The Wind Through the Keyhole: A Dark Tower Novel

I followed along with the book. I'm glad Mr. King read this for us because I could understand it much better (the dialect).

Stephen King's on a roll. This ranks right up there with Wizard and Glass as one of my favorite Dark Tower novels.

I enjoyed this small story that fits neatly between Dark Towers books 4 & 5. Packed full of references to other events in the series, it helped remind just how richly detailed this series was.

I could have handled a little less detail, however, when it involved a bursting wound filled with a spider and her eggs. Really. Ick.

It's so hot today, I could kind of enjoy a starkblast, a sudden burst of extreme cold.

This audio started at the end and then ended before the book was over

"A person's never too old for stories," Roland Deschain tells Billy, before relating a tale his Mother used to read to the young gunslinger as a child. Stephen King knows just how to capture an audience, and he does so by having the gunslinger Roland tell a story within a story to his ka-tet while they wait out a storm. The beginning seemed a little cumbersome, falling flat as an introduction to the tale, but once Roland began relating the story of an early assignment I was thoroughly engrossed. Rediscovering the rich lore and interesting land of Mid-World, made me realize how I've missed the adventures of Roland and his ragtag group of survivors.I listened to the audio version of the book, read by Stephen, and wonder at the reviews complaining about his narration skills versus voice actors. Personally, I enjoyed the author reading me his own tale. I'm never too old for a good bedtime story. As a stand-alone novel it does a great job, but as an introduction to the Dark Tower series, I believe it will be confusing to first time readers as there isn't a lot of explanation of the language used and too many assumptions made within the stories being told.I wish I could personally thank Stephen someday for his wonderful tales, and the inclusion of references from fairy tales, Disney, and other pop culture icons are always an added bonus.A must read, or listen, for any fan of the Dark Tower series!

I don't feel like 'The Wind Through the Keyhole' had all the power of a full-fledged Dark Tower. The double frame story weakened the overall book, though I guess it was necessary to establish that Roland was telling a tale of his youth and what better way than to tell stories around a campfire riding out a starkblast. (Great name for a storm by the way and the descriptors were fabulous.)

The story in the center of the frame, a fairytale told to young Roland by his mother years ago in Gilead is well done. It has excellent human elements of love, family, friendship, and betrayal. Magic and the Man in Black are extra-bonuses.

The middle frame of Roland and Jaime going to find a 'skin-man' is weaker, but it has some touching moments of Roland and the boy Billy which hearken back to his relationship with Jake.

Overall, probably a must read for Dark Tower fanatics, but not the best work in the series.

Roland, Susannah, Eddie, Jake, and Oy take shelter from a starkblast, a freezing windstorm. While waiting out the storm Roland tells them about an incident from his youth. His father sends him and his friend Jamie to investigate several killings in Debaria. The only witness is a frightened boy named Billy. Roland tries to comfort Billy by telling him a folktale from his childhood.The majority of the novel is taken up by ?The Wind Through the Keyhole,? the fairytale Roland tells Billy while they are waiting for Jamie to bring suspects for Billy to identify. This is the first time I have read a book that was like a nesting doll; a story within a story within a story. King pulls it off well.It?s been a few years since I read the original Dark Tower books, but I was able to remember all the characters and the original plotline. I enjoyed revisiting the characters and the world in which they live. This novel can be read as part of the Dark Tower series or as a stand-alone book.

The Wind Through the Keyhole was a bit of a disappointment to me, felt more like someone trying to capitalize on the series name than an addition to the story. Basically just a fairytale set within the Dark Tower universe.

This is a good book that acts to fill-in more of Roland’s world and story, than to advance his and his Ka-tet’s journey to the Datk Tower.

Let the book hangover begin. Where do I go from here? After finishing The Dark Tower series I will be missing the friends I made along the way. One thing is for sure, though. This book of the series has me even more excited for the release of Fairy Tale!

