Read: “10th Stanza: Susannah-Mio, Divided Girl of Mine”; “11th Stanza: The Writer”; “12th Stanza: Jake and Callahan”

Hey.

Hey!

Not bad!

Not bad at all!

The Susannah stuff was fine–I like the idea of Flagg serving as Mia’s Archangel Gabriel, I like the use of science to produce magical results. That’s nice and perverse.

And despite all my worries and fears, despite chapter after chapter of dreck leading up to it, the appearance of Stephen King as a character in his own book was…pretty great! A few things won me over:

1) King comes across as charmingly out of his element. Just the fact that anyone comes across charming was a treat after spending time with the likes of Calvin Tower and Detta Walker for the last few books. But character-King seemed genuinely at a loss as to what the hell was going on–no “it’s ka” for him until they put him under hypnosis, pretty much.

2) This is related to the first point, but whatever godlike attributes character-King may have in terms of his role in creating Roland, his friends, and their worlds, he’s not in control of them, meaning he himself is not godlike. That is a huge relief for me. Why? It’s hard to articulate, but if we got the sense that nothing we’ve read about would exist if character-King hadn’t dreamed it up it would invalidate the whole affair. Instead, we’re told that the larger forces of good, evil, and fate at work in Roland and company’s adventures would still be at work whether or not King put pen to paper at all. King’s more their vessel–an important one, I guess the third-most important after the Dark Tower and the Rose, but still just a vessel. This means that (within the context of The Dark Tower series) his fictions are not, strictly speaking, fictional. Phew. He’s a part of them more than they’re a part of him.

3) King further cuts down the too-cute-by-half nature of his metafictional conceit in the following chapter, when Father Callahan muses that while certain things might only exist in this “real world” they’re currently inhabiting, evil corporation North Central Positronics would exist in all worlds, just because the Crimson CEO King is a dick like that. Now, while there’s no real way for us to verify whether Roland, Eddie, Callahan, Jake, Oy, and Susannah have ever traipsed around this big blue planet of ours, you and I can look around and see that there’s no such thing as North Central Positronics. That means that even the book’s “real” world with its “real” Stephen King writing “real” novels like ‘Salem’s Lot and Carrie is NOT, in fact, to be considered real–in other words, the fourth wall is never truly broken.

The story keeps on rockin’ with the “Jake and Callahan” chapter, too. Their mental duel with Black Thirteen was a hoot and gave you a sense of how risky it is to mess with that thing, their Butch-and-Sundance attitude to their impending doom in the Dixie Pig is the kind of fatalistic heroism that makes Roland such a fun character to read about, and even the pretty breathtakingly brash decision to loop 9/11 into the storyline has the “that’s so crazy it just might work” brio of great conspiracy fiction.

Look, is it the direction I would have taken things in? No. I don’t think I’d ever have brought the gang back to America ever, let alone with the frequency King has, let alone to visit the author of the books. It just seems to me that Roland’s world is rich enough to want to explore on its own, not least because it isn’t King’s America, which we’ve seen plenty of in virtually every one of his other books. But if you are gonna go there, these last two chapters are about as good as you could hope for. For the first time in ages I’m having a good time reading these books and can’t wait to turn the page. Hooray!

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