The Wind Through the Keyhole: The Dark Tower IV-1/2 by Stephen King
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The Wind Through the Keyhole: The Dark Tower IV-1/2

by

Stephen King

(Author)

4.7

-

9,886 ratings


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).

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ISBN-10

1501166220

ISBN-13

978-1501166228

Print length

320 pages

Language

English

Publisher

Scribner

Publication date

December 05, 2016

Dimensions

5.5 x 0.9 x 8.38 inches

Item weight

10.4 ounces


Product details

ASIN :

B005GG0MTC

File size :

6803 KB

Text-to-speech :

Enabled

Screen reader :

Supported

Enhanced typesetting :

Enabled

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Enabled

Word wise :

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Editorial reviews

Review

“It’s both a pleasure and a surprise to encounter The Wind Through the Keyhole, a new, largely independent narrative set in a previously unexplored corner of Roland’s universe.” (The Washington Post)

“Masterful . . . King shows himself to be an ace storyteller yet again, spinning yarns like a favorite relative about a hero and his adventures in a world like our own but just slightly skewed.” (USA Today)

“Each nested narrative delivers its fair share of suspense, action and solid character work. King knows this fictional universe intimately, and his love for it shines through every page.” (San Francisco Chronicle)

“Vivid and precise . . . A genre mash-up of horror/western/detective fiction, in which our hero rides into town to wade through gore, solve a mystery, and bring justice to an unruly frontier town.” (Esquire)

“A fairy tale of great adventure and beauty.” (Vulture)

“Pitch-perfect . . . Even those who aren’t familiar with the series will find the conclusion both satisfying and moving.” (Publishers Weekly)

About the Author

Stephen King is the author of more than sixty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. His recent work includes the short story collection You Like It Darker, Holly (a New York Times Notable Book of 2023), Fairy Tale, Billy Summers, If It Bleeds, The Institute, Elevation, The Outsider, Sleeping Beauties (cowritten with his son Owen King), and the Bill Hodges trilogy: End of Watch, Finders Keepers, and Mr. Mercedes (an Edgar Award winner for Best Novel and a television series streaming on Peacock). His novel 11/22/63 was named a top ten book of 2011 by The New York Times Book Review and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Mystery/Thriller. His epic works The Dark Tower, It, Pet Sematary, Doctor Sleep, and Firestarter are the basis for major motion pictures, with It now the highest-grossing horror film of all time. He is the recipient of the 2020 Audio Publishers Association Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2018 PEN America Literary Service Award, the 2014 National Medal of Arts, and the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lives in Bangor, Maine, with his wife, novelist Tabitha King.

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Sample

An excerpt from The Wind through the Keyhole: A Dark Tower Novel by Stephen King

FOREWORD

Most of the people holding this book have followed the adventures of Roland and his band—his ka-tet—for years, some of them from the very beginning. Others—and I hope there are many, newcomers and Constant Readers alike—may ask, Can I read and enjoy this story if I haven’t read the other Dark Tower books? My answer is yes, if you keep a few things in mind.

First, Mid-World lies next to our world, and there are many overlaps. In some places there are doorways between the two worlds, and sometimes there are thin places, porous places, where the two worlds actually mingle. Three of Roland’s ka-tet—Eddie, Susannah, and Jake have been drawn separately from troubled lives in New York into Roland’s Mid-World quest. Their fourth traveling companion, a billy-bumbler named Oy, is a golden-eyed creature native to Mid-World. Mid-World is very old, and falling to ruin, filled with monsters and untrustworthy magic.

Second, Roland Deschain of Gilead is a gunslinger—one of a small band that tries to keep order in an increasingly lawless world. If you think of the gunslingers of Gilead as a strange combination of knights errant and territorial marshals in the Old West, you’ll be close to the mark. Most of them, although not all, are descended from the line of the old White King, known as Arthur Eld (I told you there were overlaps).

Third, Roland has lived his life under a terrible curse. He killed his mother, who was having an affair—mostly against her will, and certainly against her better judgment—with a fellow you will meet in these pages. Although it was by mistake, he holds himself accountable, and the unhappy Gabrielle Deschain’s death has haunted him since his young manhood. These events are fully narrated in the Dark Tower cycle, but for our purposes here, I think it’s all you have to know.

For longtime readers, this book should be shelved between Wizard and Glass and Wolves of the Calla . . . which makes it, I suppose, Dark Tower 4.5.

