The Wind Through the Keyhole

When I was significantly younger, my uncle lent my mother a copy of Stephen King's The Gunslinger as an audiobook on the way back from New Jersey.  About 45 minutes in there was a sex scene and my mother shut it off (I cannot really blame her.  I am not sure that I would want to listen to a sex scene with my single digit age child).  However, the idea of a cowboy trekking across a desert stuck with me.  Then when I was in high school, I went through a phase where I would spend a lot of time at the local library reading whatever piqued my interest.  There I found The Gunslinger again and all the other books in the Dark Tower series.  I found the series greatly entertaining despite some of its flaws and the protagonist, Roland, was a hero I could get behind, especially in the fourth book Wizard and Glass which recounts an adventure from his younger days.  In addition, the way that the series ends in book seven was really, at the time, quite novel to me.

In March of last year, Stephen King, one of the most prolific authors, announced that he was going to be producing a book to come in between the 4th and 5th books in the time line entitled The Wind Through the Keyhole.  My initial reaction was excitement because I am a sucker for a continuing story.  My love of the Star Wars canon probably stems in a large part from the fact that it is one long continuing story.  However, that was overtaken by trepidation, was this just some publicity trick?  It has been a while since I read the series, but I don't remember much space between 4 and 5.  However, being the faithful fan, I preordered it and avoided most of the information about it.

When I finally read it, I realized that it had a very interesting format.  There is a frame story about the series' protagonists listening to Roland tell a story about his younger days.  However, as part of that story, he tells a story he heard as a child to someone else and the readers must dutifully follow him into a frame story within a frame story and then back out, one level at a time.  (kinda Inception-esque)  Not that this is bad, but I am not sure that I have ever read a book with (relatively long) stories three layers deep.

I thought that the story that was at the middle level was significantly better than the other two and wished that it had been fleshed out more.  On reading, it is pretty obvious that the deepest story is the one that he really wanted to tell but he wanted to tie it to characters that people would recognize from the other books.

If you are a fan of Stephen King in general and are picking this up to read something in his style, I would not recommend it.  It is more like his normal fare than the other Dark Tower books but it is certainly not horror or even suspense.  If you are hoping for a normal science fiction or fantasy story, however, this really isn't one of those either. There are a lot of things that go pretty much unexplained unless you have read the other books (and some that are weird even if you have).  However, if you liked the world of the Dark Tower, this a great reminder of what it was like.  Little things like the lexicon and the way that certain events happened were a great throwback to the last time that I read them and brought me many happy memories.

Perhaps this will get more people interested in the Dark Tower series but I cannot honestly believe that it will.  If someone was interested in reading the Dark Tower series, I would definitely hand them The Gunslinger first without even thinking about The Wind Through the Keyhole.  It is the difference between teaching someone to swim in a wading pool or in the deep end with weights on their legs.

In short, if you enjoyed the Dark Tower, you probably owe this a read.  If you are interested in the Dark Tower, read at least the first four books first, if not the seven who have come out before this.  I would give this book a 79%.