The Wind Through the Keyhole, Stephen King

The cover below doesn’t match my copy of the book because I can’t seem to find my version online. I know this probably doesn’t matter to you, but I’ve been particular about matching covers so this slightly bothers me. This cover’s cooler though–actually all of the other covers are cooler. It’s a testament to Stephen King’s popularity that this book has been out for just over a year, and there’s already half a dozen different editions.

Stephen King was the first adult novelist that I read (The Shining, age 11, origin of my nightmares about being afraid to open closed doors), and I’ve been a fan ever since. You can never fully appreciate King until you’ve read his Dark Tower series, which I tell everyone whenever they try to claim a membership to his fan club. The Dark Tower is King’s opus–its characters and mythology appear in most of his books–and so I’m always excited to learn a new aspect of the story. The Wind Through the Keyhole is a story within a story within a story. This book slips into the timeline between the fourth and fifth books of the series, and begins with Roland and his ka-tet hiding out from a starkblast. As they wait out the storm, Roland tells a story from his youth in which he hunts out a skin-man that has been terrorizing a village. Within that story, young Roland comforts a boy with the tale of an early gunslinger who is sent on a journey by the Covenant Man. Though I’m often annoyed by stories that involve a real-time narrator but are still double-stuffed with dialogue, I suspended my disbelief (much like I did for Dolores Claiborne as the entire novel is a transcription of a monologue by the title character during an interrogation) for this book as King expertly weaved together the stories.

I had missed the world of the Dark Tower, with its ka and beams and nineteens. And I missed the man in black alias Marten Broadcloak alias Walter 0’Dim alias Randall Flagg alias–now–the Covenant Man, one of King’s most disturbing creations, who only has hobbies.