As for me, I was delighted to discover my old friends had a little more to say. It was a great gift to find them again, years after I thought their stories were told.

—Stephen King

September 14, 2011

STARKBLAST

During the days after they left the Green Palace that wasn’t Oz after all—but which was now the tomb of the unpleasant fellow Roland’s ka-tet had known as the Tick-Tock Man—the boy Jake began to range farther and farther ahead of Roland, Eddie, and Susannah.

“Don’t you worry about him?” Susannah asked Roland. “Out there on his own?”

“He’s got Oy with him,” Eddie said, referring to the billy-bumbler who had adopted Jake as his special friend. “Mr. Oy gets along with nice folks all right, but he’s got a mouthful of sharp teeth for those who aren’t so nice. As that guy Gasher found out to his sorrow.”

“Jake also has his father’s gun,” Roland said. “And he knows how to use it. That he knows very well. And he won’t leave the Path of the Beam.” He pointed overhead with his reduced hand. The lowhanging sky was mostly still, but a single corridor of clouds moved

steadily southeast. Toward the land of Thunderclap, if the note left behind for them by the man who styled himself RF had told the truth.

Toward the Dark Tower.

“But why—” Susannah began, and then her wheelchair hit a bump. She turned to Eddie. “Watch where you’re pushin me, sugar.”

“Sorry,” Eddie said. “Public Works hasn’t been doing any maintenance along this stretch of the turnpike lately. Must be dealing with budget cuts.”

It wasn’t a turnpike, but it was a road . . . or had been: two ghostly ruts with an occasional tumbledown shack to mark the way. Earlier that morning they had even passed an abandoned store with a barely readable sign: TOOK’S OUTLAND MERCANTILE. They investigated inside for supplies—Jake and Oy had still been with them then—and had found nothing but dust, ancient cobwebs, and the skeleton of what had been either a large raccoon, a small dog, or a billy-bumbler. Oy had taken a cursory sniff and then pissed on the bones before leaving the store to sit on the hump in the middle of the old road with his squiggle of a tail curled around him. He faced back the way they had come, sniffing the air.

Roland had seen the bumbler do this several times lately, and although he had said nothing, he pondered it. Someone trailing them, maybe? He didn’t actually believe this, but the bumbler’s posture—nose lifted, ears pricked, tail curled—called up some old memory or association that he couldn’t quite catch.

“Why does Jake want to be on his own?” Susannah asked.

“Do you find it worrisome, Susannah of New York?” Roland asked.

“Yes, Roland of Gilead, I find it worrisome.” She smiled amiably enough, but in her eyes, the old mean light sparkled. That was the Detta Walker part of her, Roland reckoned. It would never be completely gone, and he wasn’t sorry. Without the strange woman she had once been still buried in her heart like a chip of ice, she would have been only a handsome black woman with no legs below the knees. With Detta onboard, she was a person to be reckoned with. A dangerous one. A gunslinger.

“He has plenty of stuff to think about,” Eddie said quietly. “He’s been through a lot. Not every kid comes back from the dead. And it’s like Roland says—if someone tries to face him down, it’s the someone who’s apt to be sorry.” Eddie stopped pushing the wheelchair, armed sweat from his brow, and looked at Roland. “Are there someones in this particular suburb of nowhere, Roland? Or have they all moved on?”

“Oh, there are a few, I wot.”

He did more than wot; they had been peeked at several times as they continued their course along the Path of the Beam. Once by a frightened woman with her arms around two children and a babe hanging in a sling from her neck. Once by an old farmer, a half-mutie with a jerking tentacle that hung from one corner of his mouth. Eddie and Susannah had seen none of these people, or sensed the others that Roland felt sure had, from the safety of the woods and high grasses, marked their progress. Eddie and Susannah had a lot to learn.

But they had learned at least some of what they would need, it seemed, because Eddie now asked, “Are they the ones Oy keeps scenting up behind us?”

“I don’t know.” Roland thought of adding that he was sure something else was on Oy’s strange little bumbler mind, and decided not to. The gunslinger had spent long years with no ka-tet, and keeping his own counsel had become a habit. One he would have to break, if the tet was to remain strong. But not now, not this morning.

“Let’s move on,” he said. “I’m sure we’ll find Jake waiting for us up ahead.”