The main frame story shows us our incredible ka-tet in a very nostalgic light. It's light and fun and, in a way I think is really brilliant, neutral enough to fit as a kind of "in-between" story. I read it after a year-long break from the series, midway through #5, and the tone of the frame fitted my previous impressions perfectly. However, it doesn't give us anything major. Roland's tale is interesting - especially the first part - and the titular tale is very fun, but neither really gives a truly solid pay-off. All three have excellent action but fizzle out at the end, as if closure was intentionally avoided to make this seem, again, like an "in-between" addition or supplement to the series.

It was nice, but I didn't feel the connection with the rest of the dark tower story.
It was entertaining and had a good pace.

I absolutely love this book, but King's reading is terrible- PLEASE get a good cast togther to do an epic reading- it's begging for it

So, episode 4.5. On the one hand I would like an eternity of Dark Tower books, filling in all details and fleshing out stories. On the other hand, it's never worth over doing a story line.This is a stand alone story in its own right. As ever, if you're a DT aficionado you will pick up references to the bigger stories, if you're not you won't. It's a story within a tale within the journey to the dark tower, although that does little more than set the scene for the tale.The story is Mid-World's equivalent of a Grimm fairy tale. Only as it's Mid-World it's nastier and scarier. A boy faces up to challenges beyond his years, showing the strength that will ultimately turn him into a gunslinger.The tale is one of Roland's youth, of inexperienced gunslingers being sent to deal with an unusual problem.It's a joy to read a new tale of the DT, but this is a bonus to the main story, offering no additional depth to the quest for the DT. That aside, it's an enjoyable addition to the collection. Not SK's best but good enough.

Really cool stories. They really took me away from this crazy pandemic and I was able to relax , be excited, relieved, happy and sad a bit. Nothing special but also totally worth the time.

Fantastic book. Loved being back in that world.

The 8th Dark Tower book takes place between #4 and #5. While it doesn't add much to the Dark Tower storyline other than getting Roland's ka-tet from point A to point B, it is nonetheless an enthralling and scary story that adds color and depth to the mythology. It is also vastly superior to the other Dark Tower book told in flashback ,Wizard and Glass. King acknowledges this by having Roland admit that he wasn't very good at telling stories in the beginning, but he's gotten better.

So glad I didn't wait to read this book and instead read it as book 4.5. The book is a story within a story within a story, told while our ka-tet waits out a crazy storm on their journey to the Dark Tower (after the Emerald City experience in book 4). We are given both another look at a young Roland on another assignment for his father as well as a taste of the storytelling that Roland grew up with. Both these tales bring you deeper into the character of Roland as well as the history/mythology of Mid-World. Definitely a hard book for me to put down, and the best evidence yet of how much King's writing improved from "The Gunslinger" (how much I did not like that book cannot fully be explained). Even though this novel was written after the "completion" of the original Dark Tower series, I am still looking forward to the rest of the books.

Ok, I absolutely loved the Dark Tower series. I thought as each book came out they got better and better. For this book however, I did not have high hopes. Where could SK go from that super high point the series ended on? I should never have doubted! This book was wonderful - I read it as close to straight through as I can these days and I loved the story in a story in a story approach! If you have not read any of the other books in the Dark Tower series, fear not, you will still enjoy The Wind Through the Keyhole. (Make sure you read the forward to get "up to speed".)

Look, you're only going to read this if you're a Dark Tower fan. If you are, don't be afeared! Ka has been good to our Uncle Stevie and he's found one more little tale featuring our old friends. It's simple and nearly half of the book doesn't even feature Roland, let alone the rest of the ka-tet. But we get to see more of Mid-World and the way the world has moved on. We get a bit more insight into Roland's mind. We see what a true children's tale would be like, coming from King.

Mostly, though, we just get the pure joy of getting something new - a new experience - out of a universe we all believed had pretty much been shut off for good. And that sort of pure joy is, I say true, the best kind in the world, thankee.

Hile, gunslinger - and may we meet again someday.

