Mia, daughter of none, has taken over Susannah's body and brought her to New York of 1999 to deliver her baby. In pursuit through the Unfound Door, Roland and Eddie are swept off to Maine 1977, while Jake, Oy, and Father Callahan wind up in Susannah's where and when, but perhaps too far behind to save her from the Crimson King's minions...This was a fascinating book. Shorter than any Dark Tower book since The Drawing of the Three, it delves more deeply into the history, mythology, and cosmology of Mid-World, moves the plot along at a fast clip, and takes one of the most unexpected metafictional turns I've ever encountered. Most of the time, when a story delves into metafiction, it comes off as a cheat along the lines of "...he woke up and it was all a dream." King really impressed me, because I think he successfully worked metafiction into the plot of the book and enriched it rather than cheapening it. Does it change the character of the whole series? To some degree, yes. But there were hints as early as Wizard and Glass, and this story is so personal to King, it just makes sense to me.
As a standalone book, Song of Susannah is fairly weak, but it isn't meant to stand alone. Filled with rich detail about the series as a whole, it doesn't have much room left to tell its own unique story - rather, it fills in some significant blanks in the Mid-World universe while moving the plot forward a few steps to prepare for what is to come...
Arbitrary rating: 4.5 out of 5 unexpected metafictional turns
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