Two hours later, just shy of noon, they breasted a rise and halted, looking down at a wide, slow-moving river, gray as pewter beneath the overcast sky. On the northwestern bank—their side—was a barnlike building painted a green so bright it seemed to yell into the muted day. Its mouth jutted out over the water on pilings painted a similar green. Docked to two of these pilings by thick hawsers was a large raft, easily ninety feet by ninety, painted in alternating stripes of red and yellow. A tall wooden pole that looked like a mast jutted from the center, but there was no sign of a sail. Several wicker chairs sat in front of it, facing the shore on their side of the river. Jake was seated in one of these. Next to him was an old man in a vast straw hat, baggy green pants, and longboots. On his top half he wore a thin white garment—the kind of shirt Roland thought of as a slinkum. Jake and the old man appeared to be eating well-stuffed popkins. Roland’s mouth sprang water at the sight of them.

Oy was beyond them, at the edge of the circus-painted raft, looking raptly down at his own reflection. Or perhaps at the reflection of the steel cable that ran overhead, spanning the river.

“Is it the Whye?” Susannah asked Roland.

“Yar.”

Eddie grinned. “You say Whye; I say Whye Not?” He raised one hand and waved it over his head. “Jake! Hey, Jake! Oy!”

Jake waved back, and although the river and the raft moored at its edge were still half a mile away, their eyes were uniformly sharp, and they saw the white of the boy’s teeth as he grinned.

Susannah cupped her hands around her mouth. “Oy! Oy! To me,

sugar! Come see your mama!”

Uttering shrill yips that were the closest he could get to barks, Oy flew across the raft, disappeared into the barnlike structure, then emerged on their side. He came charging up the path with his ears lowered against his skull and his gold-ringed eyes bright.

“Slow down, sug, you’ll give yourself a heart attack!” Susannah shouted, laughing.

Oy seemed to take this as an order to speed up. He arrived at Susannah’s wheelchair in less than two minutes, jumped up into her lap, then jumped down again and looked at them cheerfully. “Olan! Ed! Suze!”

“Hile, Sir Throcken,” Roland said, using the ancient word for bumbler he’d first heard in a book read to him by his mother: The Throcken and the Dragon.

Oy lifted his leg, watered a patch of grass, then faced back the way they had come, scenting at the air, eyes on the horizon.

“Why does he keep doing that, Roland?” Eddie asked.

“I don’t know.” But he almost knew. Was it some old story, not The Throcken and the...

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About the authors

Stephen King

Stephen King

Stephen King is the author of more than fifty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. His first crime thriller featuring Bill Hodges, MR MERCEDES, won the Edgar Award for best novel and was shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger Award. Both MR MERCEDES and END OF WATCH received the Goodreads Choice Award for the Best Mystery and Thriller of 2014 and 2016 respectively.

King co-wrote the bestselling novel Sleeping Beauties with his son Owen King, and many of King's books have been turned into celebrated films and television series including The Shawshank Redemption, Gerald's Game and It.

King was the recipient of America's prestigious 2014 National Medal of Arts and the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for distinguished contribution to American Letters. In 2007 he also won the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America. He lives with his wife Tabitha King in Maine.

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Reviews

Customer reviews

4.7 out of 5

9,886 global ratings

Rad 192Amazon CustomerSteve

Rad 192Amazon CustomerSteve

5

In line with Dark Tower series.

Reviewed in the United States on July 21, 2024

Verified Purchase

Really good book. Stays in line with the series. I thought it was a very good story and very well told. I read the whole Dark Tower story years ago. One of the best stories I’ve ever read, all 7 books. This book and story is just as good. I liked it a lot and recommend it to Stephen King fans.

James Tepper

James Tepper

5

Superb story within a story within a story

Reviewed in the United States on April 27, 2012

Verified Purchase

Stephen King's latest, "The Wind Through the Keyhole: a Dark Tower Novel", is a return to the people and places of the "Dark Tower" series, SK's seven volume Magnum Opus that was begun in 1978 and completed in 2004. The ending of the seventh book (which was fairly controversial- some fans hated it, while others loved it) didn't leave much room for a sequel. Now, 8 years after the "final" ending, we have not a sequel, but a sort of an "intrquel", a compact novel (at just 300 pages on my iPad, I believe it is the shortest novel since his 272 page debut, "Carrie", that SK has ever published) that revisits Roland, Jake, Eddie, Susannah and Oy during a brief interlude just in between the events in the 4th novel in the series "Wizard and Glass", and the fifth, "Wolves of the Calla", each of which runs about 750 pages (and for what it's worth, were my favorites in the entire DT opus).

