The Wind Through the Keyhole, while set within Stephen King’s
original 7 volume Dark Tower epic,
has little to do with the series. Another words, it’s a small off ramp within
the franchise that neither adds nor subtracts from the other volumes. King
himself, in his forward, calls it book 4.5 (set between volumes four and five).
While some might hope to spend
more time with Roland, Susannah, Eddie, Jake and Oy, they only become bookends
to the novel as it takes a structure of a story within a story. The Ka-tet hunkers down during a sudden storm
and Roland tells them a story around the campfire. Their only purpose is to
listen to the two stories and provide a context in which the stories take
place.
The first story is from Roland's
life as a young gunslinger, before he set out on the quest for the Dark Tower.
It occurs immediately after he is tricked into murdering his mother, and a
large part of the sub-text is Roland struggling to forgive himself for that
act. (This is not a spoiler, by the way; King supplies this information in the
introduction for readers who may not have read the Dark Tower novel that relates Roland's back story, Wizard and Glass). When he was teen,
Roland’s father sends him and gunslinger, Jamie, top remote village to
investigate the horrific killings of townsfolk by a “skin-changer” (King’s take
on a shapeshifter). While investigating, Roland takes into custody the only
witness, a young boy named Bill. While trying to keep the boy company, Roland
tells him a fairy tale from his own childhood his mother used to tell.
This story takes up the bulk of
the novel.
It’s this section, with its mix
of fantasy and science fiction that will remind many readers of how the Dark
Tower universe works, as Roland tells the boy about the encounters with
fairies, dragons, mutants, long-abandoned technology and even the wizard
Maerlyn.
He also runs into the Man in
Black.
Like most of King’s novels, it’s
enjoyable and very readable. It is a bit lite, coming on the heels of 11/22/63 and its richness, and it comes
off more as two novellas, but I enjoy King and his Dark Tower series. I’m curious if he’ll continue with this format,
because I can guess that he’s not really finished with this universe.
Next up for him, in January, will be his
sequel to The Shining called Doctor Sleep.
Tucked between Wizard and Glass and the Wolves of the Calla you'll find this, King's codicil to his Dark Tower opus. The major stars of this series, Roland, Jake, Susannah, Eddie and Oy, are there at the introduction and again at the end but the central essence of this book is turned over to a young Roland who is sent to a mining town to seek and destroy a shape shifter who's been terrorizing the settlement. The central character in the other embedded tale is Tim, yet another young gunslinger starting his career resolved to restore his mother's sight that was taken away by a blow to the head by her new husband. Both of these stories are told to Roland's Ka-tet while hunkered down on their journey escaping the fury of a sudden winter storm so swift and ferocious that it must be the kind that flash froze the wooly mammoth's in their tracks so many eons ago.
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