Even before the victory over the Wolves can be celebrated in Calla Bryn Sturgis, so we learned at the end of Wolves of the Calla, Susannah disappeared through the magic door in the cave to New York in 1999.  Not just Susannah, a demon called Mia is in control of Susannah most of the time, and she has to go to New York to give birth to her chap.  The rest of the ka-tet has no option but to get her, and with some help of the Manni they succeed in going through the same door.

But Roland and Eddie end up in Maine in 1977, not far from where Calvin Tower is hiding for a man called Balazar, someone Eddie knew more of than he wanted to in The drawing of the three, about at the time Roland pulled him into his world.  And Balazar is there, accompanied by more than a handful of men and more than a handful of weapons, except that he's not waiting for Tower, but for Roland and Eddie.

Jake, Oy and father Callahan do end up in New York in '99, just a few hours after Susannah/Mia arrived there.  They are close enough to catch up on her/them, most likely, but there is something else they have to do first: secure black thirteen, without which Mia/Susannah would have never been able to cross that door.  And besides, would they be able to do anything at all against Mia?

Trying to give a synopsis is pretty dangerous for this book.  One has to reveal pretty much to give an idea of what it is about, and one cannot reveal too much to not spoil the joy of discovering it.  And a joy it is.  The stories of the three duos (one a threesome really), with the emphasis on Mia/Susannah and Eddie/Roland, are woven excellently into each other.  In Dreamcatcher it felt as if King hopped from one storyline to another just to let us wait in tension to find out what happened to the other one, here it just fits together perfectly.

In a way the story just continues.  Wolves of the Calla told of a few days in calla, Song of Susannah narrates of the even fewer following days.  But in this relatively short chapter in the Dark Tower Saga the story suddenly deepens and speeds up.  Even if we see Roland, Eddie, Susannah and Jake -heck, even Oy- as old friends we grew to like and love just because they have been around for so long ánd we know so much about them, there are still facets that are there to discover.  And most of all, the Grand Finale is coming near, that is what every stanza in this book breathes.

The most surprising was the appearance of the author himself in his own story.  Or is it the book that caught up on the author?  If you've read On Writing you know that King sees the author as some kind of a archaeologist who should use the most delicate tools to uncover the find.  Here one wonders who found who first: the story or the author.  And given the dizzy making number of worlds this Dark Tower is holding together, one sometimes differing only in details from another, the question is even which King we really saw.  Anyway, whichever King it was, somehow he made it fit, an author introducing himself in the story takes a big risk but King just gave evidence of how excellent his story-telling skills are.

So what is Song of Susannah?  It's The Dark Tower shifting gear towards the the final confrontation, it's the introduction of an unexpected twist through Mia's chap, it's a dazzling view on all of the worlds of which only two (Roland's, and ours, though it's not sure we really live in ours) really seem to matter, it's a fast-paced mixture of magic and Western-style shootouts, and it might even be a scary view on what reality really is.  But most of all it's a book that is hard to put down, and one that screams towards its reader from every page that she or he should rush towards the bookshop to get the final installment.