Read: Wizard and Glass–the rest of “Susan”
We’ve got ourselves quite the little page-turner here. The return to the fantasy language of Book One has made for the most assured and consistent section of the series since Roland’s journey through the desert and mountains. All the major beats seem to work here.
Roland and company’s three-on-three showdown with the Big Coffin Hunters unfolds at a tense yet almost leisurely pace, just the way you’d imagine these cowboy hardcases would start shit with each other. The time we spend alone with the BCH boys is time well spent, since like Gasher in Book Three they come across less like one-dimensional bad guys and more like people who’ve arrived at their current situation through a lifetime of conscious choices and reactions to circumstance. They’re bad guys you can understand.
Similarly, the mystery of what the heck’s going on in this backwater town–why they’re stockpiling horses and oxen, what they’re doing out at the oil patch, why all the town worthies are behaving so solicitously toward the Affiliation’s representatives–keeps you moving through the pages at a clip. Even when the mystery is “solved,” the secret presence of that magical glass ball at Rhea’s place indicates there’s still more to it.
I was sort of dreading the resolution of Susan’s post-deflowering bewitchment, since I find nothing pleasurable about the inevitable in fiction when that inevitable thing is the result of a ruse, but it wasn’t so bad. I’m sure her hypnotized hair-cutting will come back to haunt her in some terrible way–I’m sure things end badly for everyone involved in this tale but Roland, in fact–but at least she didn’t mutilate her face or genitals or something nasty like that. I’m glad it’s out of the way, too; I figured we’d be waiting to find out what was gonna happen until the end of this flashback.
Then again, I also figured the flashback would end with this section of the book, and now I see that it doesn’t. It looks like there’s significantly more flashback than present-day in this volume. I can live with that.