In his New York Times bestselling The Wind Through the Keyhole,
Stephen King returns to the spectacular territory of the Dark Tower
fantasy saga to tell a story about gunslinger Roland Deschain in his
early days.**
The Wind Through the Keyhole is a sparkling contribution to the series
that can be placed between Dark Tower IV and Dark Tower V. This Russian
doll of a novel, a story within a story within a story, visits Roland
and his ka-tet as a ferocious, frigid storm halts their progress along
the Path of the Beam. Roland tells a tale from his early days as a
gunslinger, in the guilt-ridden year following his mother's death. Sent
by his father to investigate evidence of a murderous shape-shifter,
Roland takes charge of Bill Streeter, a brave but terrified boy who is
the sole surviving witness to the beast's most recent slaughter. Roland,
himself only a teenager, calms the boy by reciting a story from the
Book of Eld that his mother used to read to him at bedtime, "The Wind
through the Keyhole." "A person's never too old for stories," he says to
Bill. "Man and boy, girl and woman, we live for them."
And stories like The Wind Through the Keyhole live for us with Stephen
King's fantastical magic that "creates the kind of fully imagined
fictional landscapes a reader can inhabit for days at a stretch" (The
Washington Post).
