Hello everyone and welcome to the Stephen King cast, One Man's Musings on the Works of Stephen King.

Each week I will review one entry in the bibliography of Stephen King and the chronological order of publication.

And this week I continue to look at the end of Stephen King's decades-long journey to the Dark Tower with a novel that I consider to be the second part of a trilogy that will conclude with Book 7, The Dark Tower,

a novel that focuses on the strength of a beloved member of the Katte, the titular Susanna.

Now, this is a novel that I've been thinking a lot about lately,

as it serves as a punchline to a joke that King told as far back when he published the Gunslinger

when Walter mocks Roland in the Golgotha.

I don't know if you remember, but at one point Walter tells Roland of how previous civilizations

had mastered science and exploration, traveling to the moon and curing cancer.

He writes,

Gunslinger.

Our fathers conquered the disease which rots which we call cancer,

almost conquered aging,

went to the moon,

and made or discovered a hundred other marvelous baubles.

But this wealth of information produced little or no insight.

There were no great odes to the wonders of artificial insemination.

There were no great odes to the wonders of artificial insemination, that is,

until Stephen King published The Song of Susanna,

a chapter in the epic that revolves around

artificial insemination used to take down our cotet.

I don't know if he meant to do it, but that has been stuck in my mind, and I just couldn't

...