The Wind Through the Keyhole by Stephen King

Stephen King

Stephen King’s latest addition to the Dark Tower series is a must read for anyone who has followed the tale. According to Stephen King, the Wind Through the Keyhole would be book 4.5 because it fits between book 4, after the tet escapes the Green Palace at the end of Wizard and Glass, and book 5, before they reach Calla Bryn Sturgis, the setting for Wolves of the Calla. New readers will enjoy it too, and will probably end up starting on the series with the first book, The Gunslinger.

The Wind Through the Keyhole was an old childhood story of Roland’s from the Magic Tales of the Eld. It is about a Starkblast, which is a storm that comes out of nowhere with temperatures dropping way below freezing in less than an hour. Lakes freeze instantly, birds turn to ice-statues and fall from the sky, breaking like glass. Winds with gale force rip fullly grown trees by their roots and toss them around like toys.

Finding shelter from a Starkblast, Roland tells Jake, Eddie, and Susannah a story. In a time when Roland was a young gunslinger, just after the tragic death of his mother, his father sends him and his tet-mate Jamie DeCurry to Debariato to investigate strange reports of unexplained deaths. The rumor is that the skin-man is able to change his shape and that he is committing horrific acts of murder.

A small boy, Tim, whose father is killed by the skin man, is the only survivor and, Roland hopes, will be able to identify him. While keeping the boy safe in a jail cell, Roland tries to calm him by telling him a story that his mother used to tell him, the Wind Through the Keyhole.

Stephen King

In Stephen King’s, Under the Dome, Dome Day happened on October 21st, shortly before noon in Chester’s Mill. It was like an invisible guillotine had dropped around the town. Anything that happened to be in it’s path at the time, whether it was a woodchuck, a farmer’s wife’s hand, or a scarecrow, were cleanly sliced in half. Any birds, airplanes, or helicopter’s that had the misfortune of flying in the area when the dome came down, were destroyed by the sudden impact.

Retired Captain Dale Barbara, Barbie, was within minutes of making it out of town before it happened. If only the driver of the pickup that just passed him would have recognized him as the short order cook at Sweetbriar Rose and stopped to pick him up. He would have avoided becoming part of an event that, for the first time in 9 years, caused the color of the National Threat Advisory to exceed orange.

The event went unnoticed by some of the towns citizens. Junior Rennie, son of Big Jim Rennie, king of used cars in Chester’s Mill, wasn’t aware that the town had just became completely isolated from the rest of the world. Junior usually kept his temper under control, thanks to his dead mother’s voice in his head. But that day his control was gone and the beginning of his insanity started with a murder, soon followed by another.

Stephen King has been working on this idea for a long time. The Cannibals and Under the Dome are unfinished works of his from the 70’s and 80’s. In his words these two books “were two very different attempts to utilize the same idea, which concerns itself with how people behave when they are cut off from the society they’ve always belonged to.” [1]

While reading this story I became completely immersed in the community. The twists and turns that took place kept me off balance and completely in the story, I never knew what to expect next. This is an example of a master story-teller weaving a long tale and taking you with him on the journey. I wish all of Stephen King’s novels were this big, over 1,000 pages. I hated to see it end.