Re: Books by Stephen King
Song of Susannah starts with people getting sucked through the wrong portals, so to speak. Roland and Eddie show up to talk to Sai King, and Jake and Father Callahan show up in keystone New York to follow Susannah/Mia to the Dixie Pig.
Unlike Detta/Odetta, who were arguably just fragments of Susannah's own personality brought partway into being by a traumatic brain injury (remember the falling brick?), Mia is very real, very external and very dead set on having her chap. Susannah's past with Detta and Odetta make her very uniquely suited to fight Mia; this book, when it's about her, isn't about pregnancy in and of itself. It's about being dominated, about being controlled, and finding other ways to fight back against that control. Slowing Mia down, making Mia feel things. Even if she cannot ultimately stop what's happening, she uses all her long-acquired skills. Hell, when the birth happens at the start of book 7 and Susannah gets hold of a gun and starts shooting up the place, she pretty much turns the tide. The same way Roland and Eddie showing up when Jake is cornered, in that same book, stop him and Oy from being two lonely targets on a firing range. I see this as King making a very strong and sometimes repetitive statement about the way women, and even women of colour, are portrayed, and how they often get pigeon-holed. After all, you'll note, I hope, that Susannah is only actually pregnant once, and as to the story of possession/personalities/all that jazz, the first is internal (which she beats, with Roland's help) while the second is internal, and she beats that one all by herself. To me, this is thematically whole. I'm not saying it's perfect, it's not. But it's a whole lot more charitable than you're painting it, IMHO.
Harvey's Dream, BTW, had this weird "I want to be eerie and I can't quite make it" feel to me. Rest Stop didn't do a whole lot for me either way, except to sicken me and remind me that approximately one in five women will suffer some form of abuse in their lifetime. Twenty percent. And it's probably higher, because a lot of it goes unreported.
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