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The Wind Through the Keyhole: The Dark Tower IV-1/2 Paperback – December 6, 2016

by Stephen King (Author)
4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 9,625 ratings
Editors' pick Best Mystery, Thriller & Suspense
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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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  1. Print length
    320 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publication date
    December 6, 2016
  4. Dimensions
    5.5 x 0.9 x 8.38 inches
  5. ISBN-10
    1501166220
  6. ISBN-13
    978-1501166228
  7. See all details
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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, 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.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Scribner; Reprint edition (December 6, 2016)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1501166220
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1501166228
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 10 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.9 x 8.38 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 9,625 ratings

About the author

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Stephen King

Stephen King

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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.

Customer reviews

4.7 out of 5 stars
4.7 out of 5
9,625 global ratings
good book but unnecessary
4 Stars
good book but unnecessary
was a good book but i think it was unnecessary in the storyline of the dark tower series
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Top reviews from the United States

BN.
5.0 out of 5 stars Good story
Reviewed in the United States on May 5, 2024
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Not as good as the rest of the series but still a good supplemental book to the series. Would love more.
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Christoph L. Dickenson
5.0 out of 5 stars Book
Reviewed in the United States on May 8, 2024
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The book was brand new as described. I haven't read it yet, though.
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Stefano Buffoli
4.0 out of 5 stars Trying to be objective here
Reviewed in the United States on May 2, 2012
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More or less all Constant Readers know the facts: Stephen King starts the Dark Tower series, writes four books that are generally regarded as excellent, wild, visionary Lord-of-the-Rings-meets-The-Good-the-Bad-and-the-Ugly stuff, then stops for a while, because he's not sure where to go with the story - until he has a road accident. This event changes his personal priorities, and he resolves to finish the saga writing the final three books, which unfortunately are now generally regarded as vastly inferior to the first four.

Now, I did appreciate the ending of the Dark Tower anyway. I am aware lots of people will not agree on this, but then again a lot will, it's one of those love it or hate it things. While I was reading it, while I was seeing it unfold in front of my eyes, I thought that yes, that was the only possible ending; I slapped myself on the forehead and thought "Of course!". It's not only what happens, actually, it's the how, the execution that makes it good: there is a proper crescendo, it's mystical as it should be, it really feels like the end of the journey and you are there with Roland. And in a seven book saga where the final destination, that mysterious Dark Tower, is always looming on the horizon, where every event is propelled by this obsession of the main character for the Tower, this is what makes the difference: how it all ends, the sight waiting for you at top of the mountain. A bad ending will disappoint you enough to look back at the whole series and hate it, and you will leave the place full of spite and resentment. A good ending will make you forgive the flaws and you will leave happy (and sad, because the story doesn't continue further).

But even if I liked the ending, I did agree with the general view on the second batch of books. I was particularly disappointed by Wolves of the Calla, which, I thought, was horrible (while my personal favorite in the series is The Waste Land. If you can come up with characters like a giant cyborg bear with an antenna on its head and a sentient psychopath train that loves riddles and TALKS IN CAPS, you are a brave writer; but if you manage to make those character actually believable, alive and scary, you must also be very good at what you are doing).

At some point I became fairly sure that King in recent years had lost his touch. He did obviously develop his taste for meta-elements in stories - something he always had, really, look at Desperation and its twin book, at RF/MB as the recurring bad guy that pops up in various worlds: stories that resonate, events and characters that come back, the music of chance, as Paul Auster would say. All nice and interesting, but his books as a whole seemed bland lately, and kind of, well, uninteresting and meh. Maybe the accident somewhat scared him, or scared his talent away, I thought. Maybe he did need the alcohol and the drugs to write good books, I guess it's true for many writers. Well, I would have to live with it, the world has moved on, I would never read again books like The Waste Land, It or The Stand.

And then by chance I read Herman Wouk Is Still Alive, a recent short story from King, which I found powerful, moving, rather un-King-ish in its tone and in its subtleness, but very King-ish in its view of the world, of good and evil. So I went on and read 11/22/63, which turned out to be an AWESOME novel. I won't say it's the single best one he wrote, but I would definitely put it on par with his best work. It's insanely gripping, finally (finally!) I felt again that compulsion to keep reading until four in the morning, just to know what happens next. There is the right amount of surprises along the way (what does this No Suspenders guy want?) and some of the scenes were just so incredibly convincing, effective and scary (the guy with the hammer...).
Just like that, the Good King was back, different from before but in many ways better than before. What happened? I wondered. Maybe he just sat it out and now he's fine again, maybe he just needed some time, maybe some other event triggered it. I'll never know.
With some expectation and trepidation, I then turned to The Wind through the Keyhole. King back to the world of the Dark Tower really seemed like those news that look good at first but actually are bad. As if Led Zeppelin were back and writing new songs, but then the new songs suck and you end up hating Led Zeppelin because they just didn't leave alone the good memory you had of them. And King already did this, partially, with the final three books of the Dark Tower (although to be honest in his case it's different, he didn't have a choice, he had to finish the saga somewhat).
Then again, the rest of the stuff he wrote recently is marvelous, I thought. Is it possible that he managed to pull it off? And, maybe there is something in there about the final destiny of Rhea of the Cöos...
So I read it. Like it has been said repeatedly, it's a sort of a fairy tale and a story within a story. It is much smaller in scale compared to the rest of the Dark Tower books, not in terms of size, but more in terms of style, and the kind of events it depicts. More than another volume of the saga it's kind of an interlude.
What does it do well? For a start, it's an absolutely enjoyable fairy tale. Often King is working with material that in other hands would feel stale, as in not original, been there done that. But in this case, again, it's the execution that counts, that ability he has to describe a cyborg bear so vividly that it comes alive in your head. As for this one book, how many dragons have been breathing fire in fantasy and horror stories? Still, King's dragon seems very real, it behaves like a real animal would, it is first and foremost a very believable huge beast. And the tiger is another good example:

