie and Roland attempt to secure the safety of the immaculate Rose from a somewhat irritating book collector. Adding to the group's worries is the book containing details of Callahan's previous life, classified as fiction in some other world.

As the boys split up and begin their separate quests, Susannah faces the more immediate concern about her newly-hijacked body. In a series of psychological showdowns, she attempts to establish communication with Mia, hoping to both stall her progress toward the Crimson King and learn more about the dangerous enemies that face the gunslingers in their increasingly urgent journey to the tower.

This penultimate installment in King's long-running Dark Tower series cranks the weirdness up another notch, treading ground that could easily have wrecked both the book and the series. King manages to contain this problematic self-referential conundrum to a couple dozen pages, and in one fell swoop in the book's epilogue allays a great many of my fears about the direction he seemed to be taking. The worrisome elements of the book are a very small percentage of the book's total pages, but they do manage to throw the book's pacing a little bit out of whack. Given that the series has been, to this point, a terse and well-paced bit of adventure fiction, it rings just a little off-key when this book spends more time in dialogue and psychological warfare than in straight-up shootouts.

This is not to say it isn't a good book...it certainly is. Those that have enjoyed the gunslinger books to date aren't likely to be put off by Song of Susannah. They should just be prepared for a few uncertain moments when Eddie and Roland visit rural Maine. On the other hand, there's an excellent return of mafia heavy Jack Andolini in a blazing gunfight that lets Eddie and Roland both show off their pistoleering. There's also a New York restaraunt that appears to cater exclusively to cannibals and servants of the Crimson King, where strange bird-headed monsters dine with demons wearing human faces. And there's Jake, threatening an obnoxious New York cabbie with a Ruger. When you've got that much goodness, a few pages of weird PoMo reflexiveness isn't a terribly high price to pay.

King's talent for keeping multiple plot threads running concurrently is put to the test here, with the ka-tet split into three distinct pieces for the duration of the novel. While he is largely successful, the Jake/Callahan angle gets a little shorted, though mostly because their plot thread leads to events that aren't going to be dealt with until the opening of Book 7, so King couldn't very well rush them to the point of no return while he still had all these other elements outstanding. The book's cliffhanger ending is a much better-executed example of the technique than Book 3's monorailus interruptus, and will have readers rushing for the final installment as soon as they can put this one down.

One more volume remains to see if this epic goes down as King's crowning achievement or his most promising shortfall. And for the first time in all the books, there are some serious questions raised about how many of the ka-tet will actually reach the Dark Tower alive, or whether they can reach it before irreversible damage has been done to the multiverse.