The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah recap

The ka-tet is scattered. Susannah, ruled by the being Mia, has passed through a door to 1999 New York to give birth to her child, and Jake, Father Callahan, and Oy follow to save her, tracking Mia to the Dixie Pig, a den of vampires and the Tower's servants. Mia's bargain is revealed: she was promised motherhood in exchange for carrying the child, who is fathered partly by Roland and partly by the Tower's great enemy, and she is likely to be cast aside once he is born. Meanwhile Roland and Eddie travel to 1977 Maine to secure the vacant lot and its rose by dealing with the bookseller who owns it, and there they meet the writer Stephen King, realizing that the story of their quest flows through him and that he must be kept alive and writing. The book ends on a knife-edge, with Jake and Callahan about to storm the Dixie Pig and the child's birth at hand.

So far, Roland Deschain, the last gunslinger of Gilead, has gathered his ka-tet on the road to the Dark Tower: Eddie and Susannah Dean, brought from New York and wed, the twice-bound boy Jake Chambers, and the billy-bumbler Oy. They destroyed the insane monorail Blaine, learned the sorrowful tale of Roland's youth, and faced and drove off the dark sorcerer Randall Flagg. In the farming town of Calla Bryn Sturgis they defeated the child-stealing Wolves and gained an ally, Father Callahan, a priest from another world who guarded the deadly seeing-glass Black Thirteen. But Susannah proved secretly pregnant with a demon-fathered child, and a hidden second self, Mia, rose up, seized Black Thirteen, and fled through a door to New York to give birth. Jake and Callahan went after her as the fellowship was torn apart.

The threads are left dangling at their most dangerous points. Susannah, still largely under Mia's control, reaches the Dixie Pig in New York, where the child is to be born and where Mia is set to lose everything she was promised. Jake and Father Callahan arrive to rescue her and steel themselves to fight their way into a nest of vampires and low men, with Oy at their side, the outcome unknown as the book closes. Roland and Eddie, in 1977 Maine, survive a gun battle and find and confront the writer Stephen King, coming to understand that he is the vessel through whom their tale is told; they press upon him that he must keep writing it or the quest and the Tower will fail. A closing note about King's life hints at a future accident that could silence the story. The birth of the child looms, the ka-tet is broken across worlds, and every strand is poised to break open in the final book.