In the cage, pacing slowly around a hole in the center, was an enormous tyger.
It saw the staring, gapemouthed boy and approached the bars. Its eyes were as large as Points balls, but a brilliant green instead of blue. On its hide, stripes of dark orange alternated with those of richest midnight black. Its ears were cocked. Its snout wrinkled back from long white teeth. It growled. The sound was low, like a silk garment being ripped slowly up a seam. It could have been a greeting . . .

Don't you just perfectly see a tiger in your head, a fairy tale tiger, after this brief description?

Another good thing is the absence of what someone has called 'overwriting'. It's the single most annoying element of King's style in his recent books: a tendency to always make everything very explicit, something like putting the word (sarcasm) between brackets after any sarcastic question that any character happen to ask, in case someone doesn't get it. This is a problem that 11/22/63 has, actually (but not Herman Wouk). A small example. Let's say that King wants to show how ignorant and illiterate a political extremist group of the Sixties can be; he does that with the content of a flyer that has many spelling mistakes, distributed by one of these groups:

During the Thursday night telemcast of the Billy James Hargis so-called "Cristian Crusade," Channel 9 will give are-time to GENERAL EDWIN WALKER, a right-wing fascist who has encouraged JFK to invade the peaceful peoples of Cuba and who has formented anti-black, anti-integration "HATE-SPEAK" all over the south. (If you have doubts about the accuracy of this information, check the "TV Guide.") These two men stand for everythig we fouht against in WWII, and their Fascist RAVINGS have no place on the are-waves.

Now, this would be enough, the spelling mistakes are clearly visible, I understood what King wants to tell me; but no, his main character will comment:

I briefly pondered the misspellings, then folded the flyer and put it in the box where I kept my manuscripts.

Why this comment? Just in case I didn't notice the misspellings myself, I guess. It may seem like a small thing, but on the long run it's annoying. It's a bit like constantly being suggested that you are stupid and you need help. And there is more to it, there are the repetitions. How many times can you say 'The past resonates' before the average reader starts thinking 'I know it does, stop repeating it!' Clarity is always good, there is nothing worse than an unintentionally confusing story, but there are limits; if you pass them and really start explaining everything (everything!) as if the readers were completely unable to catch anything that is even slightly subtle... well, the book obviously loses strength.

I am glad to report there is nothing like this in The Wind through the Keyhole, and I really hope King will just get rid of this style feature for the future, it was the only real flaw I could find in 11/22/63, in every other respect, like I said, an AWESOME book.

Another good thing is that The Wind through the Keyhole tells us interesting stuff about Roland and sides of his personality that were not previously explored. Because the story is really about Roland, there is no space for Eddie or the other usual sidekicks; and it's also about what it means to be a gunslinger.

Anything bad to report? Not really, not exactly. As I said this is more of an interlude rather than an untold chapter of the quest for the Tower; so I wouldn't say it's a terribly dramatic or powerful book, and it's not very likely to become your favorite Dark Tower so far; but then again, I don't think it is meant to do that. Actually, I appreciate the way King has chosen to go back to that world, sort of on tiptoe, and being careful not to destroy anything valuable, just modestly adding a few things that were left out.

So my conclusion, for what it's worth, is that yes, this book is good, and I would keep an eye on whatever King will publish in the next months and years. There. I am a Constant Reader again.
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Anonymous
5.0 out of 5 stars So good to get back to Roland...
Reviewed in the United States on April 27, 2024
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Classic King. Read most of Dark Tower series years ago. Found this and the last one that came out. So good to get back to mid world and gunslingers...
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Isaias Barbosa
5.0 out of 5 stars Good book
Reviewed in the United States on April 19, 2024
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If your a fan of Stephen King and the The Dark Tower series you will love this book.
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James Tepper
5.0 out of 5 stars Superb story within a story within a story
Reviewed in the United States on April 27, 2012
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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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Top reviews from other countries

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Uriel
5.0 out of 5 stars no es lo que esperas
Reviewed in Mexico on June 22, 2022
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No es una historia tradicional de la Torre oscura, pero la magia que tiene Stephen King para crear mundos es inegable. Aunque no hayas leído otro libro en la serie ampliamente recomiendo este
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Rebecca Roberts
5.0 out of 5 stars Good story. Disappointed with book
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 13, 2024
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Had to return as cover in image wasn’t the one sent and who wants a mismatched book? Luckily it was a gift so I just replaced it but it was annoying
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Ioan Radu Apostol
5.0 out of 5 stars 11/10
Reviewed in Sweden on October 9, 2023
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It's the crown jweel for King
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MIGUEL ANGEL
5.0 out of 5 stars Todo correcto.
Reviewed in Spain on November 21, 2020
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Todo correcto.
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Jhonatam
5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing story
Reviewed in Brazil on March 27, 2019
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Read it just after finishing Wizard and Glass (Dark Tower volume IV) and enjoyed a lot on the histories contained on the book - specially the way SK nested them one into another.
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