The Story Behind the Story Behind the Story

Despite my recent bad experience reading Stephen King, I was recently compelled to give him another chance. That's because his latest, The Wind Through the Keyhole, is a new Dark Tower book. Though the series was finished years ago, he apparently found an idea that tickled him enough to go back in and write a new book chronologically wedged between books 4 and 5 of the original series. Despite my middling-at-best reaction to King's other writing, I did enjoy the Dark Tower books overall, so decided this one would probably be worth my time.

But the thing is, the notion that this is actually a Dark Tower book is rather a stretch of the truth. It's actually a turducken of fiction, a fairy tale stuffed inside a prequel, stuffed inside a Dark Tower short story. It's not necessarily bad, as I'll get to in a moment, but it does invite you to read it under false pretenses.

The core of the book is a sort of Grimm-esque fairy tale that connects to the Dark Tower books only in the sense that it uses the same style -- a similar setting and similar language. It doesn't actually involve any of the Dark Tower characters, and I think it would have been more at home in a Four Past Midnight type of story collection.

The gimmick to legitimize the story as Dark Tower material is that it's being told to a young boy by the hero of the Tower series, Roland, during an event that took place when Roland was a young man, many years before the series proper begins. The story is a way to distract the boy from the recent loss of his father in a brutal massacre by a shape-shifting man/monster, who Roland is trying to locate and destroy. This story at least earns the Dark Tower moniker honestly, though the contents of the tale do little to reflect on the Tower saga at large, and hold no real suspense.

But there's an extra added twist to the narrative approach, just for the fans who want to see Eddie, Susannah, Jake, and Oy one more time. The entire book is framed in a tiny side adventure set (as I mentioned earlier) between books 4 and 5. Pinned down in a storm, the group has nothing to do to pass the time, and so Roland tells this story from his younger days... which includes his telling of the time he was telling this fairy tale.

It's a step or two too clever, by which I mean that really, the Dark Tower elements of this book don't work for me. Someone missing those characters would be better served, I think, by just reading the original series again; this slight volume does nothing to really expand or recontextualize their story.

But I said at the outset that I didn't necessarily think this was a bad book. And that's because this tale at the center of the story within the story within the story -- the fairy tale which lends the book its title -- is actually very entertaining. My reading pace quickened when I reached this 100 or so pages at the core of the book. I enjoyed the dark tones Stephen King brought to his uncharacteristically succinct take on "the hero's journey."

I don't know if King felt a commercial need to package this all up as The Dark Tower, or if the need to revisit his beloved characters led him down a creative road where he discovered this short story. In any case, the core is worth a read. I'd call the entire novel a B-, though I would caution Dark Tower fans to lower their expectations.