To do this, King very effectively uses the old "story within a story" structure, only this time it's really a story within a story within a story. The enclosing tale finds the ka-tet rushing to find shelter from a kind of deadly Mid-World subzero tornado or hurricane called a starkblast whose imminent arrival is signaled by Oy's behavior. The group frantically gathers wood for a fire and takes refuge in the only solid stone structure that they find in a deserted town. Roland tells them that they are going to be holed up, hunkered around the fireplace for at least a few days, and Jake asks Roland to tell them a story. If you've read Wizard and Glass, you know that the bulk of that wonderful, bittersweet novel was also relayed via Roland telling the ka-tet a story about when he was a boy. So trapped by the starkblast, Roland proceeds to tell them another story about his days as a teen-aged newly minted gunslinger (that takes place shortly after the events in Wizard and Glass), when his father sends him and friend, Jamie, to investigate mysterious murders and rumors of a shape-shifting monster terrifying the town of Debaria. This tale is the story within a story. While there, Roland and Jamie meet 11 year old Bill Streeter, the sole survivor of the monster's most recent attack in which his father is killed.

Roland comes up with a plan to uncover and capture the shape-shifter, that involves locking Bill into a jail cell for protection, and promising to wait with him as his plan unfolds. During the night in the cell, Bill asks the young Roland for a story, and Roland tells him a story that his mother used to read to him when he was about Bill's age (only a few years ago). That tale is a magical story about a young boy just about Bill's age and is called "The Wind Through the Keyhole", and is the longest section of the book.

All three stories are distinct and different, but all are filled with trademark SK characters and story lines that weave in and out of each other self-referentially. It all fits with and feels so much like Wizard and Glass that it is hard to believe that The Wind Through the Keyhole was written some 15 years later. Perhaps best of all, as King states in the very short forward, one need not have read Wizard and Glass or any of the other DT novels to be able to follow and fully appreciate this one (given a few facts that SK lays out in the Foreward). For those who have read the rest of the DT novels, we learn a bit more about the young Roland, his relationship with his mother, the "current" Roland, and billy bumblers. We also meet new and old characters from the DT universe, all the while being entertained with the centerpiece story that is a beautiful sort of Stephen KIng fairy tale, in a similar vein to his "Eyes of the Dragon".

Very Highly Recommended for DT fans and others who just like a good story.

JM Tepper

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6 people found this helpful

T-Rex 5

T-Rex 5

5

Excellent Addition to the Dark Tower Series

Reviewed in the United States on May 25, 2015

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This is overall an excellent book. The book is 8th in the Dark Tower series, but more appropriately can be considered book 4.5. The novel features a story, in a story, an interesting & unusual way to do a novel. The novel starts off with the band of 5 from book 4, on their trip to find the Dark Tower. A deadly storm (a "starkblast") comes up, and they are trapped in a shelter for 3 days. During this time, Roland tells them a story from his youth, to entertain them. The story concerns one of his first assignments as a gunslinger, sent by train to a distant land to find the source of reports of a murderous shapeshifter (reports which his father doesn't believe are true.) The reports are true, and his first night there, another multiple homicide occurs. A young boy is the only surviving witness, but even through Roland's hypnotism, he recalls little. Roland locks the boy and himself in the town jail as protection, fearing that the shapeshifter may target the boy, since he's a witness. To entertain and comfort the boy, Roland tells him a story that his mother often told him, about a brave boy who survives a "starkblast". So the first 3rd of the book concerns Roland's history, the second 3rd, the story he tells the boy, then the third 3rd, wraps up the story from history. Both stories are very well-written and entertaining. The story is suspenseful, but perhaps not quite as suspenseful as some of King's others stories (after all, we all know that Roland will survive the shapeshifter.) As a bonus, we learn a bit more about Roland's mother, and a last letter she wrote to Roland. The story Roland tells the boy involves a character who is an evil tax-collector from the land of Gilead, I highly doubt that Roland's mother, raising Roland in Gilead the supposed bastion of good on the earth, would have ever told a tale featuring such a character. That was the one part that seemed out of place in the novel, since the story could have been told without reference to an evil representative from Gilead. The rest of the story Roland the boy told was quite developed, especially in its discussion of marvels from the "old people." Concerning Roland's story of his youth, I have a feeling that its not quite 100% consistent with the rest of the books (like the Manni people in book 5, weren't they new to Susannah/Jake/Eddie, yet they should have known them from this story. Still, any inconsistencies are small, and quite forgivable considering this excellent novel.

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4 people found this helpful

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