I so love Roland and his ka-tet! What a pleasant little surprise this was for me. Long after the final dark tower book was released, we are gifted with this tale within a tale within a tale. Roland and the gang are riding out a vicious storm when he begins to tell them about his time tracking a skin-walker. Embedded in this tale is the true meat of the book, a fable from his childhood about Tim Stoutheart. It is beautifully written and crafted in mid-world, but a story of bravery anyone could appreciate. I think I enjoyed this so much because I love the stories of Roland as a boy (my favorite being of course the Wizard and Glass). We are given the chance to see what shaped him into the gunslinger he is today. This was short by King's standards-- only 300 pages. Despite this, it transported me into the beloved world of the Ka-tet. Great for lovers of the series, but I am sure it would stand on it's own prettty darn well and for that I say Thankyee sai.

Loved it! Finished up the series in a couple months last year, and was saving this one as a treat, knowing there wouldn't be anything left afterwards. It was worth the wait, as it was a wonderful story.The biggest disadvantage is that (as the review before this one points out) it's a story within a story within a story. The main framing device has the ka-tet, and the secondary story only has Roland. "The Wind Through the Keyhole," the story young Roland tells to child in the story old Roland tells, doesn't have any of the main characters in it. But it's still a wonderful story. And I did enjoy the little peek into the law-keeping business of young Roland, and even what the man in black was sometimes up to long ago.More shocking to me was that Merlyn shows up in it. I had finished "The Once and Future King" just before this book, and had forgotten about the Arthur Eld connection in this series.Great stuff, though I am sad there isn't any more Dark Tower now.

Well, it's a really good tale, two actually, but it really has very little to do with The Dark Tower, other than the fact that the ka-tet is in it. The tet is caught in a starkblast, and Roland tells the tale of the Skin-Man from when he was young. In that adventure, he tells the story of "The Wind Through the Keyhole" which has nothing to do at all with the DT! So... I liked the stories, but am bummed at how little they had to do with the overall saga.

With a dangerous storm about to roll over them, Roland and his Ka-tet seek shelter to wait it out. While they wait, Roland tells them two stories, one nested inside the other; of his second assignment as a Gunslinger, and the fairy tale he told a scared young boy while he was waiting for that investigation to progress; one that his own mother, so recently dead by his own hand, had read to him as a boy.Being a late insert, The Wind Through the Keyhole doesn?t add an enormous amount to the primary storyline and is very much about getting a deeper glimpse into Roland?s past through a flashback story, and a diverting fairy-tale which, given the magic and strange tech in Roland?s where and when, reads rather less like a fiction of his world, than an actual recounted story, and adds a beautifully rich layer itself. I was pleased to find that I didn?t find this absence of Dark-Tower focus frustrating, and was able to enjoy the sidelining for what it was? a little extra helping of Mid-World and the role of the Gunslinger. As an added extra, the fairy tale has some bumblers in it... any time King wants to write a book about Billy Bumblers, I?ll be happy to read it. That said, without the quest being the highlight, the book lacks some of the intensity of its brethren volumes, even Wizard and Glass which it most resembles in style. Still, within the constraints of being sandwiched between four books on one side and three on the other, The Wind Through the Keyhole delivers a self-contained fireside tale that fits snugly and roams far at the same time. What a nice thing it is to have a Dark Tower novel that I?ve only read once. I will certainly enjoy revisiting and savouring it all over again, although I don?t think it will yield as many re-reads as the main set. Thank you for indulging your DT fans, Mr. King.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It is a story within a story within a story. The gunslinger and his ka-tet are holed up in a sturdy building waiting for a storm to pass, and the gunslinger tells a story of when he was young and had to find a shapeshifter who was killing people. Young Roland tells a story to a young man, of a boy who ventures into a dark forest to save his mother's eyesight.

