Book #68: The Wind Through the Keyhole by Stephen King
The Wind Through the Keyhole by Stephen King
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
So, this was a sort of bonus novel that Stephen King wrote as part of the Dark Tower series, some time after he completed it, and it takes place immediately after "Wizard and Glass".
I had read some quite negative things about this one, but decided to read it for completeness; I can honestly say I was disappointed, as it was definitely the worst in the Dark Tower series so far.
So, at the start, Roland and his companions are sheltering from some oncoming adversity, and Roland starts to tell as story-within-a-story, another tale from the past. This one revolves around his early days as a gunslinger, and his encounter with a "skin man", a shape-shifter. Unlike Wizard and Glass, the narrative does switch to first-person when Roland tells his story. The only real problem with this narrative style is when another character in the flashback starts talking a lot, and a couple of times I had to backtack a lot, realising that it was now Roland telling about what someone else said to him.
Overall, the skin-man story isn't particularly bad, although the ending seems a little like Stephen King was on auto-pilot as he wrote it, in that it is a little anti-climatic. However, it is broken up by Roland consoling a young boy who has lost his family by telling him a story from his childhood, "The Wind Through the Keyhole".
So, now we have a story-within-a-story-within-a-story; not only does it take up the bulk of the novel, but it seems almost completely unrelated to Roland's hunt for the skin-man. This story is about a boy called Tim, also living Gilead, whose mother has re-married to an abusive husband, and ends up going blind. So, it starts to chart Tim's journey to find a cure.
I tried to like this story, but in the second half, it just become a bit too weird, and it felt like Stephen King was shoehorning in fantasy staples - fairies and dragons - just for the sake of it. There are a few bizarre moments that feel that they could be straight out of a novel by H.P. Lovecraft or George Saunders, and I found myself struggling to read it. I am not sure if any of the content becomes relevant in one of the later three titles, but here is just seemed a bit confusing.
Overall, I felt like this was a letdown, and because the stories about the Skin Man and Tim felt so completely detatched from each other, it seemed that they would been better off as completely separate novellas, in one of Stephen King's short-story collections. I think I would have liked to have read something new involving Roland and his travelling companions. This didn't really add much to the Dark Tower series, so overall I don't really see what the point of writing it was.
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