It has been eight years since the controversial conclusion of Stephen King ’s Dark Tower series, which he began way back in 1974. But now King has returned to Mid-World, gunslinger Roland Deschain, and his ragged band with The Wind Through the Keyhole , a book that, King tells us, “should be shelved between Wizard and Glass and Wolves of the Calla… which makes it, I suppose, Dark Tower 4.5.”
But it also works as a stand-alone novel, and a novel about the nature of storytelling at that. “These tales nest inside each other,” Roland says, as we’re led into a story within a story within a story. Roland begins to tell his companions a tale of his early days as a teenage gunslinger, wherein he saves a young boy from a vicious marauding shapeshifter, and then comforts him with another story, a fairy tale from his own childhood. This innermost tale, the story a teenage Roland tells about a boy named Tim, is the most compelling of the three, entirely of Mid-World and also a fable of our collective consciousness, the kind of story, Roland says, that “start[s] ‘before your grandfather’s grandfather was born.'” We think this novel is sure to win a slew of new Dark Tower converts, while managing to please the faithful — no easy feat.
Click through for a sneak peek at the first few pages of the book — or if you’d rather listen to King’s dulcet tones, let him read them to you himself.
Dying to know what happens next? Grab your copy of Stephen King’s The Wind Through the Keyhole, which hits shelves today, here.