Books Read: The Wind Through the Keyhole by Stephen King
This bloke can write.
I’d forgotten King had written this novel, squeezed between books four (“Wizard and Glass”) and five (“Wolves of the Calla”) of the Dark Tower series. But I was checking on Wikipedia to see if Revival followed Joyland when I saw this novel was published before Joyland (and therefore, I should have read it last month as part of my Stephen King catch-up). But you live and learn people. Live. And. Learn.
I loved The Dark Tower and especially the final novels, which could only have been written by someone who no longer cared that much about what the critics thought of him and was going to write whatever the fuck he wanted, including putting himself in the narrative and making jokes about Insomnia. At the same time, though, I wasn’t chalashing1 for a new Dark Tower novel, especially a story centring on Young Roland Deschain, whose past never really interested me.
I, of course, was 100% wrong.
The Wind Through the Keyhole starts with the ka-tet, Roland, Eddie, Susannah, Jake and Oy, following the Beam. When a kindly old man warns them of an incoming “starkblast”—a magical cold front capable of freezing everything in its path—they take shelter in an abandoned building. With enough firewood to keep them warm (starkblasts typically last 24 hours), Roland tells the ka-tet a story from his youth. He recalls the time his Dad sent Roland and fellow gunslinger Jamie DeCurry to hunt down a skin-man, a violent shape-shifter terrorising the town of Debaria. There, young Roland meets Bill Streeter, a traumatised boy who glimpsed the skin-man’s human form before it massacred a family. To calm him, Roland recounts a story his mother once told him—The Wind Through the Keyhole, about a boy named Tim Ross and his perilous quest to save his mother.
We get two framing stories for the price of one. Young Roland’s investigation with Jamie is fantastic—the ease between the two young men, only slightly unbalanced by the savagery they encounter, the gory table leavings of the skin-man. It's so good, so immersive, that I was annoyed when King decided to change gear and drop us into a fairy tale. But, my God. “The Wind Through the Keyhole” is King at his most imaginative, his most cosmic, his most magical. It’s so vivid, so sparkling with energy and light, that young Roland’s story and the ka-tet's journey can only seem a bit sepia in comparison.
What an enormously enjoyable novel. Fuck I love Stephen King.
Yiddish for salivating.