For some reason, I didn't find this one as enjoyable as the other entries in the series; I suspect it's due in part to the thinness of the book - only slightly larger than The Gunslinger, and certainly not the doorstop that volumes 5 and 7 are - but something about it just feels "off" to me.

The characters are their usual selves; Eddie is appropriately manic, Roland predictably stern with Jake and Susannah (and let us not forget Oy) in varying degrees in the middle. The first section just seems like King was fishing for a convenient reason to expose more of Roland's backstory. While I'm all for hearing more about Roland's (mis)adventures between leaving Mejis in Wizard and Glass and turning up in Tull in The Gunslinger, I don't know that we really need more arbitrary framework for it; Little Sisters of Eluria did just fine as a one-off that just told the story it came to tell. Essentially, it felt like King just wasted roughly 70 pages before getting to any part of the story that mattered (at least, for those who've already read the other Dark Tower books; I suppose some context of the ka-tet might help others, but...)

Once we get to the "real" story, that of Roland and Jamie DeCurry heading out of Gilead in pursuit of a monstrous assailant, it perks up quite a bit. The pacing is quick - though sometimes overburdened with information and nods to pop-culture or the other novels in the series, which is probably not much of an issue to a Dark Tower fan but may impede enjoyment for newcomers - and the characters interesting. In particular, I found the allusions to Stephen Deschain's actions and motives fascinating, disturbing and properly foreshadowing (aftshadowing?) Roland's character and actions in the other novels.

Then the book reveals it's true nature of being a puzzle box. We started with Roland and his current ka-tet; then Roland begins telling a story of his past. Come a properly dramatic moment, young Roland then begins a tale of his own. This tale-within-a-tale(within-another-tale) is done in proper fairy-tale tones but still resonates with King's unique linguistic style and echoes certain characters from the main narrative; the Covenant Man, in particular, bears watching. As the fairy-tale ends and we come back to the story of Roland and Jaime, it leaves you with a certain satisfaction but still craving more; once the adventure of young Roland winds down and we're back to the "present" - which is to say, immediately preceding Wolves of the Calla - it feels like someone gave you a rude shove out of a pleasant dream.

Don't get me wrong; I love the series overall, and I like both of the "inner" stories, but the wrapper it's clothed in felt unnecessary and forced. Had it just been "Young Roland Adventures" - or even just the titular fairy-tale - I'd have rated it higher, but as things stand, 3/5.

Fantastic read. It is a tale within a tale within a tale, and it breathes life not just into Roland and his quest, but into the very folks of Mid-World. Dark yet vibrant, it is a tale of the magic and bravery of the human spirit in the face of the unknown. It doesn't really fill in any missing pieces of the original series, and in fact revolves very little around the ka-tet, taking place instead inside one of Roland's tales, told to his ka-mates in the shadow of a deadly storm they must wait out. 'The Wind Through The Keyhole' reads very much like a brief detour on the road to the tower, But I found it to be a detour well worth taking... one filled with wonder, fear, and ultimately, hope.

Dark Tower novel set (kind of) in an interlude as the main protagonists continue towards the Tower, but that?s really a wrapper for the story within the story within the story. The one in the very center is about a young boy at the edge of a dark forest whose father dies and whose new stepfather is not very nice, nor is the tax collector who sends the boy on a hunt for the famed Maerlyn. The middle is about an adventure from Roland?s youth in which he comforts a traumatized boy who?s seen a shapeshifter kill his family by telling him about that other young boy. And the frame story is about Roland and his ka-tet hiding from the starkblast, a cold storm that freezes so fast that trees explode. It didn?t seem very memorable to me, but it was definitely King.

Loved the book, but hated Stephen King's narration. He should stick to writing--he is not a great narrator.

My experience of reading The Wind Through the Keyhole is one only a Dark Tower newbie could have, and so I decided to have it.

This novel -- practically a novella next to its gargantuan cousins -- was published just this year, but is meant to be "shelved" between the fourth Dark Tower book, Wizard and Glass, and the fifth, Wolves of the Calla. Which is to say it takes place, insofar as its outer loop of storytelling can be said to take place, between Roland's ka-tet's visit to the off-kilter Emerald City that turned the last ten percent or so of WaG into one giant in-your-ribs Wizard of Oz reference, and their arrival outside the Calla crescent whereat they get called on to be gunslingers in the good old fashioned sense. Like WaG, The Wind Through the Keyhole tells us a story of Roland's past, but nested within that story is another story, called "The Wind Through the Keyhole" which is a sort of Roland-world fairy tale presented in full as told by Roland to a child in the middle of the story from his past as told by Roland to Eddie, Susannah, Jake and Oy.

Got that? Good.

So this book really doesn't advance the Dark Tower plot one bit, but it's not meant to. It's meant to deepen and extend the mythology of Roland and his world a bit, while leaving the door (or keyhole) wide open for more of the same if there is demand. Or maybe even if there isn't. I can sort of imagine King spending his twilight years adding more and more volumes like these to his baby until new readers of the Dark Tower find themselves in a sort of Zeno's Paradox, chasing the last volume and its revelation and proper ending, but never quite getting to it because every step forward leads to a half-step forward and then a quarter-step forward and so on. Nor need all of them take place between WaG and WotC, Bog help us. And future wags will no doubt refer to these Dark Tower 4.5s and 4.7s and 5.12s and whatever as King's Silmarillion. Which will likely lead to much wailing and gnashing of teeth on the part of people like my friends who originally read this series one book at a time, waiting years between them, for just the original seven, and who then want everybody else to read them, except now there are like 17 of them plus the ones that King's children cobble together out of his random jottings on various flash drives and whatnot left posthumously behind...

On the other hand, maybe King pere et fils will show some restraint. I suspect a lot depends on how well this book has been received. Judging from Goodreads, the answer to that question is fairly well, though some fans are annoyed that its nature partakes more of WaG fan fiction than of the series as a staggering whole. Absolutely none of the perceived lacuna between the plots of WaG and WotC (which I am reading now and does seem to feature a staggering advancement in Roland's apprentices' skills and in the Schroedinger's Fetus that is just hand-waved as "some stuff happened between the novels") is filled; it's all just tangential texture.

But so back to how my experience in reading The Wind Through the Keyhole is something only newbies can have. I'm going to take a stab in the dark and say that, based on what I've gleaned via King's bad habits of sending his characters message-dreams and whatnot that I've complained about elsewhere and of ham-handed foreshadowing generally, that most, if not all, of Roland's apprentices are not going to make it to the finish line. I might be wrong; I'm trying hard to avoid spoilers (and driving my friends crazy because I'm not reading these novels fast enough to suit them and they want to talk about them with me at great length, the darlings. Sorry, sweetnesses; I'm just not enough of a fan to want to devour these straight through without some breaks with other books) and so hope not to found out whether I'm right or wrong until the end. But, reading between the lines as I decided whether to read this or Wolves of the Calla next, I got the distinct impression that original readers of the series found it jarring or bittersweet or just plain weird to see characters with known fate/dooms walking around and learning and talking like they still had futures. For the, you know, 20 or so pages in which they appear in this book, anyway. As I said, I'll never know that experience. For me it's just the WaG mixture as before, except in that, glory be, no stupid teen romance in this one. For which I am grateful.

The stories themselves, especially the central fairy tale, have a lot of charm to them, a quality that seems to me rare in most of King's other work. There are still elements of peril and horror and heartbreak, to be sure, but somehow even depictions of, e.g. shredded bodies in the Roland-story of the terrible shape-shifter besetting a mining town, have kind of a light, fond touch. This is King putting an extra layer of delicious buttercream frosting on an already too-rich cake. He's having such fun, and buttercream is yummy; why stop him? Just, you know, don't let him totally encrust the thing with candy flowers and crap, okay?

But now I'm definitely hitting a wall of Dark Tower fatigue. Oy.